Bahar Ghandehari, an activist who opposes the Iranian regime, posted a video on Saturday that shows her spray-painting “free Iran” and “woman, life, freedom” on the outside walls of the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
“I left a message for the criminal Iranian regime on its embassy in Damascus,” she wrote. “For 14 years, the Iranian regime propped up Assad’s dictatorship, crushing the Syrian revolution for freedom. Today, Assad and Khamenei are out of Syria. Soon, Iran will be free too.”
Jonathan Harounoff, international spokesman for the Israeli mission to the United Nations in New York, told JNS that the messages that Ghandehari wrote on the building are “significant.”
“Like the people of Iran who, unlike their brutal regime, seek peace and prosperity, we’re seeing signs of ordinary Syrians disavowing the actions of the Iran-backed Assad regime and murderous ‘axis of resistance’ in pursuit of liberty and peace,” he said.
Harounoff, the author of the forthcoming book Unveiled, about the woman-led protest movement in Iran, told JNS that “the Islamic Republic of Iran seldom acts in the interests of the Iranian people.”
Instead, it prioritizes “a violently anti-Israel and anti-Western foreign policy over addressing a serious energy crisis back home, where decades of wasteful government consumption, plundering and mismanagement have led to dire gas, electricity and water shortages in Iran,” he told JNS.
“Still, despite the Iranian people facing serious domestic challenges, their government appears more interested in allocating resources and arms to the Houthis in Yemen,” he added.
Mark Milke, president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy in Calgary, wrote that “when you’re opposed to a government or its actions, and live in a different country, this is what you do: protest at their embassy.”
“You don’t—hello ‘pro-Palestinian’ protesters who are better described as pro-Hamas—hold mob chants in front of hospitals, invade churches, firebomb schools and synagogues, show up at Christmas tree light-ups at Rockefeller Center, etc.,” he added.
