The writer is in Australia
WHY should an ordinary Australian, far from the bazaars of Tehran and the bloodied streets of Mahabad, care about a war brewing between Israel and Iran, or the battle raging within Iran itself? In a world of so many tragedies, what makes this one yours to witness, to speak of, perhaps even to lend your voice to?
Let me start, humbly, with my conservative brothers and sisters.
You believe – rightly – in the universal worth and dignity of the human life. You do not hide behind the excuse of moral relativism: you hold that every human being, born under any flag, possesses an unalienable right to shape his or her own life. This is not an abstract slogan, it is a duty written into the conscience of free peoples.
I do not say that liberating Iran’s millions should rest on Australian shoulders. But I do say this: your voice, your solidarity, your refusal to turn away could help a people stand taller at a moment when they are closer than ever to ending four decades of tyranny.
For 40 years, Iran’s regime has done all it can to hollow out the human soul, to grind people into dust for an extremist utopia that never comes. It treats the individual not as sacred but expendable, pawns to be sacrificed to hasten the apocalypse of which its clerics dream. If you think I exaggerate, know that this regime literally teaches its children to pray for the end of the world, to await a saviour whose arrival they believe they can hasten by spreading blood and ruin.
In the eyes of these rulers, there is no number of bodies too high, no price too steep. Dignity, agency, the chance to fall in love, to speak one’s mind, to laugh openly – all these are threats to the grand design of a theocracy that must devour its own children to survive.
My Australian brothers: the Iranian man is not your enemy, nor alien to your dreams. He longs, like you, to build, to protect, to earn his bread with honour, to kiss his beloved without fear of the moral police. These dreams were not imported by Western NGOs: they are native to the Persian spirit, and older than the regime that tries to stamp them out.
And to my fellow Australians who lean left, who hold sacred the voice of the oppressed: here is a people who meet your definition perfectly. For almost 20 years now, Iranians have risked their lives, again and again, to say a single word to their rulers: ‘Enough’. For this word they have been shot, imprisoned, raped, exiled, executed. Yet they rise – women burning the veil that once marked them as obedient, men refusing conscription into wars that are not theirs.
Even now, as you read these lines, there are millions across Iran who raise their fists to the sky, chanting for a normal life – and are beaten, tortured and murdered for daring to want it. A powerful ghoul towers over them, condemning this ‘heresy’ and their longing for happiness as a crime against the afterlife.
In my motherland, heaven is mandatory. The price of this forced paradise is poverty, surveillance, humiliation and the terror of secret police. Leave a strand of hair uncovered under the 50-degree sun, and you may forfeit your life.
My Australian friends, what I ask is simple: listen to the song this nation sings in spite of the fear. It is the same song your own ancestors sang once: the song of people who want to dance freely in the streets, to kiss whom they love, to raise children without shame and want, to see their trees green again, their rivers clean, their wildlife safe. They want to bury slogans and build sturdy homes. They want to stop weeping at graves, to post smiling faces instead of martyr photos, to free the minds imprisoned for thinking too bravely.
They want to say ‘No’ to a forced heaven and ‘Yes’ to earthly dignity.
Now, in a twist of history, the war that Israel’s government has chosen to wage against the bloodthirsty regime in Tehran may yet prove to be the best chance Iranians have had in decades to claim this dignity for themselves. Israel does not strike for conquest or glory: it strikes out of sheer necessity, because no sane nation can tolerate a neighbour whose ruling ideology prays for apocalypse and sees nuclear weapons not as deterrents but as divine instruments to hurry the end of the world.
A nuclear Iran would not simply threaten Tel Aviv or Riyadh. It would pull the entire world closer to the edge of this suicidal vision. In the eyes of Iran’s clerics, to unleash chaos is to be righteous; to sacrifice millions is a virtue.
So, when Israel fights Iran’s regime, it fights not only for itself but for all of us – for the stability of the Middle East, for the security of global commerce, for the prosperity of free societies, for the chance that the Iranian people might, at last, break their chains amid the weakening of the tyrant’s grip.
This is why Australians should care. Because the Iranian people’s freedom is not a distant fight for someone else’s values: it is the same fight that makes your own freedom possible. And it still matters, perhaps more than ever, whether the free world stands silent or speaks.
If you hear their song, do not hush it. If you see their fists raised, do not look away. If you see Israel’s bombs strike the war factories of Armageddon, know this is for your children’s safety as much as it is for Iran’s chance to finally be free.
Their struggle is your own in another tongue – and today, at last, they may win.
Arman Rahimian is the pseudonym of an Iranian resident in Australia who knows his real name would lead inevitably to the imprisonment and likely executions of his family in Tehran
This article appeared in Quadrant on June 15, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
