Trump's sanctions and the awakening conscience of the Iranians abroad
Tabnak- Mahmoud Maleki- The new round of unilateral American sanctions against Iran will take effect on Sunday. US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have already welcomed the new sanctions.
US Secretary of States has put the daily reminder for the new round of sanctions on its website, and On Friday, Trump posted an image on its twitter account, depicting himself striding forward, along with the words "Sanctions are coming. November 5.” It’s written in the iconic Game of Thrones style across his chest.
But the Iranian side is yet to show a concrete reaction. The Iranian authorities were on the weekend breaks, and the Iranian media don’t know what will happen in the coming days. There are only some Iranian nationals abroad, including journalists and political activists, who criticize Trump’s new sanctions and try to expose false allegations by the US that the new sanction don’t harm the Iranian people and are just targeting the Iranian government.
Saeed Kamali Dehghan, an Iranian journalist working for the Guardian, posted a number of tweets, trying to clarify some false allegations of the US officials on the sanctions against Iran. Mentioning Pompeo, he wrote in a tweet “Don’t be fooled by this…while sanctions don’t directly target food & medicine, in practice due to banking restrictions they will be gravely affected. Not a single European bank is currently doing business with anyone, any entity, anywhere in Iran”. In fact, he challenged Pompeo’s claim that “our actions today are targeted at the regime, not people of Iran.”
Ali Vaez was another Iranian activist abroad who reacted to a false claim of the US officials about the impacts of sanction on Iran's activities abroad. He posted several tweets, saying that Iran sanctions will not have any effect on Iranian activities in the region: “The premise of Trump’s admin’s policy toward Iran is that sanction will diminish its disruptive activities abroad. But historical data shows little”.
He subsequently published a comprehensive article, using historical data to show that how the return of US sanctions is illogical and will have little impact on Iranian behavior in the region.
Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-American journalist, also commented on Mike Pompeo’s claims, saying that: “Please don’t add to injury. It’s been proven time and again that sanction first and forest crushes the populations and civil society. The claim that sanctions don’t hurt the people of Iran is a big fallacy.”
There are so many other Iranians around the world who have effectively reacted to the return of sanctions against Iran. In fact, they don’t separate themselves from their homeland and show solidarity whit their homeland!
It seems that Iranians inside the country also have to get involved in the international debates on Iran. That’s because nowadays local reactions to global evolutions will reach nowhere.
