IRGC Chief Commander Hossein Salami claims Iran's 'Resistance' ideology has infiltrated universities across the United States and Europe, referring to pro-Palestinian protests in Recent months.
"The resistance is so grand, beautiful, and captivating that its attractions have penetrated even into the universities of the US and into the cities of France, England, Germany, Spain, Australia, and everywhere," Hossein Salami said during a conference on "Resistance" in Mashhad on Saturday.
The "Resistance" generally refers to the Islamic Republic's ideology of fighting Israel and also the US through a coalition of Tehran-backed armed militant groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Iraqi Shiite militias.
Salami's remarks specifically point to the recent campus protests in the US and Europe by thousands of students who established encampments on campuses to decry Israel's military actions against the Iran-supported Hamas in Gaza.
Enraged by the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, students across the US have been organizing pro-Palestinian rallies and sit-ins to pressure their institutions to disclose and divest from funds and corporations that do business with Israel.
Triggered by a Hamas attack on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 individuals, mostly civilians, Israel's subsequent military response reportedly led to the deaths of over 35,000 Palestinians, according to Hamas figures.
The protests in Western universities have been praised and politically leveraged by Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has repeatedly lauded the students' efforts as aligning with Iran's resistance against American and Israeli policies.
In a recent speech, Khamenei branded the campus protesters part of Iran's 'resistance front' against the US and Israel.
The campus protests across the US featured on the cover pages of many Iranian dailies, triggering a considerable backlash from ordinary Iranians who view the stunt as ‘glaringly hypocritical’ from a ruling system that suspends, beats and imprisons students for much less than what students have been doing in the US in the past ten days.
The Islamic Republic has always presented itself as the only true champion of Palestinians and their cause. This sentiment has become much stronger and prevalent since October 7 when Hamas, backed by Iran, rampaged border areas inside Israel.
The irony, as ordinary Iranians have been pointing out on social media, is hard to miss. It is a case of 'astounding hypocrisy', many say, of a regime who cheers on American students exercising their freedom of expression, while its prisons are humorously called ‘universities’ for hosting sheer numbers of students, graduates, and educators who have dared to speak their mind.
On February 5 a number of the outlet’s journalists were arrested during a raid by security agents at their office in Tehran’s Argentina Square.
Security forces locked down and detained all 30 staff inside the building for 14 hours, confiscating their mobile phones and laptops.
Fardaye Eghtesad’s deputy editor-in-chief, Behzad Bahmannejad, a video journalist, Nikan Khabazi, and Ali Tasnimi were arrested according to Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned the raid and the arbitrary detention of Fardaye Eghtesad’s journalists urging Iran to “cease the practice of arbitrarily locking up members of the press.”
According to CPJ Bahmannejad, Asgari, Khabazi, and Tasnimi were detained for 4 days inside the outlet's newsroom. HRANA further reported the four journalists were transferred on February 9 to an undisclosed location.
On 21 February, the non-profit rights group Defense of the Free Flow of Information (DeFFI) reported that Bahmannejad and Asgari were released from Tehran’s Shahpoor Intelligence Detention Center while video journalists Tasnimi and Khabazi remained under temporary detention.
"I am a former hostage…I endured Evin, Iran's most notorious jail, and can't understand how Sweden can leave its citizen to die there," Namazi wrote in an opinion piece for the Guardian on Friday.
As part of the Stockholm-Tehran deal on June 15 two Swedish citizens Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi were swapped with Hamid Nouri, a former prison official serving a life sentence in Sweden for war crimes for his role in mass executions of political prisoners in Iran in 1988. Sweden said that Iran refused to negotiate the release of Djalali in the deal.
“I am overjoyed to see Floderus and Azizi back home with their loved ones, but Stockholm’s decision to strike that deal and leave behind a Swedish citizen facing execution in Iran was unconscionable,” Namazi wrote.
Namazi argued that Sweden's failure to secure Djalali’s release reflects a troubling hierarchy in valuing citizens' lives and a severe lapse in negotiation.
“I believe it [Sweden] could have secured the release of all its nationals and several other European hostages, too, had it understood the value of the card it was holding,” Namazi added.
With a death sentence looming, Djalali has recently gone on a hunger strike as a last resort. In a message from Evin prison, he criticized the Swedish Prime Minister for leaving him out of the deal.
Namazi further referred to Djalali’s recent hunger strike adding that this isn’t the first time Dajali has been left out of a prisoner swap deal.
“I was still in Evin prison when Ahmadreza was omitted from the Belgium deal. As someone who had experienced the despair of being left behind from hostage deals several times myself, I understood his pain – though I wasn’t on death row,” Namazi wrote.
In May 2023, in a prisoner exchange deal with Brussels, Iran released Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele with Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat convicted of a plot to bomb an Iranian opposition rally in Paris in 2018.
Namazi wrote that Djalai was “purportedly the main candidate” to be swapped for Assadi but “his fate changed when Sweden arrested and sentenced Nouri, who had close ties to some of the most senior figures in the Islamic Republic.”
In December 2023, Amnesty International issued a statement saying that Djalali “is at grave risk of imminent retaliatory execution” the week that the appeals court in Sweden reaffirmed the life sentence of Hamid Nouri.
Namazi additionally recounted details of the times when he spent time in Evin with Djalali:
“He told me about the times when his captors took him to the brink of execution to bring pressure to bear on his would-be rescuers, and how in one instance he was tossed back in a solitary cell for five months to await his death”
“One morning, his sadistic jailers told him he would be hanged at sunrise the next day, and gave him what they said was a final call to his wife to say goodbye. He wished they had killed him in the first year of his arrest,” wrote Namazi shedding light onto the psychological torture Djalali was subject to.
Djalali a disaster medicine specialist was arrested in 2016 during a visit to Tehran. He was sentenced to death in 2017 on trumped-up charges without legal due process. He remains on hunger strike with his condition deteriorating as warned by human rights groups, activists, and his wife Vida Mehrannia.
Namazi, who was imprisoned in Iran for 8 years was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment on trumped-up charges of “collaborating with a foreign government”. He was released on 18 September 2023 as part of a prisoner swap with Iran brokered by the Biden administration, in which the US released 5 Iranian prisoners and paid $6 billion to the Iranian government.