Any regimes that need changing, including the U.S., Israel and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.
— Arundhati Roy, 2026
As The Fat Boy Posse’s latest illegal, depraved, unprovoked, and predictable attack on Iran proceeds with the customary savagery and disregard for civilian life and infrastructure, we have been trying to put ourselves in the position of one of those Muslim Iranians said by the Western media to have been protesting in their thousands against their government for economic and political reasons.
We have been trying to do the same for the two (down from seven) Iranian footballers who, with great fanfare and glee (the Western corporate media could barely contain themselves), have been offered and accepted heavily politicised grants of asylum by the Australian Government.
Politicised because the same government is otherwise notorious for paying the small Pacific Island state of Nauru to keep it in atrocious conditions and well out of sight and indefinitely out of mind ‘lesser’ asylum seekers. That is, all asylum seekers except those who, for the moment, are such a ‘turn on’ for what Mohammad Marandi calls the ‘Epstein class’ of its US lord and master.
How did these Muslim Iranians suppose their lives could be improved, we wondered? It is a reasonable question to raise because presumably those among them in Tehran who allegedly supported ‘regime change’ will have been encouraged to do so by the fifth column provocateurs (paid by the CIA, Mossad, and MI6) who fomented much of whatever unrest of that type there may have been.
Empty Promises
It is reasonable to suppose that a prime incentive offered to the lead troublemakers was that they would qualify for a grant of asylum in a capitalist Nirvana such as the US or Australia or the UK. At the very least, we can assume that they would have been encouraged to dream about such a prospect. They will have been encouraged also by the propaganda of (the minority of) Iranians abroad who have been induced to portray the West as some sort of paradise in comparison to the ‘evil regime’ of the Islamic Republic – apparently, their selfless mission being to abandon ‘paradise’ to return to a ‘democratic’ Iran.
Remember, these views have been manufactured, and these promises have been made, by the same people who just in this century have murdered millions of Muslims, many of them women and children, either through military means or by starvation using sanctions of different kinds – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Their war crimes are legion and never ending. The depth of their concern for Muslim well-being is there for all to see.
Moreover, making such promises – and breaking them – is US standard practice. In much the same way that negotiations with Iran have been employed by them as cover for unprovoked military attacks.
Here is another example. Following its defeat in Afghanistan, the US government abandoned many Afghans who had worked within its military or as translators. These people were promised that they would be welcomed by the US on Special Immigration Visas (SIV) after the war ended.
When US forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, an estimated 78,000 Afghans with SIV visa applications were left behind.
And, of course, the same governments have subjected Iran to decades of crippling sanctions and are now inflicting their standard means of mass corporal punishment by carpet-bombing Iran, targeting schools and hospitals and crowds of civilians in the streets. Once again, thousands of Muslims are being killed, wantonly.
These are the people who refer to Muslims as subhuman or vermin to be exterminated like cockroaches: ‘as “two-legged beasts”, as “grasshoppers” who should be “crushed”’ (Roy, 2024). People whom they consider to be ‘richly deserving of their fates, and for those fates to be unremarkable, because either they are terrorists and religious fanatics or because, if they are not, they carry the seeds of terrorism and religious fanaticism within them’ (Blunt, 2025).
They will even stoop to manufacturing fake terrorist groups and committing false flag crimes in their own countries that can then be attributed to Islamic extremists with roots in Iran or whichever country suits their purpose at the time, as in the recent attack on an ambulance in London analysed by the former British diplomat Craig Murray. These acts are clearly designed to incite and intensify anti-Muslim fervour or Islamophobia among the general public, in this case particularly against Iran.
Clearly, when it comes to Muslims, Western depravity knows no limits. The US and its allies have shown time and time again that they will do to Muslims as they please in violation of international law, UN declarations, and basic human decency.
And none of the perpetrators is ever held to account.
But surely by now everyone knows all of this, Muslims most of all. The implications must be clear.
We therefore cannot believe that the number of genuine anti-government protesters in Iran is anywhere near as great as the media hype and the US/Israeli governments would like us to believe. If for no other reason than because these governments and their media mouthpieces have purposefully, and erroneously, conflated protests about economic conditions brought about by Western-imposed sanctions, and a desire for gradual reform, with anti-government sentiment and support for so-called ‘regime change’. The distinction is rarely or never drawn between those protesters doing so with peaceful reform in mind and, we would suggest, the much smaller number that is interested in revolutionary change.
Like Gladstone, who was said (by Disraeli) to be ‘inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’, perhaps they have fallen victim to their own propaganda. Particularly Trump and his cabinet, less so the Israelis who will probably have used the prospect of decapitation and capitulation a la Venezuela as Trump-bait. The result (in at least the Trump administration) being a delusional condition that helps to explain their misjudgement – among others – of the efficacy of decapitation strikes and carpet bombing, and their underestimation of Iranian resilience and resolve and the quality of Iranian strategic planning.
We cannot believe either that Muslims in general wherever they are do not already have some sense of what we are about to say.
But for those (few?) in Iran who have swallowed whole the bait – the Kool-Aid – of false promises and who do not really understand the full extent of what they would be letting themselves in for, here are just a few indicators of what life would be like.
The Humiliations of Everyday Life
‘For those of us whose names, religion, appearance, or skin colour make it an inescapable part of everyday life and for those among the rest for whom the mainstream media fog has lifted a little, the expression of Orientalism abounds in the unreflective and unrelenting hubris and condescension of Western societies towards the “other”, and their conspicuous disdain for the lives of people so categorised’ (Blunt, 2025, ibid).
The first thing to realise is that your experience of everyday life will change dramatically and forever. Not so much because you will be able to buy some of those consumer goods that sanctions prevented you from buying for all those years or because you will have unfettered access to social media, and so on.
Rather, it will be because in every interaction that you have with the institutions and dominant ethnic groups or classes in the society that you manage to gain entry to you will be reminded constantly that you are an outsider or ‘other’. That you are a lesser and unwanted and unwelcome interloper.
Although the crudeness of the expression of these sentiments will vary, they will become an inescapable and permanent feature of your encounters with people at all levels of society.
This constant barrage of racism – the millions of small cuts of humiliation that you will have to endure – will eviscerate your self-confidence, your dignity, and your self-esteem.
You will be glared at suspiciously when you enter a shop or board an aeroplane. Your children will be bullied at school because of the way they look and speak and because of their religion. You will be discriminated against in employment, in housing, and in education. Law enforcement agencies will single you out for special attention: when you are driving or walking down the street; on public transportation; and at border controls.
You will be surveilled by the state and put on watch lists.
(Mir, 2026) demonstrates how racist attitudes associated with the notions of Orientalism, Islamophobia, and the Double Muslim (one who is ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ and has a terrorist DNA) ‘are used by government agencies such as the NYPD to justify blanket surveillance of Muslims – their places of worship, student organisations and so on – in order to attract substantial government funding and that this constitutes a form of “terror capitalism for profit”’ (Blunt et al., 2026, p. 21).
Perhaps worst of all, your children will be made to suffer. The incidence and severity of bullying is a barometer of how society regards and treats its most innocent and vulnerable members. In the US, 48% of Muslim Americans (as opposed to 18% of the general public) report that their children are bullied at school, 20% of them say it happens every day.
Keep in mind that, according to some estimates, 85% of anti-Muslim incidents and hate crimes go unreported, making it likely that the same is true of bullying and other forms of harassment including verbal abuse and physical violence.
Muslims comprise 1% of the general population but 9% of the US state and federal prison systems, a disproportion that is three times worse than that experienced by Black citizens.
The Rise and Rise of Islamophobia
And it is getting worse, much worse.
Two months after the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, Islamophobic incidents had grown by 300% in the US.
To December 2025, in Australia, there was a corresponding 636% increase in Muslim hate crimes. They surged again, by more than 200%, following the killing by a Muslim assailant of 16 people in the Bondi Beach incident in December 2025.
In 2025, the Islamic Council of Victoria in Australia reported that there had also been a significant rise in what it referred to as ‘Islamophobia incidents that were not directly reported by a victim – but could include occurrences of anti-Muslim racism such as online “hate comments”, emails sent to Muslim organisations, “hostile phone calls” and other material including “dehumanising media commentary”…’
The Council recorded 3,254 such incidents just in the six months between January and July 2025. Figures that are likely to be much worse because — to reiterate — about 85% of Islamic hate incidents are not reported by victims for fear of retaliation or because they do not want to draw attention to themselves.
Since the latest attacks on Iran began, US immigration authorities have launched an all out ‘round up’ of Iranians, many of whom have lived there for decades. In one such instance:
ICE agents arrested Mandonna Kashanian while she was picking figs in front of her New Orleans home. She was 64 years old with no criminal record, had arrived in the United States in 1978 and lived in New Orleans for 47 years — volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and raising a family of U.S. citizens.
The pattern is unmistakable: The more war we have with Iran, the more we dehumanize and abuse Iranians here — and in the times that U.S. bombs have fallen on Iran, ICE has arrested and abused Iranians en masse in the United States. As of September 2025, 320 documented final orders of removal had been issued to Iranians (Mabourakh, 2026).
This followed the recent suspension by the Trump administration of immigrant visa processing for 75 countries, including Iran: ‘The practical result is that an Iranian permanent resident who has lived here for decades, raised children, paid taxes, and passed a citizenship exam cannot currently apply to become a U.S. citizen’ (Mabourakh, 2026, ibid).
In early March 2026, the niece and grandniece of the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the US in 2020, were arrested (‘pending removal from the country’); and their permanent resident status was revoked.
Since September 2025, there have been at least 3 flights from the US returning Iranians to Iran.
Clearly, even if you are allowed into the US, as an Iranian Muslim, you can never be certain that you will be allowed to stay. And even if you were allowed in for reasons that were politically expedient at the time, they are all too easily forgotten and overshadowed by new political circumstances, your brown skin, your religion, your ethnicity, and the way you dress.
The Mental Health Effects of Islamophobia
Unsurprisingly, the unrelenting hatred and nastiness directed against Muslims makes them hypervigilant. They are constantly on the lookout for, and fearful of, being vilified or physically attacked or discriminated against:
Discrimination due to Muslim identity is associated with a greater number of depressive symptoms, fear and anxiety, lower self-esteem, and overall psychological distress. Daily repetitive harassment that Muslims face may be the biggest factor contributing to long-term mental health issues, while violent, hate-motivated crimes can increase fear, hypervigilance, and identity disturbances (Awad (2023).
The single greatest cause of mental ill health among US Muslims is the discrimination and life stressors that result from Islamophobia.
Women who wear visible religious clothing are particularly likely to be harassed and discriminated against.
In the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, more and more Australian Muslim women wearing headscarves are being attacked in public. Some have been called ‘dirty Muslims’ and been pelted with eggs.
Graffiti calls for the destruction of mosques throughout the country and for ‘Muslim scum’ to be ‘wiped from the face of the earth’ (SBS, 2026).
The State Government of Victoria in Australia notes that apart from the mood disorders, chronic stress and anxiety caused by such incidents, they can lead to:
… intergenerational trauma, where the harmful and insidious impact of Islamophobia is felt through multiple generations.
Witnessing or experiencing Islamophobia can also prevent some people from accessing healthcare services because they don’t feel safe accessing essential services. Participants in an Australian Human Rights Commission project that explored the experiences of Muslim Australians, reported unfavourable and discriminatory treatment when accessing healthcare
The Causes are Not Going Away
Orientalism is a system of (irrational) beliefs that presupposes the intrinsic superiority in all respects of the peoples of the West (Europe, the US and the Anglo settler societies) and Western civilisation over the peoples and civilisations of the Orient (the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia) or the “other” ….. [It assumes that] “we” (in the West) are more intelligent and rational, more knowledgeable, more cultured, more humane, more noble, more democratic, more honest, more advanced, more trustworthy, braver, stronger, and so on than “they” are (Blunt, 2025, ibid).
In Western countries, racism of this type is a structural feature of society. It is ingrained. That is to say, there is more to it than ‘just widespread ignorance and bigotry…. [it is not just] a necessary part of the growing pains of a new civilisation or culture, which is the way such stories tend to be passed off or excused or rationalised in polite Establishment circles in Australia’ (Blunt, 2026, p. 356).
It is an integral part of the capitalist hierarchy of control:
In the Anglosphere societies and the former colonial powers in Continental Europe, in many ex-colonies such as Argentina, and in much of Central America, the capitalist hierarchy of control and reward is still remarkably colour coded…. The high correlation between skin colour and level in the hierarchy is not spurious. The fact that, in the US, African Americans comprise 30% of prisoners but only 5% of the national population is not an accident. Aboriginal Australians fare even worse, comprising 36% of prisoners but only 3.1% of the population, a new record (Blunt, 2026, p. 357, ibid).
The very few ‘others’ who are allowed to make it to the top of the system – ‘these thoroughly assimilated and “white-washed” people, who normally would be regarded as interlopers, are often among the staunchest defenders of the system they represent. They have learnt and can recite their lines perfectly and can deliver them unflinchingly, with conviction and in the right style’ (Blunt. 2026, p. 359, ibid).
In short, racism, Orientalism, Islamophobia – call it what you will – are built into the systems of political economy in these countries. They are permanent and ineluctable.
Poor and Muslim in the US
But, in addition to the psychological distress caused to Muslims by the daily humiliations and discrimination, successful asylum seekers will experience considerable economic hardship.
Economists like Varoufakis and Roberts argue that even if the Iran war were to end soon, a period of stagflation is inevitable in the major economies. Reasons include the fact that the energy infrastructure already destroyed in the Middle East would take years to rebuild, as would global supply chains.
Energy prices will remain high until the energy infrastructure can be restored, raising the costs of transporting people and goods and of manufacturing.
Inflation and unemployment will rise at the same time.
The already wide gap between rich and poor will widen.
As always, the economic and social hardship will be borne almost exclusively by the poor in these countries and worldwide, the bottom half of the population which does not own shares in Enron or BP or weapons manufacturers, and which lives from paycheck to paycheck.
About one third of Muslims in the US live at or below the poverty line (a higher percentage than for any other religion).
However, irrespective of income, the strong likelihood is that all Muslims will be made scapegoats for the economic and social hardships faced by the general – non-Muslim – population.
Discrimination against Muslims and Muslim hate crimes will rise together with the cost of living.
Authoritarianism in the West
Being Muslim and poor in the US or any Western country is not a pleasant experience and it is one that is certain to continue to worsen as the global economic crisis caused by the latest war with Iran, and the declining influence of the imperial powers, ushers in increasingly authoritarian governments in the West.
Blunt et al. (2026, p. 4, ibid) give some sense of the drift towards fascism that has already begun:
‘In the UK, the trend [is] exemplified by the arrest in mid-2024 of the journalist Richard Medhurst under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, which stipulates that “expressing an opinion in support of a proscribed organisation” (emphasis in the original) can result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years (Murray, 2024b); the arrest and imprisonment (for 5 years) of Roger Hallam for “causing a public nuisance without reasonable excuse” (Hedges, 2024c); in mid-October 2024, the dawn raid on the home of investigative journalist Asa Winstanley and the seizure of his electronic devices (Cook, 2024e); the banning of Nelson Mandela’s grandson “from entering the U.K. as a ‘terrorist sympathiser’ because of his support for Palestine” (Murray, 2024c); and, for alleged support of proscribed organisations after he said “Israel cannot win against Hamas” during an anti-genocide speech about Palestine (MEE staff, 2024), the arrest on 1 November 2024 by the London Metropolitan Police of Haim Bresheeth, the son of Holocaust survivors and the husband of the author of Chapter 9, Yosefa Loshitzky.
Members of the Australian government quickly fell into line by denouncing as criminal any expression of sympathy or support for Hezbollah, which according to Johnstone (2024b) in Australia is listed as a terrorist organisation because of its opposition to the US and not because of its “actions or methods”. Other members of the Five Eyes, like New Zealand, introduced similar legislation that imposed severe restrictions on freedom of expression.’
Xenophobia and Islamophobia can only intensify under these state-sanctioned conditions.
Conclusion
Before the most recent military attack on Iran, the message of this aide memoire is one that immigration authorities in the US, Australia, the UK etc. would have embraced wholeheartedly and openly.
Normally, they want to keep all Muslims out.
For short periods, however, in cases where there is political capital to be made and there is high visibility, it is convenient in a few cases for these countries to pretend otherwise, as Australia did recently with the Iranian footballers. However, the fragility of being so anointed was demonstrated a few days later when the same Australian Government banned for six months Iranians holding valid tourist visas.
This aide memoire demonstrates emphatically that the pretences of countries like the US and Australia are just that and that they are fleeting, shabby and ludicrous. Any promises that may have been – or will be – made by them are likely to be empty, as so many other Western democratic supposed virtues and values have turned out to be.
So what does the short to medium term future hold for Iran?
Iran’s bargaining position in any discussions regarding a cessation of hostilities (the notion of a lasting peace agreement with the US and Israel is clearly an oxymoron) will depend almost entirely on the continuing effectiveness of Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz and, via the Houthis in Yemen, its ability to sever the Saudi oil pipeline to the Red Sea and restrict shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. It will also be a function of Iran’s ability to destroy or damage more of the oil and gas infrastructure of the Gulf Arab states and their water desalination plants.
This gives Iran a stranglehold on the world economy and the future of the Gulf states.
The longer the war drags on, the more damage that is done to the global economy, the more disgruntled the US electorate becomes, the more precarious the family dictatorships of the Gulf states are made, and the greater the extent to which an already over-stretched Israeli military becomes more so, the stronger is Iran’s bargaining position (Mearsheimer, 2026).
This clearly creates significant settlement opportunities for Iran, particularly:
First, the provision of meaningful guarantees regarding Iran’s sovereignty and a complete halt to all assassinations and future aggression against Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen (Lauria, 2026). This would probably require the US’s complete withdrawal militarily from the Middle East. US military bases in the Gulf Arab states damaged or destroyed by Iran during the war would not be resurrected. It would also entail the termination of US support of Israeli aggression in the region.
Second, the payment to Iran of adequate reparations for the murder of innocent civilians and the devastation of civil infrastructure.
Third, the maintenance by Iran of the right to a domestic, industrial-scale uranium enrichment capability.
And fourth, the lifting of all economic sanctions and acceptable guarantees that they would not be reimposed.
Most critically, Iran will undoubtedly seek to retain the leverage over the West that its control over the Strait of Hormuz so clearly provides: first, as a means for securing reparations – by levying fees on vessels transporting energy to countries that have been complicit in the wars waged against Iran; and second, as a form of insurance that any agreements reached with the US/Israel will not be broken.
Crucial also will be the speed at which China’s influence in the region grows and supplants that of the US; and what rearrangements in the governance of the Gulf Arab states takes place. The combination will produce a significant reconfiguration of global geopolitics that might allow Iran to regain its position as the dominant power in the Middle East, as Crooke (2026) has suggested.
And just as the escalation of eternal aggression has tended to subordinate internal political divisions within Iran to the overriding demands of national unity, an Iran that survives the war in the manner suggested above could strengthen and sustain that cohesion or engender what Salehi (2026) calls ‘collective endurance’ and ‘societal adaptation’. Evidence of this (based on personal observation by the second author) is to be found daily in the streets of Tehran where – as the bombs are falling – unveiled girls, boys with tattoos, and people who were previously pushed to the margins of society mingle freely with women in religious dress and religious نیروها. All of them support the armed forces of Iran against the external aggressors.
The main imponderable is whether President Trump’s megalomania and other mental ailments will allow him to say ‘no’ to the Israelis, and countenance what will amount to a humiliating and ignominious and very public defeat, which the conditions set out above would constitute.
The US, after all, is still a country that believes it runs the world, that it can spurn international law at will, that it can invade countries whenever it likes, and that it can tell a country of the size and significance of India when and when not to trade with Russia. According to Hedges (2026), a country whose ‘soulless’ president, in the face of a possible debacle in Iran, ‘will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.’
But whichever way this war ends, we can be sure that it will turbo-charge the already high levels of antagonism and discrimination directed at Iranian Muslims – and Muslims generally – in the US and in the other countries of the West.
Whatever their political inclinations, if we were Muslim Iranians (and one of us is), we know where we would rather be.