Peace Demonstrations that Prevent Peace – Short Version

By CrisHam, 14 July, 2025

Members of today's peace movements are unaware of how far they have been pushed away from a truly peacemaking path. More than 175 years ago, the writer Victor Hugo presented a magnificent vision at the Paris Peace Congress – that of the United States of Europe.

The implementation of this idea would have spared the cultural continent two world wars and much further bloodshed. With Russia an integral part of the concept, there would have been no October Revolution of 1917 and no later arms race during the Cold War.

But militarists with no sense of European solidarity have brought about a devastating historical turn in the opposite direction. As early as 1853, Great Britain and France intervened in one of the regional conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, siding with the Turks. The war, which escalated stubbornly, cost 1 million lives. If at least this blood toll had been understood as a final warning, the European nations would not be facing each other again in a fratricidal war in Ukraine.

A similar lack of solidarity has also numbed politicians in the European, i.e., Judeo-Christian, cultural sphere to the breach of treaties and defamation to which Jews have been exposed in their ancestral homeland of Palestine since the end of World War I. A major blind spot in political awareness is the fact that the Arabs, through their liberation from 400 years of Turkish rule, were amply compensated for Palestine—which, of course, was also occupied by the Turks.

The lack of solidarity among political leaders toward their own citizens is generally a vastly underestimated phenomenon. It also played and continues to play a decisive role in Iran.

Before the overthrow of the Shah's government in 1979, the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile in France. There, he was provided with high-profile contacts, both with American President Jimmy Carter1) and with the British broadcaster BBC. The latter established a Persian-language program for him, broadcast in Iran, in which he could promote an Islamic republic.2)

After the coup, the Islamic 'Republic' emerged for Iranians as a dictatorship of the Supreme Leader, and Khomeini as a polarizing extremist who led the country on a collision course with the US and Israel. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has continued this kamikaze course and the promotion of terrorism since 1989.

All of these are the consequences of the irresponsible Western installation of Khomeini, a fanatic who unhesitatingly sacrificed the security and well-being of Iranians to his extremist visions. As was clear to his sponsors,3) this domestically meant the imposition of Islamic supremacy in state affairs - the opposite of the reform

of Islam necessary to establish its compatibility with liberal civilization. In its foreign policy ambitions, Iran, under Ayatollah rule, is placed entirely at the service of global Islamic expansion and dominance.

On the issue of the nuclear program, the current democratically elected President Pezeshkian bowed to the tough stance of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, against his own convictions.

Those unfamiliar with this background, which is presented most incompletely in the mainstream media, are easily tempted to react to the Israeli military strike in June 2025 by participating in protest marches. However, these protests unitentionally send signals that thwart peaceful solutions.

To the idealistically motivated participants, who are almost never familiar with Israel's actual history,4) the demand for an arms embargo appears to be conducive to peace. However, they fail to recognize that their one-sided partisanship undermines the respect for the West which the short, hard US strike wrested from the Ayatollah regime. This respect had been denied by the autocrats for decades, when they sponsored large-scale terrorism, thereby transforming peacetime into incessant war.

The counterproductivity of the rallies is especially evident when posters (large-format and distributed in huge numbers) bearing the image of dictator Khamenei are presented. As a result, the moderate President Pezeshkian5) is losing domestic political clout, and the current chance for a democratic liberation6) of Iran is dwindling.

An internet search using the keyword "Hands off Iran!" or the Spanish version "¡Manos fuera de Irán!" yields a very large number of results. These demonstrate a concerted nature (via the major news agencies) of the counterproductive ‘peace’ rallies. Politically motivated NGOs, which in turn depend on funding from wealthy foundations, are easily identified as the promoters of the parallel protest marches.7)

Before June 13, 2025, demonstrations under the slogan "Hands off Iran" – without Khamenei's portrait – would have been appropriate, as they could have prevented hasty Israeli politicians from falling into the trap of military confrontation long set by unsolidary Western polarizers. As in the Gaza War, the Jewish state is largely defenseless against a media-wide propaganda tsunami. But only when people realize that the entire Judeo-Christian cultural sphere is exposed to a war by all means will there be hope for its future in freedom.

References and Internal Links