Iran protests challenge Americans to stand up for Mahsa Amini

For a week now, protests have raged across Iran, spurred by anger over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the country’s “morality police” for not complying with the state dress code and who later died in their custody.

The hospital where she was treated said she fell into a coma and died from brain trauma, Iran International reported, and a top Iranian health official verified the cause of death as trauma to the head.

But one thing is certain: In order for these protests to result in meaningful change, they must be accompanied by international solidarity and pressure.

(Case in point: the U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday announced sanctions against Iran's morality police and some state officials in response to the anti-government protests; but the move is largely symbolic, and comes with no consequential terms or actions.).

Some experts anticipated that restoring the Iran nuclear deal (and therefore lifting sanctions) might still be a diplomatic priority with Iran this week, despite the civil uprising: “It’s a Gordian knot that some Western diplomats may try to tackle on the sidelines of this week’s UN General Assembly,” Golnar Motevalli, Bloomberg’s Iran correspondent, reported.

“I think in this moment in history, we need to remember that when George Floyd was killed by police in America, there was global solidarity,” Nazanin Boniadi, another British-Iranian actor and a vocal advocate for human rights, said on PBS NewsHour.

“You saw images from inside Iran, from inside Syria — places where they, themselves, are in dire straits — showing solidarity.

The least we can do in the West is to show solidarity for the people inside Iran.”.

But the West’s untiring solidarity with Ukraine — which comes in part in the form of sanctions on Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers — has yielded unending ramifications.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if Ukraine becomes part of the West’s calculation in whether or how much to support the protests in Iran

We should be watching closely and demand the sort of international solidarity we’ve offered Ukrainians