-        Mrs Mona Ghassemi Could you briefly explain what the Iranian Canadian Congress is, what it represents, and what role it plays within the Iranian community in Canada?

As stated on our website, “The Iranian Canadian Congress is a non-profit, non-partisan and non-religious organization established in 2007 to represent the interests of Iranian-Canadians and encourage their participation in Canadian society.”

“The ICC's vision is to build an active and influential Iranian Canadian community which is politically engaged at all levels of government and socially involved in Canada's multicultural society for the betterment of Iranian Canadians in social, political and culture spheres.”

Our mission is to pursue this vision in the areas of advocacy, education, community building, and image building for Iranian Culture in Canada.

-        The Iranian community in Canada is often described as diverse and sometimes politically divided. How would you describe the range of opinions within the community regarding the current conflict and Iran’s government?

There is a huge range of political opinions in the Iranian Canadian community. This diversity does not necessarily represent one-to-one the opinions of those of Iran or the composition of Iranian society, with its variety of classes and ethnicities. Instead, the diversity in opinions among Iranian-Canadians in part reflects the different waves of emigration of Iranians during different key historical moments.

The Iranian Canadian Congress is aware of this diversity, and the non-religious and non-partisan clauses in our constitution allow for the inclusion of these various opinions under an umbrella of an organization that advocates for peace, justice, and diplomacy.

Our organization comprises individuals with political views that range from left-wing to liberal, and include members from different walks of life, including students, business people, and professionals. Some are more secular, while others hold strong religious values. What unites our community is the love of our country and opposition to war and foreign interference. While not all support the current structure or policies of the Iranian government, we understand that in Canada, where our country of residence has severed all diplomatic ties with Iran and imposed sanctions on our homeland, we need to fight these problems first in order to maintain Iranian sovereignty. Without a sovereign country we cannot expect our other freedoms to be preserved.[GU1] 

Unfortunately, leading up to the joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran starting on the 28^th of February, there was mass-mobilization within the Iranian diaspora to manufacture consent for this war. The diaspora includes a monarchist contingent which is much less prominent in Iran because it is mostly comprised of those who fled after the revolution because they benefitted from the Pahlavi regime, and their descendants. The most extreme right-wing segment of this group vocally supports Israel and the aggression of Israel and the U.S. against Iran. There are also individuals who promote a “democratic transition” under the former crown prince Reza Pahlavi. They likely hold relatively liberal secular views. Finally, there are some on the progressive left who have been vocally critical of the Islamic Republic but oppose war and foreign intervention and are sympathetic to Palestine. While it is unlikely that our organization can change the minds of the first group, we are hopeful that with the outbreak of the war, we will be able to attract more of the second and third groups as it becomes increasingly clear that (1) Pahlavi is not a viable alternative and his ally, Israel, intends the destruction of Iran as an independent sovereign nation, and (2) the position (in the West) that gives equal weight to critiquing the Iranian government and foreign intervention fails to stop the sanctions and war machine. We need to maintain sovereignty if we are to have a country that supports Palestine and the liberation of West Asia, and in which we can critique our government, fight for civil, social, and worker’s rights, and develop our nation on our own terms – outside of imperialist agendas.

-        The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader reportedly sparked widespread mourning and protests in several countries. How has this event affected Iranian communities around the world, including here in Canada?

The reactions expressed by the Iranian community reflect the diversity I have expressed in my previous answer. While pro-Trump monarchists celebrated, those in the religious community grieved the late Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei [GU2] as a martyr. The Iranian Canadian Congress respects the right of Iranians and all concerned peoples to grieve a figure who was a respected religious and spiritual leader for many across the globe. We also understand that many who hold grievances against the Iranian government may feel differently. Regardless, we condemn the assassination of any head of state as an act of war that tends to lead to further instability, and sets a horrific precedent. We reject the notion that this act of war did anything to improve conditions for Iranians.     

-        Recently, the Iranian Canadian Congress has raised serious concerns about civilian casualties in Iran, including the bombing of a girls’ school in Minab. From your perspective, what does this incident reveal about the nature of the current conflict?

In the last week, so much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed by U.S. and Israeli bombs that the term casualties no longer seems appropriate. Indeed, the Red Crescent Society of Iran has called for the International Criminal Court to investigate these attacks as war crimes. The Iranian Canadian Congress is actively working on additional statements condemning the destruction of medical facilities, in addition to the school and sports complexes that were mentioned in our first statement[GU3]  in response to the war, and our statement commemorating International Women’s Day. We also know that cultural heritage sites, an airport, and a water desalination plant were targeted.

As I stated in a speech at the emergency rally held in Montreal in collaboration with the Palestinian Youth Movement on February 28, the killing of children comes straight out of the Israeli playbook in Palestine. Likewise, the destruction of hospitals and medical facilities also reflects a genocidal tactic employed by the IDF, making the treatment of the wounded more difficult. Israel also has a history of uprooting Palestinians’ connections to their land and culture, something I see reflected in the destruction of Iranian historical sites.

Attempts to understand the current conflict while ignoring the Palestinian issue would fall short, because Israeli opposition to Iran is grounded in Iran’s material support for the Palestinian people, Iran’s refusal to recognize the occupying force as a state, and the threat of what a successful Iran exemplifies for other indigenous resistance movements in the region. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a popular uprising, and return to a shared Islamic cultural source, against decades of oppression and underdevelopment. In 1953, a CIA and MI6 backed coup d’état overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh, who nationalized Iranian oil that had been under British control, and brought Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power as absolute monarch. Since 1979, Iran has been punished with severe economic sanctions, the Imposed War with Iraq (supported by the U.S.), and vilified in Western media for daring to model an alternative to comprador Gulf regimes. The current coup attempts, including the campaign to revive the monarchy by promoting the son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, as an opposition figure, hark back to 1953. The U.S. and its allies cannot tolerate an independent Iran. The Iranian Revolution and the liberation of Palestine are tied together, and both represent fights for dignity, sovereignty, and freedom from foreign rule and oppression.

-        Did members of the Iranian Canadian Congress experienced any form of harassment or intimidation in Canada?

Yes.

After my interview with David Cochrane on CBC Power and Politics, the organization’s social media accounts were inundated with negative messages, some of which included slurs and vaguely threatening language. The threats escalated to target my employer, who informed me they had received many e-mails complaining about the interview, including threats and defamatory language. 

Offline, some members of the board have been pursued and harassed by individuals seeking to film them and paint them in a bad light. Other members have had their personal information, such as home and work address, posted online, possibly in attempts to incite harassment. I have seen tweets seeking to defame individuals, using distortions or partial truths to attempt to create a false image of the individual’s family connections and/or political positions, in order to intimidate them, or mobilize a target audience against them. A website came to our attention called “Mozdur-yaab”,“Mercenary-finder” which listed current and former members of the board and individuals close to the board, among others. The website appeared to be intended to mark these individuals as targets and included language suggesting that we would be pursued and punished. Ironically, the “Mercenary” framing alleges we are paid to stick our necks out like this. I wish!

This was not the first time individuals linked to our organization experienced attacks. Last year, the Past president attended a public event and was confronted by an individual who told her “how dare she” show up there and frightened her with aggressive behaviour. 

These attacks occur because we speak out against the war and foreign intervention in Iran, and because we have spoken out about the genocide in Palestine over the last two-and-half years. The attacks often attempt to paint the organization as either an official representative of the Islamic Republic, or aligned with the Islamic Republic. As we are a Canadian organization of volunteers with a small, transparent budget (our financial statements are available for anyone to read on our website), we know that attempts to delegitimize us are not grounded in reality. Their main impact is to discourage others from associating with us or joining us. We know these attacks are part of broader efforts to silence anti-war voices, and for this very reason we continue our hard work.

 -        The Iranian Canadian Congress recently sent a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney and senior ministers criticizing Canada’s position on the conflict. What were the key concerns raised in that letter?

We are disappointed in the Prime Minister’s recent statements, which characterized the war on Iran as “Iran-related hostilities” and twice called Iran “the prinicipal source of instability and terror throughout the middle east”. As with his response to the twelve-day-war, Carney obscured and defended the guilty party and defended indefensible actions, simply because of a pre-existing relationship with the U.S.

In our letter, we raise that the U.S.-Israeli attacks were unprovoked and occurred in the midst of negotiations, and draw attention to some of the attacks on civilians, including the Minab elementary school. We discuss the discourse (often divorced from reality) around Iran’s nuclear program and the contradiction in the Prime Minister’s statements that “Canada stands with the Iranian people” while supporting the U.S. aggression.

In this letter we asked the Prime Minister to withdraw Canada’s endorsement of the strikes, apply the same legal standards to belligerents, call for a cessation of hostilities, and support IAEA verification and renewed diplomacy. We welcome the March 8^th statement, in which Carney has stated that Canada “has no plans to participate in the offensive actions against Iran that are being undertaken by the U.S. and Israel”, but we are also following developments closely and hope that our Canadian government goes further in condemning the attacks and stands up to the U.S. as his previous speech at the Davos Economic Forum indicated he would.

-        Canadian officials have described Iran as a major source of instability in the Middle East. How does your organization respond to that characterization?

This appears to be a propaganda point designed to obscure the U.S.’s own role in sowing instability in the region, with U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham being one of its vocal proponents.

We watched closely during the “ping-pong game” with Israel that preceded the Twelve-Day-War, and each of Iran’s attacks was a proportionate response to previous Israeli aggressions, which is a UN-enshrined right. Unfortunately, the mainstream media tends to obscure context to focus only on immediate events, characterizing Iran as an aggressor through omission.

This omission is especially glaring when belligerent forces undermine Iran’s role in bringing stability to the region. Under the leadership of the late General Qassem Soleimani, assassinated by U.S. President Donald Trump in 2019, Iran coordinated the fight against Daesh (ISIS), a major destabilizing force in the region that emerged in the power vacuum created by the U.S. war on Iraq under the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Bush had previously invaded Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the U.S. withdrawal of forces after their failure to rehabilitate the country led to the re-establishment of the oppressive Taliban government. U.S. adventurism and Israeli expansionism, along with the re-emergence of ISIS, led to the decade-long dirty war against  the secular Syrian government and its toppling by the current pro-Israel HTS government led by former Al-Qaeda member Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, also known as al-Jolani. Finally, Israeli apartheid and the constant expansion of settlements into the Palestinian territories despite international condemnation, culminating in full-scale genocide as observed in the last two-and-a-half years, is, to take words out of Carney’s mouth, “a failure of the international order” that will likely only be resolved through global anti-colonial and revolutionary actions.

Carney’s statement appears woefully misinformed about contemporary history of the region. It is only through wishful thinking or deliberate ignorance that one could make such an egregiously misleading statement.

-        Another point of contention has been Canada’s stance on Iran’s nuclear program. How do you interpret the legal debate around Iran’s rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

I remember hearing debates surrounding Iran’s nuclear program since I was a child. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been claiming that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon for over thirty years. Not only have none of his predictions come true, but under the late Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, there was a fatwa (religious decree) prohibiting the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The repetition of the “nuclear issue” by the media is intended to create fear surrounding Iran and has been a long-running piece of anti-Iran propaganda and fear-mongering to create public support for war against Iran.

As part of efforts to diversify its energy sources, industries, and build a strong economy and society independent of foreign resources while under sanctions, Iran has built a civilian nuclear program. This is their right under NPT article IV. Nevertheless, multiple Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated and the U.S and Israel deployed the computer worm stuxnet in 2009 to destroy Iranian nuclear centrifuges. In 2015, Under the Rouhani and Obama presidencies, Iran accepted the JCPOA, a deal with the U.S. and other countries which partially lifted sanctions in exchange for Iran allowing especially stringent inspections of its nuclear program. In 2018, during his first term as U.S. President, Donald Trump broke the JCPOA agreement. He later bombed Iranian nuclear enrichment sites near the conclusion of the Twelve-Day-War, on June 22, 2025.

It is strange that despite Iran’s compliance with regulations, the U.S. and Israel, who both have nuclear weapons, so vehemently insist that Iran should never come anywhere close to having its own. I interpret this as in reality an effort to keep Iran in check. Some experts have argued in favour of nuclear deterrence, and the U.S. and Israel are afraid of a potential future in which Iran has such a deterrent capability. However, the multiple attacks on Iran’s scientists and nuclear infrastructure, the breaking of the JCPOA deal, and the killing of the Supreme Leader who issued the fatwa prohibiting the building of nuclear weapons, would seem to undermine this goal and may lead to the hastening of Iran’s acquisition of the latter.

 -        Prime Minister Carney also suggested that Canada cannot completely rule out participation in the conflict. What is your organization’s response to that statement?

Prime Minister Carney appears to have been hedging his bets in this statement, perhaps relying on his banking background to guide his decision-making. But war should not be treated as a bet to be won, and Canada’s decision should be based on ethical considerations, which unequivocally point away from participating in the unprovoked and unjust attacks. Canada has long considered itself an ally of the United States and continues to do so despite the Trump presidency’s threats to subsume Canada and its financial tariffs on this country. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien refused to join the Iraq war despite the potential of a rift with allies, and we would hope Carney would take a page out of his book. Thankfully, Carney’s March 8^th statement indicates that “Canada has no plans to participate in the offensive actions against Iran”. Let’s hope it stays that way.

-        You have also criticized Canadian media for what you describe as limited coverage of civilian casualties and anti-war voices. What kind of media coverage would you like to see instead?

After my appearance on CBC’s Power and Politics, another segment was aired in which David Cochrane interviewed a guest critical of the Iranian Canadian Congress. Mr. Cochrane did not disclose his guest’s  former association with the organization, and the guest undermined the credibility of the Congress through ad hominem attacks, repeated unsubstantiated claims and atrocity propaganda regarding the numbers killed in the January 8-9^th attempted colour revolution in Iran, with no sources, and avoided engaging with the facts raised in my interview sourced from Israeli news and former U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. During this segment, the host apologized four times for platforming me as a representative of the ICC. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) subsequently applauded the guest, as did Honest Reporting Canada, leading at least one Iranian-Canadian journalist to ask why CIJA cares which Iranian-Canadians are platformed.

When ICC e-mailed the ombudsperson regarding CBC’s failure to disclose relevant facts about the position of their guest and failure to invite ICC to respond to the accusations, we were told that the decision was made in the interest of balance. The ombudsperson’s public blog expressed disappointment that they did not receive further accolades for their decision.

The appeal to the idea of balance is a canard. CBC is failing to provide its audience with necessary context to interpret the information with which they are presented. This is often a problem with mainstream media. Furthermore, the CBC expects to be rewarded for succumbing to bullying from fascists.

Whenever I appear on the media, in association with ICC or otherwise, I aspire to ground my analysis in facts. This is what I expect from the media. Instead, we often see efforts to create a false sense of balance by giving equal weight to different viewpoints, regardless of their credibility. This can create a sense among listeners that the situation is too complicated for them to form an opinion, keeping people from taking action.

 -        What role do you believe Canada should play diplomatically in reducing tensions and promoting a peaceful resolution to the conflict?

Canada should start by taking an objective view of this aggression that is grounded in international law. Further, it should categorically refuse to participate in a war that Prime Minister Carney has admitted the U.S. started without consulting the United Nations or its allies. Furthermore, Canada should condemn the illegal actions of the United States and Israel against Iran, and re-establish diplomatic relations with the latter. Unlike some past actions that Canada has taken to diplomatically isolate Iran, such steps would generate feelings of goodwill and give Canada ground to negotiate with Iran. However, the primary sources of this conflict lie in U.S. and Israeli belligerence, which is something Canada would need to contend with if a just and peaceful resolution is to be reached.

-          Finally, what message would you like to send to Canadians who are trying to understand this conflict and its implications for global peace and international law?

Canadians who truly want to learn about the sources of this conflict should read about the history of modern Iran, Israel, and U.S. involvement in West Asia. It is not enough to “listen to Iranian voices” — we must take into account the positionality of different voices, and understand which voices among the many we are listening to. Further, we must use critical thinking and our own moral compass to interpret what we hear and see in the media.

Average Canadians are reacting with confusion to the mass-hysteria-induced wave of members of the Iranian diaspora thanking Donald Trump for attacking their country. We should not doubt our instincts in such cases, if something seems “off”, that’s because it is.