Masih Alinejad: From Receiving the Courage Award to the Revelation of Personal Emails
These days, the name Masih Alinejad, a journalist who has transformed from a women’s rights activist to an advocate for regime change, is entangled with many controversies. On one hand, after the Washington Institute for Peace jointly awarded the Courage Award to her and Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine who stood by his people amidst the war with Russia.
She faced criticism from parts of the community on social media, questioning why such an award should be given to someone who operates outside the borders when protesters inside the country, especially women, youth, and even underage children, are being brutally suppressed in the streets, universities, schools, and prisons for the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests.
On the other hand, the revelation of Alinejad’s personal emails by a hacker group named ‘Adl Ali’ has sparked controversy, as it contradicts her claims in Persian and international media about her efforts for the freedom of Iranian women. In this report, we will analyze the content of these emails and the developments surrounding Masih Alinejad to answer whether she was deserving of the Courage Award or not.
What has Masih Alinejad said no to?
While one cannot deny Masih Alinejad’s professional background in journalism, especially during her time in the country, such as the sit-in of the Sixth Parliament and the exposure of the payrolls of the Seventh Islamic Consultative Assembly during the reform era, as well as her critique of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies in her note ‘The Song of the Dolphins’, she became widely known to the public as an activist of the Green Movement after the 2009 presidential election. But was she a supporter of the Green Movement?
Interestingly, when Mir Hossein Mousavi entered the competitive arena of the tenth presidential election, Masih Alinejad published a note on her blog titled ‘Old Man, Please Stay a Painter’, attacking the candidacy of the wartime prime minister in support of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, who was the reformist candidate at the time. After Khatami withdrew in favor of Mir Hossein, she joined Mehdi Karroubi’s campaign.
Another point is that before the 2009 elections, Masih traveled abroad to interview the President of the United States, then Barack Obama, for domestic publications as a reporter for Etemad Melli newspaper. However, after the election events, her first wave of activism as a Green Movement activist in Persian media began.
Without going to prison or being banned from work at the time, you surely remember her image with a hat, symbolizing a hijab. Nevertheless, after the house arrest of the Green Movement leaders, her approach changed. Initially, she denied street protests, echoing reformists’ calls to participate in several elections in support of Hassan Rouhani and the Hope lists. But with the rise of Donald Trump’s administration, she removed her hat and founded the ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ and ‘White Wednesdays’ campaigns.
Was Masih Alinejad the leader of the Girls of Revolution Street?
It is unfair to reduce the opposition to compulsory hijab, which started with the first Women’s Day march after the revolution in 1979 and was reintroduced in society with the ‘One Million Signatures’ campaign in the 2000s, to the Girls of Revolution Street movement. Especially its manifestation in 2009 with the activism of individuals like Nasrin Sotoudeh, Narges Mohammadi, Zahra Rahnavard, Faezeh Hashemi, and other women who voiced women’s demands in streets and prisons.
Nevertheless, one cannot overlook the role of Vida Movahed, who in the midst of the December 2017 protests, first raised her scarf on a stick and stood symbolically on a platform with her hair blowing in the wind, in popularizing the demand to abolish compulsory hijab within the country. After her arrest, other women, both with and without hijab, repeated her gesture on various platforms in support. But what was Masih Alinejad’s role in this movement?
Masih’s second wave of activism begins here. By omitting the name of Vida Movahed, who was imprisoned, she appropriates the Girls of Revolution Street movement and, by aiding a few women like Shaparak Shajarizadeh, who performed the Revolution Street Girls’ gestures in secluded alleys for asylum or residency in Western countries, she presents herself as the originator of this movement on global platforms.
Initially, she introduced the long-standing efforts of women’s rights activists like Narges Mohammadi and Nasrin Sotoudeh as her achievements in greenhouse campaigns like ‘White Wednesdays’ and ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ to human rights organizations. After gaining international attention, she claimed the movements of Vida Movahed and the Girls of Revolution Street as her own with a few demonstrations, to secure funding from the most misogynistic administration in the US, the Trump administration, which was openly against abortion rights and whose anti-women remarks by officials are still media fodder.
However, this apparent claim of striving for the freedom of Iranian women soon faded, as Masih openly transformed from a women’s rights activist to an advocate for regime change, aiming to use such funding for economic sanctions and suspending Iranian sports to change the political system. What did Masih say in her emails?
Firstly, the hacker group ‘Adl Ali’ that revealed Masih Alinejad’s personal emails is different from the ‘Justice Ali’ hacker group, which previously hacked Evin prison cameras to expose prisoner mistreatment and recently aired the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ in support of public protests on Iranian state TV. It is evident that this hacker group, similar to the cyber army supporting values, exposed Masih’s emails to support the regime.
Nevertheless, with a critical view and distinction from the goals of this hacker group intending to personally attack this regime-opposing figure, we can examine some significant content of these emails, without invading her privacy, to enhance media literacy and verify Masih Alinejad’s claims in the media.
The first point is writing scripts for the videos of ‘White Wednesdays’ and ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ campaigns, which were published as people’s documentaries and images of women. The second point is the effort to secure funding from human rights organizations and institutions by citing these types of films as samples of work for achieving Iranian women’s freedom, which Masih Alinejad claimed to be among the most successful in similar campaigns.
The third point is her team’s pressure on US government officials to officially condemn the Iranian government, again citing films scripted for her campaigns, which resulted in consequences like sanctions.
The fourth point is Masih Alinejad’s complaint to a British parliamentary legal official about not having a US residency permit, claiming that US officials treat her as her husband’s asset. This raises the question: if US officials treat a women’s rights activist like her husband’s asset, how can she request funding from the same country’s government for Iranian women’s freedom and ask its officials to act for gender equality in Iran?
The fifth and final point is an audio file of Masih stating to one of her close associates that she has no hope of returning to Iran. Again, this raises the question: if she has no hope for change and freedom in Iran that would lead to her return, why does she sell this dream to the Iranian people for collaboration with her campaigns and also sell this dream through her campaign videos to foreign officials for funding?
Was Masih deserving of the Courage Award?
One of the key points that can be inferred from Masih Alinejad’s hacked emails is that human rights organizations initially asked her and her team to raise Iranian people’s awareness about fake news in cyberspace, refute officials’ fallacies, and neutralize cyber army attacks on civil activists in exchange for collaboration and funding.
But gradually, instead of neutralizing such techniques used in totalitarian countries to suppress and misinform people, she employed the same techniques in her campaigns against the people to erase and undermine the civil society and women’s rights activists within the country with fake news and cyber-attacks, claiming their achievements as her own. Not for the freedom of Iranian women, but for securing more funding. As in the latest criticism of her performance, an audio file of Salome Seyednia, a presenter for Manoto TV, was released, revealing Masih’s profiteering with the voice of Nahid Shirpisheh, mother of Pouya Bakhtiari, one of the victims of the November protests, in Persian-language media.
Is Masih advocating for regime change?
One might say Masih Alinejad’s third wave of activism is appropriating the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests. Not to amplify the voices of Iranian women’s and youth’s demands to the world or even to take steps towards changing Iran’s political system, but by exploiting these demands, she seeks to impose more sanctions on the country and projects like removing Iran’s national football team from the World Cup and suspension from FIFA, which are more aligned with the goals of countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel for isolating Iran.
In this regard, as evidence suggests, significant funding has been allocated to individuals like Masih, similar to the operations of Iran International network. With these details, one must again ask whether Masih was deserving of the Courage Award or not.
In this context, other articles have been published on Iran Gate, two of which are listed below.
- From Maryam Rajavi to Masih Alinejad: Appropriation Forbidden
- The Battle for a Share of the Streets in Iran’s Nationwide Protests
