Masih Alinejad: From Receiving the Courage Award to the Exposure 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, the Washington Peace Institute jointly awarded the Courage Award to her and Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, who stood by his people amidst the war with Russia.
This 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, especially when protesters inside the country, particularly 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 exposure of Alinejad’s personal emails by a hacker group named ‘Adl Ali,’ which contradicts her claims in Persian and international media about her efforts for the freedom of Iranian women, has sparked controversy. This report will examine the content of these emails and the developments surrounding Masih Alinejad to answer whether she deserved the Courage Award or not.
What did Masih Alinejad say no to?
While one cannot deny Masih Alinejad’s professional history in journalism, especially during her time in the country, notably in the Sixth Parliament’s sit-in and the exposure of the salary slips of the Seventh Islamic Consultative Assembly members during the reform period, and also her note ‘The Song of the Dolphins,’ criticizing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s populist policies, she became publicly known as a Green Movement activist mainly after the 2009 presidential election. But was she a supporter of the Green Movement?
Interestingly, when Mir Hossein Mousavi entered the competitive arena in the tenth presidential election, Masih Alinejad published a blog post titled ‘Old Man, Please Stay a Painter’ in support of Mohammad Khatami, who was the reformist candidate at the time, attacking the candidacy of the war-time Prime Minister. After Khatami withdrew in favor of Mousavi, she joined Mehdi Karroubi’s campaign.
Another point is that Masih traveled abroad before the 2009 election to interview the President of the United States, Barack Obama at the time, for domestic publications as a journalist of the National Trust newspaper. However, after the post-election events, Alinejad’s first wave of activism as a Green Movement activist in Persian-language media began.
Without being imprisoned or banned from work at the time, you might remember her with a hat on her head, which was a symbol of hijab. Nevertheless, after the house arrest of the Green Movement leaders, she changed her approach. Initially, she denied street protests, echoing reformists in supporting several elections in favor of Hassan Rouhani and the Hope lists. Later, 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 would be unfair to reduce the issue of opposing compulsory hijab, which began with the first Women’s Day march after the 1979 revolution 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 activities of figures like Nasrin Sotoudeh, Narges Mohammadi, Zahra Rahnavard, Faezeh Hashemi, and other women with different beliefs who raised women’s demands in the streets and prisons.
Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the role of Vida Movahed, who in the midst of the December 2017 protests, for the first time, placed her headscarf 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 in support on platforms across various places. But what was Masih Alinejad’s role in this movement?
Alinejad’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, with the help of a few women like Shaparak Shajarizadeh, who performed the Revolution Street Girls’ movement in deserted alleys in a theatrical manner for asylum or residency in Western countries, she introduces herself as the creator of this movement on global platforms.
Initially, she presented the years-long 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 recognition, she claimed the actions of Vida Movahed and the Girls of Revolution Street as her own through some performances to secure funding from the most anti-women administration in the U.S., the Trump administration, which openly opposed abortion rights and whose officials’ anti-women statements are still media fodder.
However, this apparent claim of striving for the freedom of Iranian women quickly faded as Alinejad openly shifted from a women’s rights activist to an advocate for regime change, aiming to use such funds for economic sanctions and the suspension of Iranian sports to politically change the regime. What did Masih say in her emails?
First, it should be noted that the hacker group ‘Adl Ali,’ which exposed Masih Alinejad’s personal emails, is different from the ‘Justice Ali’ hacker group, which previously hacked Evin prison cameras to expose mistreatment of prisoners and recently broadcasted the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ in support of public protests on a news channel. Evidently, this hacker group, similar to the cyber army supporting the regime, exposed Alinejad’s emails to support the government.
Nevertheless, we can critically examine and separate the objectives of this hacker group, which aims to personally attack this opposition figure, to review some significant content of these emails without invading her private life, solely to enhance media literacy and verify Alinejad’s claims in the media.
The first point is the scripting for videos in the ‘White Wednesdays’ and ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ campaigns, which were released as public and documentary images of women. The second point is the effort to secure funding from human rights organizations and institutions based on these types of films as sample work for achieving women’s freedom in Iran, which Alinejad claimed to be among the most successful performances in similar campaigns.
The third point is her team’s pressure on U.S. government officials to officially condemn the Iranian government, again citing films scripted in her campaigns, which resulted in consequences like sanctions.
The fourth point is Alinejad’s complaint to a British parliamentary legal official about not having a residency permit in the U.S., claiming that American officials treat her as her husband’s property. This raises the question: if U.S. officials treat a women’s rights activist like her husband’s property, how can she request funding from the same country’s government for Iranian women’s freedom and ask its officials to act towards gender equality in Iran?
The fifth and final point is an audio file of Masih saying to a close associate, ‘I have no hope of returning to Iran.’ Again, this raises the question: if she has no hope for change and freedom in Iran leading to her return, why does she sell this dream to the Iranian people for collaboration in 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 important points that can be inferred from Masih Alinejad’s hacked emails is that human rights organizations initially asked her and her team to raise awareness among the Iranian people about fake news in cyberspace, refute officials’ fallacies, and counter the cyber army’s attacks on civil activists.
However, gradually, instead of countering such techniques used in authoritarian countries to suppress and keep people uninformed, she employed the same techniques in her campaigns against the people to appropriate the achievements of the civil society and women’s rights activists within the country with fake news and cyber-attacks, not for Iranian women’s freedom but for gaining more funding. As seen in the latest criticism of her performance, an audio file of Salomeh Sadeghnia, a Manoto TV host, was released, revealing Alinejad’s exploitation of Nahid Shirpisheh, the mother of Pouya Bakhtiari, one of the November protest victims, in Persian-language media.
Is Masih advocating for regime change?
It might be said that Masih Alinejad’s third wave of activism is the appropriation of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests, not to amplify the voices of Iranian women and youth’s demands to the world or to take steps towards changing Iran’s political regime, but by exploiting these demands, she is merely seeking more sanctions on the country and projects like removing Iran’s national football team from the World Cup and suspension in FIFA, which are more the goals of countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel for isolating Iran.
In this regard, as evidence suggests, like the performance of Iran International network, a lot of funding has been allocated for the likes of Masih. With these details, the question must be asked again: was Masih 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: No to Appropriation
- The Fight Over the Share of the Streets in Iran’s Nationwide Protests