We grew up breathing the smoke of burning foreign flags. Extremists blackened our lungs. Under theocracy, children were forced to chant: “Death to America. Death to Israel. Death to the enemies of the Islamic jurist. The blood in our veins is a gift to our Supreme Leader.” This was our childhood, not a battlefield.
Last month, when reports of Israeli strikes on Iranians surfaced, they camouflaged a deadlier truth: that millions of Iranians face escalating violence, as the totalitarian repression, established by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, continues to intensify.
What has unfolded in Iran must be called what it is: state terrorism, marked by deliberate, systemic ideological coercion and fanatical religious absolutism, maintained through institutional terror and disguised as divine law.
For more than four decades, the regime has waged borderless campaigns of violence, carrying out more than 360 assassinations and attacks across more than 40 countries, often using non-Iranian operatives.
Western appeasement, through prisoner swaps, diplomacy, academic ties and apologist platforms, has emboldened the regime’s transnational indoctrination networks. While Australia scrutinises Chinese and Russian interference, Iran’s extremist influence, through Islamic centres, schools, universities and mosques, persists with no substantive measures to immobilise its operations.
In 2022, Iran’s state-run Mehr News Agency released Hello Commander, a propaganda music video filmed in Sydney. It featured veiled children and adolescents, many non-Iranian, singing in Arabic and Persian, glorifying Islamic Republic values and pledging submission and sacrifice to Iran’s Supreme Leader and the Mahdi, the messianic Shia figure.
Founded by Khomeini in 1988, the Student Basij, a paramilitary militia, still exploits children for obedience, martyrdom, and religious fanaticism.
Dr Faith Gordon, associate professor of law at the ANU, has said that under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Australia is obligated to protect children from exploitation, manipulation and foreign propaganda. Oversight under Australia’s child protection, foreign interference and national security laws remains vague. Who funds this production? Are participants paid by a sanctioned regime? What protects children from ideological exploitation?
In 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie over alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses, which he reportedly never read. Rushdie’s Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator stabbed and his Norwegian publisher shot.
In 2022, Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New York State, leaving him blind in one eye and partially paralysed. His 24-year-old Lebanese-American assailant, Hadi Matar, was rewarded by the Foundation to Implement Khomeini’s Fatwas with farmland.
In 2023, former Australian ambassador Lyndall Sachs complied with Iran’s compulsory hijab laws during a visit to Al Mustafa University, an institution notorious for exporting radical Shia-Khomeinist ideology, where she reportedly encouraged academic collaboration.
In 2025, Senator Fatima Payman spoke at Women in Contemporary Iran at Western Sydney University, alongside mostly non-Iranian women in hijabs. She also appeared on Iran’s state-run Press TV – sanctioned by Australia and the EU for airing forced confessions – where she praised Iran’s political system, lauded women’s workforce participation as democratic progress, called it an “incredible place” for women, cited workforce participation as democratic progress, and dismissed criticism as “Western propaganda”, claiming Iran’s realities differ from the one-sided narratives presented abroad.
As a scholar and journalist with over a decade of documenting executions, torture and extrajudicial killings, I found her claims appalling; an echo of the regime propaganda long used to discredit dissidents and justify their annihilation. Press TV, Iran’s state broadcaster, later endorsed Payman and branded her critics as “anti-Iranian factions”. The senator’s sanitised narrative obliterates the suffering of countless victims.
Iran Rahimipour, executed without legal counsel for converting to the Baha’i Faith; her newborn taken from her in prison and forcibly handed to an orphanage, then an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked family. Mahrokh, compelled to pay for the bullets that killed her 18-year-old son. Zeynab, mother of nine-year-old Kian Pirfalak, shot dead, who kept his body on ice at home to prevent confiscation.
Zahra Kazemi, a photojournalist raped and murdered in custody.
Myriad facts expose the brutal machinery of a totalitarian state. The senator’s rhetoric echoes its mechanisms. Her appearance under a sanctioned regime’s flag raises critical questions: What protects Australian officials from spreading foreign propaganda? Who authorised and funded a sanctioned broadcaster platform in Australia?
Last year, an ABC article, entitled “Why Muslim women cover their hair with a hijab”, written by a non-Iranian journalist, framed the chador as a benign cultural practice, while obscuring the criminalisation of hijab refusal in Iran. When Iranians objected, the journalist dismissed them as “Islamophobic” on X.
Founded on Velayat-e Faqih, absolute rule by a male jurist, Iran’s regime conflates punitive coercion with choice. During the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising, security forces blinded more than 120 protesters, including children, with close-range paintball fire. Labelling subjugation as “culture” legitimatises state terrorism.
Following Canada’s 2024 designation of Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist entity, 14 members of the Australia–Iran Friendship Association warned the Australian government that similar action – dismissed as “foreign agendas” – could jeopardise Labor votes in “Muslim constituencies” across western Sydney and Canterbury-Bankstown.
We must not allow these terrorists to remain as if they have a legitimate claim to our diplomacy when they have repeatedly demonstrated to be a law unto themselves. The Islamic State-occupied regime in Iran has seized national resources to fund extraterritorial influence but now faces major setbacks: US-Israeli strikes, Assad’s regime collapse, and degradation of its proxy militias, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. This pivotal moment demands the international community support the Iranian people in countering transnational state terrorism, defending their self-determination through legitimate referendums and dismantling indoctrination networks that sustain clerical authoritarianism – rejecting bombings and appeasement that only impoverish Iranians.
Nothing is more sacred than human dignity. We must defend the right to subvert the power sacralisation that brutalises.
Dr Saba Vasefi is an award-winning scholar and journalist at the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She is an expert on state violence and a research consultant on capital punishment and the extrajudicial executions of Baha’is at the US-based Boroumand Centre for Human Rights in Iran.
More Coverage
Ambitious climate targets must not undermine growth
Stiell’s warnings should be considered but not taken at face value.
China pursues Australian activist
Beijing hunts dissidents to the end of the earth.