As tens of thousands return to the streets for the first national Palestine march of 2026, this movement refuses to be sidelined or silenced, says PETER LEARY
IN LATE June 2022, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, threatened those involved with the mass protest movement currently taking over the country that if they continued along this path then a fate of the kind witnessed in the 1980s would await them.
He was referring to a dark era in Iran’s history, when the then-nascent Islamic Republic regime started a wave of killings of opposition activists — during which all political parties and activities, other than those loyal to the regime, were outlawed and bloodily purged leading to thousands of executions. This was an era during which any expression of dissent, however mild, was answered with executions (even summary), brutal torture, lengthy imprisonment, and forced disappearances.
The mere reference to this era is often enough to bring terror to the hearts and minds of most ordinary Iranians.
MOHAMMAD OMIDVAR, a senior figure in the Tudeh Party of Iran, tells the Morning Star that mass protests are rooted in poverty, corruption and neoliberal rule and warns against monarchist revival and US-engineered regime change
In the second of two articles, STEVE BISHOP looks at how the 1979 revolution’s aims are obfuscated to create a picture where the monarchists are the opposition to the theocracy, not the burgeoning workers’ and women’s movement on the streets of Iran



