The audacity — and ignorance — of a German politician declaring that Iranians are “not ready for democracy” has ignited fierce and historically devastating pushback from Goldie Ghamari, the Iranian-Canadian lawyer, former Member of the Canadian Parliament, and tireless voice for the Iranian people. In a viral video that is cutting through the noise of the Western media blackout on Iran, Ghamari dismantles the colonial supremacy quietly embedded in the Western left’s approach to Iran — and does so with receipts dating back more than a century.

Her message is as pointed as it is historically precise: Iran had a constitutionally elected parliament twelve years before Germany even became a democracy.

Ghamari opens her commentary by calling out a pattern she has experienced personally. As a former parliamentarian, she says the only racism and condescension she ever faced came not from the right — but from the left and the far left. Those who claim to champion inclusion, she argues, are often the first to tell Iranians what they should think, what they should want, and what they are supposedly “not ready for.”

The Media Blackout the World Should Be Ashamed Of

Her video amplifies a devastating speech from His Royal Highness Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran and leader of Iran’s National Lion and Sun Revolution, delivered following his European tour. Pahlavi traveled to Stockholm and Berlin, holding two press conferences attended by more than 150 journalists over more than two hours. The result was a journalistic disgrace of historic proportions.

Not a single journalist among those 150 asked about the 40,000 Iranians slaughtered in the streets on January 8th and 9th. Not one asked about the 19 political prisoners executed in the preceding two weeks. Not one asked about the 20 political prisoners then facing death sentences. And when Pahlavi stood beside a mother and a father whose sons had been killed — and invited journalists to hear their stories — not one asked them a question.

Instead, Pahlavi reports, the journalists seemed far more interested in criticizing America and asking why the United States and Israel killed the dictator who had slaughtered Iranians for 47 years — than in questioning the regime doing the slaughtering. They preferred to ask about Iran’s past rather than the democratic future Iranians are fighting — and dying — to achieve. One member of parliament even told Pahlavi he didn’t believe Iranians were ready for democracy. Ghamari’s response to that claim is withering.

Watch: Goldie Ghamari’s Full Commentary

@gghamari on X (Twitter) · Iranian democracy, the left, and the media blackout

The History Lesson That Changes Everything

Here is where Ghamari transforms commentary into a history lesson that leaves no room for the colonial condescension she is dismantling. In 1906 — twelve years before Germany became a democracy — Persia (Iran) experienced a constitutional revolution that established a democratically elected parliament, the Majlis. Iran was the first country in the Middle and Near East where a revolution in favor of a democratic constitution occurred and succeeded.

Ghamari emphasizes that in 1963, the Shah of Iran granted women not only the right to vote, but the right to stand for and win election to parliament — while women in Switzerland still could not vote, and many European countries had not yet followed suit. Iranian women parliamentarians existed decades before certain Western democracies considered women fit for the same privilege.

And Ghamari goes further still — noting that Thomas Jefferson himself, when drafting the American Constitution, drew inspiration from Cyrus the Great and the Cyrus Cylinder, history’s first declaration of human rights. “Iranians invented the concept of democracy 2,500 years ago,” Ghamari states flatly.

“The Red and the Black” — A Warning Europe Refuses to Hear

Ghamari reserves some of her sharpest words for what she describes as the same destructive alliance Iran experienced in 1979 — now replicating itself in the West. She calls it the “unholy alliance of the red and the black”: the red of communists, socialists, and the woke progressive left, and the black of Islamists. This alliance, she argues, toppled Iran’s modernizing government four decades ago — and the same ideological forces, operating in Western capitals and newsrooms today, are enabling the silence around Iranian suffering.

The “extreme left” that stood against women’s voting rights in 1963 Iran, she notes, is the same ideological force that today suppresses coverage of 40,000 Iranians massacred in their streets. The resistance to democratic reform has never come from the political right, Ghamari says — it has always come from the left and the Islamists, working in concert.

Her closing message to European politicians and journalists is unsparing: Iran will free itself — with or without European support. But she warns that nations allowing themselves to be captured by the same forces that destroyed Iran have no claim to Iranian solidarity when the consequences arrive at their own doors. “Don’t expect us to help you when you turn your countries into the third world Islamic hellhole,” she says. “Because we Iranians — we have been down that path.”

And then, the historical coup de grâce: “Iran was a democracy in 1906. So if you think we Iranians are not ready for democracy — that just shows how ignorant, stupid, and racist you actually are.”