A Weakened Iran Faces Massive Internal Divisions

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

There is no shortage of commentary about the possibility of Iran’s theocratic regime falling in the wake of Israel’s intervention earlier this month. But it’s important to keep in mind that the state is divided along ethnic lines – something which is almost certain to have a bearing on its survival.

Iran is quite heterogeneous, with many ethnic and religious minorities. Many of them also live geographically adjacent to ethnically kin states. Will they try to carve the country up? Bordering countries in Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia are paying close attention.

The reverberations of the Hamas attack on Israel October 7, 2023 may yet prove the theocracy’s undoing. The Islamic Republic’s imperial strategy over the years has succeeded because there was little pushback. But then Israel eliminated Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah as a threat, which presaged the collapse of the Tehran-backed Syrian regime. Suddenly Iran was exposed to attack.

Will this decapitate Iran’s ruling elite? A country of 92 million people, it is a multi-ethnic state with an ethnic Persian majority comprising only about 60 per cent of the population, but with sizable minorities of Arabs, Azeris, Balochs, Kurds, and Turkmen, among others. These groups inhabit about 70 per cent of Iran’s land mass, mainly along the peripheries. They often experience economic and political marginalization, leading to tensions and separatist movements in various regions of the country.

The Islamic Republic of Iran aims to be a state with a single unified, Persian nation who adheres to Shia Islam. As a result, members of ethnic and religious minorities face discrimination in all spheres of life. This includes economic marginalization, denial of cultural rights, denial of language rights, denial of religious freedom, denial of freedom of expression, and violations of political rights. Schooling is conducted exclusively in Farsi. As a result, non-Farsi speakers are underrepresented in higher levels of education and government.

Azeris number up to a quarter of the population, and they live mainly in the northwest, adjacent to the independent republic of Azerbaijan, a former Soviet entity across the Aras River boundary. A small country, with a population of 10 million, with close ties to Israel, Azerbaijan has caused headaches for Iran. Groups such as the South Azerbaijan National Liberation Movement (JAMAH), created in 1991, and the Southern Azerbaijan National Awakening Movement (SANAM), founded in 2002, have sought to unify Iran’s Azeri community with Azerbaijan.

Kurds constitute another large minority in Iran, with a population of around 10 million people, concentrated in those parts of northwestern Iran with either a majority or sizable population of Kurds. Neighbouring Iraq and Turkey, the four main Kurdish-inhabited provinces are West Azerbaijan, Kermanshah, Kurdistan and Ilam.

The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), founded in Mahaban in 1945, is an armed separatist movement of Iranian Kurds. The group, which is banned in Iran, calls for either an independent Kurdish state or the implementation of a federal system. It organized the Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran (CNFI) in 2005, representing the Azeri, Baloch, Turkmen, and Arabs in Iran. The KDPI has waged a persistent guerrilla campaign against the Iranian regime, including major insurgencies beginning in 1979 and again in 1989. Since 2016, the KDPI and other groups have again clashed with Iranian forces.

At the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union, despite prior agreements, refused to withdraw its troops from northern Iran and supported the establishment of pro-Soviet separatist governments in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. The Republic of Mahabad, a Kurdish entity, arose in northwestern Iran alongside the Azerbaijani People’s Government’s Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, a similarly short-lived unrecognized Soviet puppet state. This has not been forgotten by the Iranian rulers.

Khuzestan, the southwestern region of the country along the Persian Gulf next to Iraq, has a predominantly Arab population, home to decades-long separatist movements. Tensions have often resulted in violence and attempted separatism by Khuzestani Arabs, including an insurgency in 1979, unrest in 2005, terrorist bombings in 2005-2006, protests in 2011, assassinations in 2017, and a 2018 attack on a military parade in the capital, Ahvaz.

Nearly one million Turkmen can be found living along the northern edges of Iran, just south of the Turkmenistan-Iran border. They primarily seek greater rights and recognition of their cultural identity within Iran, not a separate state.

Iran shares a 909-kilometre border with Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province. On June 16, Pakistani officials announced several border crossings with Iran would be closed indefinitely. The relationship between predominantly Sunni Pakistan and Shia-majority Iran has been problematic, with the cross-border region affected by attacks from Baloch separatists in the Baloch Liberation Army who are fighting a war of independence against the Pakistani state. Baloch separatist insurgents and various Islamist militant groups are also involved in attacks against Iran in its Sistan and Baluchestan province.

In Afghanistan’s Herat province, which borders Iran, the Islam Qala-Dogharoon border was closed by Iran June 20, halting both passenger movement and the transit of goods. The Hazara Shia community there continues to face challenges related to religious freedom and security, particularly in the context of Sunni Taliban rule.

So is Iran going to disintegrate and perhaps go the way of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, two other multi-national states that did not survive? We have to wait for the answer.

 

Antisemitism in Some Unlikely Places in America

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post

Antisemitism flourishes in a place where few might expect to confront it – medical schools and among doctors. It affects Jews, I think, more emotionally than Judeophobia in other fields.

Medicine has long been a Jewish profession with a history going back centuries. We all know the jokes about “my son – now also my daughter – the doctor.”  Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath to heal the sick, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. When we are ill doctors often become the people who save us from debilitating illness and even death. So this is all the more shocking.

Yes, in earlier periods there were medical schools with quotas and hospitals who refused or limited the number of Jews they allowed to be affiliated with them. It’s why we built Jewish hospitals and practices. And of course, we all shudder at the history of Nazi doctors and euthanasia in Germany and in the concentration camps of Europe. But all this – so we thought – was a thing of a dark past. Yet now it has made a comeback, along with many other horrors we assume might never reappear.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, there has been a resurgence of antisemitism, also noticeable in the world of healthcare. This is not just a Canadian issue. Two articles on the Jewish website Tablet, published Nov. 21, 2023, and May 18, 2025, spoke to this problem in American medicine as well, referencing a study by Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene of Do No Harm, a health care advocacy group, based on data amassed by the organization Stop Antisemitism. They identified a wave of open Jew-hatred by medical professionals, medical schools, and professional associations, often driven by foreign-trained doctors importing the Jew-hatred of their native countries, suggesting “that a field entrusted with healing is becoming a licensed purveyor of hatred.”

Activists from Doctors Against Genocide, American Palestinian Women's Association, and CODEPINK held a demonstration calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Nov. 16, 2023, almost as soon as the war began. A doctor in Tampa took to social media to post a Palestinian flag with the caption “about time!!!” The medical director of a cancer centre in Dearborn, Michigan, posted on social media: “What a beautiful morning. What a beautiful day.” Even in New York, a physician commented on Instagram that “Zionist settlers” got “a taste of their own medicine.” A Boston-based dentist was filmed ripping down posters of Israeli victims and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine did the same. Almost three-quarters of American medical associations felt the need to speak out on the war in Ukraine but almost three-quarters had nothing to say about the war in Israel.

Antisemitism in academic medical centres is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish healthcare professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study by the Data & Analytics Department of StandWithUs, an international, non-partisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism.

“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics, and study co-author, Alexandra Fishman, said on May 5 in a press release. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”

The study, “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” included survey data showing that 62.8 per cent of Jewish healthcare professionals employed by campus-based medical centres reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.

“When administrators and colleagues understand what antisemitism looks like, it clearly correlates with less antisemitism in the workplace,” co-author and Yeshiva University professor Dr. Charles Auerbach reported. “Recognition is a powerful tool -- institutions that foster awareness create safer, more inclusive environments for everyone.”

Last December, the Data & Analytics Department also published a study which found that nearly 40 per cent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left more than one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 per cent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”

The official journal of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine concurs. According to “The Moral Imperative of Countering Antisemitism in US Medicine – A Way Forward,” by Hedy S. Wald and Steven Roth, published in the October 2024 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, increased antisemitism in the United States has created a hostile learning and practice environment in medical settings. This includes instances of antisemitic behaviour and the use of antisemitic symbols at medical school commencements.

Examples of its impact upon medicine include medical students’ social media postings claiming that Jews wield disproportionate power, antisemitic slogans at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, antisemitic graffiti at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Cancer Centre, Jewish medical students’ exposure to demonization of Israel diatribes and rationalizing terrorism; and faculty, including a professor of medicine at UCSF, posting antisemitic tropes and derogatory comments about Jewish health care professionals. Jewish medical students’ fears of retribution, should they speak out, have been reported. “Our recent unpublished survey of Jewish physicians and trainees demonstrated a twofold increase from 40% to 88% for those who experienced antisemitism prior to vs after October 7,” they stated.

In some schools, Jewish faculty are speaking out. In February, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group at UCLA accused the institution in an open letter of “ignoring” antisemitism at the School of Medicine, charging that its indifference to the matter “continues to encourage more antisemitism.” It added that discrimination at the medical school has caused demonstrable harm to Jewish students and faculty. Student clubs, it said, are denied recognition for arbitrary reasons; Jewish faculty whose ethnic backgrounds were previously unknown are purged from the payrolls upon being identified as Jews; and anyone who refuses to participate in anti-Zionist events is “intimidated” and pressured.

Given these findings, many American physicians are worried not only as Jewish doctors and professionals, but for Jewish patients who are more than ever concerned with whom they’re meeting. Can we really conceive of a future where you’re not sure if “the doctor will hate you now?”

Iran-Israel Conflict Divides U.S. Republicans

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Since Israel began its war with Iran, President Donald Trump and his White House have sent mixed messages, giving the warring factions of his political coalition reason to hope they may prevail in shaping his policy toward the new war in the Middle East.

The so-called “restrainers” inside the MAGA movement want a foreign policy that pares down America’s global military footprint. On the other side, a mix of pro-Israel advocates and Republican “hawks” have sought to keep Washington more engaged.

For the restrainers, war between Israel and Iran is another Middle East quagmire. For their opponents, it is a fight to eliminate the threat of a nuclear Iran that has menaced the Middle East for many decades.

Many commentators and politicians who support President Trump’s “America First MAGA” policies feel he has abandoned the doctrine by talking tough about Iran and giving support to Israel in its current war with that country. This has become a “civil war” in the Republican Party. The most prominent of these voices is former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

They point to his promise not to engage in “forever” wars, which led to disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. They have predicted that Iran would strike U.S. bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, also in the restrainer camp, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” June 15 that he expected “hundreds of thousands of people” would “die on both sides.”

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky co-sponsored a war powers resolution with a Democrat, Ro Khanna of California, that would stop Trump from going to war without congressional approval. “This is not our war. Even if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution,” Massie wrote, posting a copy of the resolution.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing Georgia House Republican who has spoken out against U.S. involvement in Israel’s air campaign against Iran, on June 17 told the London-based Guardian: “While I’m opposed to America’s involvement in foreign wars and regime change, I do not see a need to sign on to Rep. Massie’s war powers resolution yet as we are not attacking Iran.”

Greene, posting on X two days earlier, lambasted “fake” America First leaders, arguing that they have “exposed themselves quickly. Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.”

But what Trump meant when he promised not to mire the United States in such conflicts was based on his rejection of the dubious prospects of “nation-building” aimed at transforming countries with far different political cultures into Western-style democracies. But he also meant what he said about never allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. He declared he’d prefer to do it through diplomacy. But he told the Iranians that if they didn’t agree to his deal, he’d have no choice but to do things the hard way. 

The proponents of intervention insist that sceptics have “overlearned” the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the United States mustn’t be paralysed by a fear of instability. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” also on June 15, that the “worst possible outcome of the world is for the Iranian nuclear program to survive after all of this.” He went on to say that he was pressing President Trump to “go all in” to make sure none of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was left standing.

Vice-president J.D. Vance has repeatedly lashed out at American interventionists but now finds himself straddling the fine line separating his ideological and partisan commitments. In a long message posted to X, he backed up Trump: “I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue,” he wrote. “And having seen this up close and personal, I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals.”

Trump has indicated quite unambiguously that the United States is tired of playing the role of hegemon in global affairs and will thus base its future decisions on its own priorities. In an interview with the “Atlantic” June 14 he said that he alone defined what America First meant. Trump may be many things politically, but being a reflexive isolationist is not one of them.