PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Masih Alinejad’s theatre of grief, the platforms that reward it, and the war she now says she never wanted. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Partido Popular, greets Masih Alinejad before the ‘Mujeres libres’ session at the Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid, 5 March 2026. Credit: EFE / Borja Sánchez-Trillo, via Infobae. On 21 July the mayor of New York conceded on video what his lawyers had told him: the city has no independent authority to execute the International Criminal Court’s warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, should he arrive for the General Assembly in September. The next day Masih Alinejad answered him with a bicycle. She filmed herself beside a Citi Bike, pointed at its worn brakes, told Zohran Mamdani to fix what actually endangers New Yorkers – ‘Oh busy trying to arrest Netanyahu?’ – and offered him instead the names of Iranian officials she says are bound for the same city. The bicycles are operated by Lyft and sponsored by a bank; the mayor owns neither the brakes nor the warrant. It scarcely matters. The clip was never an argument. It was a set: one prop, one grievance, one camera. It was also a rerun. On 28 February, the first day of the war, with American and Israeli aircraft over Iranian cities, she told the same mayor to stop lecturing Iranians about peace. A man who objected to the bombing of her country had become, in her telling, a threat to her safety in his own. Whatever else that is, it is consistent, and the consistency is the subject of this essay. The Style There is an older clip, from the years when Javad Zarif still toured Western studios selling the republic’s smoother face. She posted herself at a laptop while he spoke, weeping at the screen, grief staged at broadcast scale, as though the man in the frame were one of the century’s great criminals and she the survivor appointed to testify against him. I wrote this week about Iranians abroad who reach for the Nazi analogy as a shortcut through thought. She arrived there years early, and she arrived in character. The United Nations appearance of January 2020, reading the names of the protest dead through tears, ran on the same voltage. Some of those tears may well be real. That is what makes the choreography work, because a performance needs true feeling somewhere in the building. The question is what the feeling is for, and the answer, across a decade of footage, is that it is for the camera that happens, every time, to be running. Say the true things first, because they are serious. The Islamic Republic has tried to kidnap her and tried to kill her. A Manhattan jury convicted two men over the plot, and in October 2025 they drew 25-year sentences. My Stealthy Freedom gave women inside Iran an outlet the regime answered with the threat of ten-year prison terms, and it cost her own family dearly. Her fear is earned. Nothing below erases it, and nothing below is written in the regime’s defence. What the Public Record Shows Now the ledger, drawn only from documents anyone can read. In 2015 she received the inaugural Women’s Rights Award of the Geneva Summit, the annual gathering convened by UN Watch, the advocacy group best known for defending Israel at the Human Rights Council. The organisation’s own website claims the prize under its name. The same year she signed with Voice of America’s Persian service, where her federal contract described her as an ‘anchor, writer, reporter’. The publicly posted awards passed $305,000 by 2019, and she remained on the agency’s books for years afterwards. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the capital’s flagship pro-Israel think tank, gave her its Scholar-Statesman medal; the institute’s own transcript records her greeting its director as ‘my brother in arms’. And on 18 February this year, ten days before the first bombs fell, she stood at the Geneva Summit once more, accepted its Courage Award on behalf of the heroes of Iran, and asked the hall to bring Europe’s leaders together to plan for an Iran after the Islamic Republic. None of this was hidden. That is the point. What the documents describe is an economy in plain sight: attention as the labour, platforms as the wage. Her politics sit squarely inside the exiled opposition, and the opposition’s one attempt at unity shows how she operates within it. In February 2023, at the height of the Mahsa movement, she shared a Georgetown stage with Reza Pahlavi and a handful of others. An alliance was announced, a charter followed, and within months the arrangement had come apart. The public accounts of the collapse differ. My own reading is that two principals, each built for the microphone, could not share one. I examined his half of that temperament last week. This is hers. The War She Never Wanted Then the war came, and the record became a sequence. On the first day she was among the exiled figures calling for the attacks to continue, and viewers reposted footage she had circulated of a strike near Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s house, asking why the screams of the neighbours had not detained her. By last summer a New Lines essay could already describe her as functioning as ‘a mouthpiece for Netanyahu’. On 5 March she stood in the Spanish Congress as a guest of the opposition bench and told Pedro Sánchez, a prime minister whose offence was refusing his bases to the operation, that he stood with the murderers and had dared to use the wounded bodies of her people as ammunition in his domestic quarrels. In the same room she defended the strikes without a hedge: approve of the American president or not, he had done the right thing. The Spanish press carried her in translation, so the wording travels loosely; the position does not. There is a precedent for what happened next. In June 2025, during the twelve-day war, she amplified Israeli evacuation orders to Iranians, took a storm of criticism, and pivoted within days to an open letter telling Netanyahu to spare the people of Iran; a BBC Persian correspondent drily pronounced that Netanyahu had lost her. The same hinge swung this spring. As the casualty count climbed and the water failed in Hormozgan, she began insisting she had never championed a military attack on her country. Viewers did what viewers now do. They produced the clips, dated and side by side, Madrid included. The inconsistency is not incidental to the style; it is the style. A performer holds the position the room rewards, and the room keeps changing. A correction of my own, before the close. When I wrote last week about Reza Pahlavi’s bookkeeping of grief, I treated the habit as a monarchist defect. That was too narrow. The habit belongs to an industry, and the industry has more than one star. She quarrelled with the prince’s camp and kept the business model: the same wounded bodies, itemised for whichever audience is paying that season. Iranians inside the country film what is done to them at the risk of prison, and are paid in nothing. She films herself beside a bicycle. The tears are hers, and some of them may be true. The stage, the lights and the wage bill are other people’s, and whoever pays for a theatre has a say in the play. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS
