I’m issuing a reminder once again to please say “Islamic Republic,” not Iran. This is the title they gave themselves. I want you to understand why this is so important - First, nobody ever refers to a terrorist regime by the country or province they occupy. People don’t say “Afghanistan,” they say “the Taliban.” They don’t say “Palestine,” they say “Hamas.” They don’t say “Lebanon,” they say Hezbollah. It’s understood that it’s harmful to refer to the country, because you then implicate an entire nation of people by association. This has damaging long term effects. Second, and most importantly, we are talking about Iranians, who not only actively oppose this regime, but have been paying with their blood to protest it for 45 years, being lynched, tortured, and raped on a daily basis in doing so. Haven’t they earned the simple respect of not besmirching our name, by using “Iran” not to refer to a nation of freedom fighters, but a terrorist mafia that we don’t identify with and actively rise up against? When Iranians are being killed en masse to rid themselves of this murderous regime, is it too much to ask to ask to just afford them the basic respect of not calling those same terrorists “Iran”? We have a lot of work ahead of us as a people, and we do not need everything we’ve fought for—as well as all of our glorious, precocious, expansive, and majestic history—to be tarnished through this painful sullying of our name. We are not the terrorists, and they are not us. They are the Islamic Republic, we are Iran.
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