A Question for Maryam Blumenthal

Preface: On the Joy and the Grief

Let us begin where clarity demands: Ali Khamenei is dead, and we are not sorry.

For forty-seven years, first as a shadowy figure in the revolutionary apparatus and then as Supreme Leader, Khamenei presided over one of the most suffocating theocratic systems in modern history. The executions of 1988. The crushing of the Green Movement. The bullets fired at young women whose crime was removing a piece of cloth from their heads. The torture chambers of Evin, the rapes in Kahrizak, the unmarked graves in Khavaran. When the news came on February 28 that he had been killed, many of us felt something we had not felt in decades: relief.

That relief is real, and no one should be asked to apologize for it.

But relief is not a legal framework. Joy is not a justification for everything that accompanied Khamenei's death that day. On the same February 28, 148 schoolgirls were killed in Minab. Across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah, 201 people died and 747 were injured on the first day alone. The question before us is not whether Khamenei deserved his fate—he did—but whether the military operation that ended his life should be shielded from legal scrutiny simply because we are glad he is gone.

That question, apparently, makes Hamburg Senator Maryam Blumenthal uncomfortable.

I. The Video: What Blumenthal Said

On February 28, 2026—the same day the strikes killed more than two hundred people—Maryam Blumenthal, Senator for Science, Research, Equality, and Districts in the Hamburg Senate, and an alternate member of the German Bundesrat, published a video addressing human rights organizations, international law experts, and Middle East scholars.

Her message contained four core arguments:

1. The situation is "too complex" for standard international law frameworks to apply. Those who cannot accommodate this complexity "should perhaps not discuss this situation at all."
2. Iranians are celebrating in the streets, which serves as moral proof that the military intervention is justified and welcome.
3. Human rights organizations and legal experts should "stop now"—their analyses "just don't fit" this particular situation.
4. She speaks as an Iranian-German with authentic knowledge of what "the people" want, positioning herself as a more legitimate voice than institutional experts.

The key passage deserves to be quoted directly:

"I want to say to you, please stop now. It just doesn't fit. [...] If you cannot include the complexity of this situation in your analysis, then you should perhaps not discuss this situation at all."

Let us be precise about what this is. A sitting government official—a senator who holds an alternate seat in the Bundesrat, one of Germany's two legislative chambers—publicly instructed human rights institutions and legal experts to cease their work. Not to refine it, not to broaden it, not to consider additional perspectives. To stop. To be quiet. To accept that in this case, the rules do not apply.

II. Who Is Maryam Blumenthal? — A Political Biography

Maryam Blumenthal was born in Tehran in 1985. Her family fled Iran when she was two years old, arriving in Germany in 1987 as asylum seekers. She grew up in Bad Schwartau, then Viersen, before settling in Hamburg in 1998. Between 2005 and 2015, she studied education science, psychology, and ethnology at the University of Hamburg. She worked as a schoolteacher before entering politics.

Her political career has been rapid and, by most measures, admirable. She joined the Green Party's district politics in 2014, won a seat in the Hamburg Parliament in 2020, served as co-chair of the Hamburg Greens from 2021 to 2025, and was appointed Senator for Science in 2025—making her an alternate member of the Bundesrat.

In October 2022, during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, Blumenthal delivered a tearful speech in the Hamburg Parliament. She called the Iranian regime "terrorists." She demanded a halt to deportations. She organized solidarity events for the Iranian protesters. These were courageous acts, and they mattered.

This is precisely what makes her February 28 video so devastating. The same person who once wept for Iranians killed by the regime now tells the institutions that documented those killings to shut up.

Two additional facts are essential for understanding the full picture.

First: In a 2021 interview with Klönschnack, a Hamburg political magazine, Blumenthal stated clearly: "Military force must always be the absolute last resort." On February 28, 2026, she did not ask whether all other options had been exhausted. She did not even acknowledge the question.

Second: As reported by journalist Shoan Vaisi in nd-aktuell, in an article titled "Hier Brandmauer, dort Monarchisten" (Firewall Here, Monarchists There), Blumenthal has explicitly stated: "Ich unterstütze den Demokraten Reza Pahlavi"—"I support the democrat Reza Pahlavi." We will return to this.

III. The Danger of "Exceptionalism" — When Complexity Becomes a Weapon

Blumenthal's central argument rests on the word "complex." The situation, she argues, is too complex for existing legal and moral frameworks. Those who cannot accommodate this complexity should remove themselves from the conversation.

Let us parse this carefully.

International humanitarian law was not designed for simple situations. Simple situations do not need legal frameworks. You do not need the Geneva Conventions to adjudicate a playground argument. The entire architecture of international law—from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the laws of armed conflict—exists precisely because the situations it governs are complex. War is complex. Occupation is complex. The relationship between a tyrannical government and the civilians under its rule is complex. That is the point.

When a politician argues that a particular situation is "too complex" for these frameworks, she is not making a sophisticated analytical claim. She is making an exemption claim. She is saying: in this case, the rules should not apply.

We have heard this argument before.

Iraq, 2003. The situation was "complex." Saddam Hussein was a tyrant—he genuinely was. His removal was presented as liberation. Twenty-three years later, Iraq remains a shattered state. The International Crisis Group's assessment is unambiguous: the intervention failed to produce stability, democratization, or security. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are dead.

Libya, 2011. The situation was "complex." Gaddafi was a dictator. The intervention was authorized by the UN Security Council—unlike the Iran strikes. And yet. The Belfer Center at Harvard concluded that the intervention's aftermath demonstrated "how not to intervene." Libya descended into civil war, open-air slave markets emerged, and the country's institutions collapsed entirely.

In every case, "complexity" served the same function: it was invoked not to deepen analysis but to suspend it. Not to apply more rigorous legal standards but to apply none at all.

Noam Chomsky identified this mechanism decades ago:

"The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their inability to organize their own affairs."

And here we arrive at what Blumenthal's video does not mention. In her account of February 28, there are dancing Iranians and there is the death of a tyrant. What is absent is everything else: the 148 schoolgirls killed in Minab. The 201 total dead. The 747 injured. The strikes on Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. The retaliatory strikes across the Gulf.

She mentions only the dancing. The dead children do not appear in her "complexity."

IV. The Universalism of Human Rights vs. Selective Morality

"I want to say to you, please stop now. It just doesn't fit."

Consider what this sentence means when spoken by a senator. Not a private citizen expressing an opinion on social media. An alternate member of the Bundesrat—one of Germany's two legislative chambers, the body through which German states participate in federal legislation. A person who swore an oath to uphold the Basic Law, which in Article 1 declares: "Human dignity shall be inviolable."

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." There is no complexity exception. There is no clause that reads: "unless the people of the targeted country dislike their government, in which case the above does not apply." The Geneva Conventions do not contain an exemption for situations where some civilians celebrate while others are being killed.

What Blumenthal is doing—whether she recognizes it or not—is a form of what Umberto Eco, in his essay "Ur-Fascism," described as selective populism: the leader (or, in this case, the politician) claims to interpret the will of "the people," while defining "the people" as only those who agree. Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works, describes this as one of the core mechanisms of fascist politics: "the leader claims to be the sole authentic voice of the people."

This is not to call Blumenthal a fascist. It is to say that the rhetorical technique she employs—gatekeeping who may speak about human rights based on whether their conclusions align with her preferred narrative—is a technique with a documented history and documented consequences.

Norway's Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide stated that the strikes were "not in line with international law." Belgium's Foreign Minister said the same. The European Journal of International Law published an analysis titled "Manifestly Illegal." The Conversation published a piece by legal scholars: "Neither Preemptive Nor Legal." SBS News surveyed international law experts who reached similar conclusions.

Should they all "stop now"? Should the Foreign Minister of Norway "be quiet"?

Michael Ignatieff, in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, identified three forms of American exceptionalism in international law: exemptionalism (supporting rules but exempting oneself), double standards (applying them to others but not allies), and legal isolationism (refusing engagement with international legal institutions). Blumenthal's position exhibits all three. She supports human rights when the Islamic Republic violates them. She demands their suspension when American and Israeli forces do the same.

Edward Said would recognize this immediately. In Orientalism, he documented how Western discourse positions certain regions as fundamentally "other"—so different that universal categories do not apply. When Blumenthal declares the situation "too complex" for standard legal analysis, she is, in effect, saying that Iran exists beyond the boundary of universal law. That the people there do not require the same protections. That their deaths can be subsumed into a narrative of liberation without scrutiny.

V. The Paradox of the Beneficiary — Asylum, Republic, and Selective Memory

Every opportunity in Maryam Blumenthal's life was made possible by the international legal framework she now tells others to disregard.

She arrived in Germany in 1987, a two-year-old refugee from the Islamic Republic. The right that received her is codified in Article 16a of the German Basic Law: "Persons persecuted on political grounds shall have the right of asylum." That right does not exist in a vacuum. It exists because of the international legal architecture built after 1945—the same architecture of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the Refugee Convention of 1951. These are not abstract documents. They are the reason Maryam Blumenthal grew up in Bad Schwartau instead of in Tehran under theocratic rule.

Hannah Arendt understood this better than anyone. In her 1943 essay "We Refugees," she wrote about the fundamental precariousness of statelessness: "We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings."

Arendt's deeper insight, developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, was that human rights are meaningless without political communities that enforce them. The "right to have rights," as she called it, depends on belonging to a functioning political order. This is precisely why bombing a country into rubble does not produce freedom. Bombing destroys political communities. It creates more refugees. It does not create the institutions that refugees need in order to become citizens again.

Blumenthal's own biography is proof of this. She did not become a senator because someone bombed Tehran. She became a senator because Germany's constitutional order—rooted in international law—granted her asylum, education, and political participation. For a beneficiary of that system to tell its guardians to "be quiet" is not merely inconsistent. It is a betrayal of the principles that saved her life.

VI. "I Support the Democrat Reza Pahlavi" — The Monarchist Question

In his nd-aktuell investigation "Hier Brandmauer, dort Monarchisten", journalist Shoan Vaisi examined a phenomenon among German politicians of Iranian origin: the maintenance of an anti-far-right "firewall" (Brandmauer) in domestic German politics while simultaneously supporting Reza Pahlavi's monarchist movement abroad.

Blumenthal is quoted explicitly: "Ich unterstütze den Demokraten Reza Pahlavi."

The framing—"the democrat Reza Pahlavi"—is itself a political act. It presents as settled fact what is, at best, a contested claim. Pahlavi is the son of the last Shah of Iran, whose regime was overthrown in 1979 after decades of authoritarian rule, secret police (SAVAK), and political repression. Pahlavi has never held elected office, never led a democratic organization, never submitted himself to any form of democratic accountability. Calling him a "democrat" is an assertion, not a description.

More troublingly, the Pahlavi movement's documented behavior contradicts the "democrat" label that Blumenthal endorses. As we have documented in previous articles on this site, Pahlavi's supporters have chanted "Death to the Left" at demonstrations. They have attacked the graves of Iranian writers and intellectuals. They have engaged in coordinated harassment campaigns against dissenting voices. These are not the actions of a democratic movement. They are the actions of an authoritarian movement that has not yet obtained power.

The inconsistency is striking. In domestic German politics, the Green Party maintains a Brandmauer—a firewall—against the AfD, a right-wing populist party. The principle is that certain political forces are so dangerous to democratic norms that no cooperation with them is possible. And yet, when it comes to Iran, a Green senator supports a dynastic figure whose movement exhibits many of the same characteristics that the Brandmauer is designed to contain.

Petra Kelly, the founder of the German Green Party, built the movement on the principles of nonviolence, grassroots democracy, and ecological justice. She opposed all forms of militarism and authoritarian power. The idea that a Green politician would openly support a monarchist figure—the heir to a dynasty—would have been incomprehensible to Kelly. But the Green Party of 2026 is not the Green Party of Petra Kelly. We will return to this transformation.

VII. War Is Not a Dance — The Weaponization of Social Media

Let us establish what actually happened on February 28, 2026.

The United States and Israel launched joint military strikes on Iran in what was designated Operation Epic Fury (US) and Operation Roaring Lion (Israel). Strikes hit Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed. On the first day, 201 people were confirmed dead and 747 injured. In Minab, an airstrike hit two schools, killing 148 girls. Retaliatory strikes were launched across the Persian Gulf region.

Yes, some Iranians celebrated. Of course they did. After forty-seven years of theocratic oppression, the death of the man who embodied that oppression is cause for relief. No one disputes this.

But TikTok videos of dancing are not a referendum. They are not a popular mandate. They are not legal authorization for military action. And they are certainly not evidence that every bomb dropped was justified and every death was acceptable.

We have seen this before. On April 9, 2003, the world watched as Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Firdos Square, Baghdad. The images were broadcast as proof of liberation, evidence that the Iraqi people welcomed their "liberators." Later analysis revealed that the crowd was small—numbering in the dozens, not thousands—and that the event was partly staged by US forces. The "liberation" that followed cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.

Selective use of social media footage is a documented propaganda technique. CNN's geolocated video analysis of February 28 showed a chaotic information environment in which celebratory footage circulated alongside images of destroyed neighborhoods, injured children, and grieving families. Cherry-picking the celebratory videos while ignoring the destruction is not "including complexity"—it is the opposite. It is denial.

When Blumenthal holds up the dancing as moral proof, she is doing exactly what she accuses others of: reducing a complex situation to a simple narrative. Her narrative is: the people are happy, therefore the bombing is good. The narrative she rejects is: the bombing killed civilians, therefore it requires legal scrutiny. Only one of these is actually complex.

VIII. From Petra Kelly to Annalena Baerbock — The Green Party's Betrayal of Its Foundations

The German Green Party was founded in 1980 on four pillars: ecological wisdom, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence. Its founding figure, Petra Kelly, was uncompromising: "We should have no army" and "An ecological and demilitarized Europe" were not slogans for her—they were constitutional principles.

The party's transformation into a pro-interventionist force is one of the most remarkable ideological reversals in European political history.

Kosovo, 1999. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a Green, led Germany into its first combat mission since World War II. At a party congress, a protester hit him with a paint bomb. The moment was decisive: it marked the break between the Greens' pacifist identity and their new role as a governing party willing to use military force.

Afghanistan, 2001. The Greens voted to support the invasion. The party that once opposed NATO membership was now deploying troops under NATO command.

Libya, 2011. The Greens pushed harder for intervention than other German parties, criticizing the Merkel government for abstaining from the UN Security Council vote authorizing military action.

Ukraine, 2022. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock announced a "180-degree turn" in German foreign policy. Economy Minister Robert Habeck called for weapons deliveries. The Greens, the party of peace, became the most vocal advocates of military support in the German government.

Now, in 2026, a Green senator celebrates foreign military strikes on a sovereign nation without even acknowledging that 148 children were killed on the same day. The transformation from peace party to war party is complete.

As Jacobin observed, the contradiction is revealing: if the principle is that self-defending nations deserve support, then it should apply equally to Yemenis, Kurds, and Palestinians. The selective application suggests either an unconscious hierarchy of human value or an alignment with ruling-class interests that the party once existed to challenge. The Green European Journal asked the question directly: "Are Green Parties Still Pacifist?" The answer, by 2026, is unambiguous.

IX. The Silence Command and Epistemic Injustice

The philosopher Miranda Fricker, in her book Epistemic Injustice (Oxford University Press, 2007), identified two forms of epistemic harm. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker's credibility is reduced because of prejudice against their identity. Hermeneutical injustice occurs when a group lacks the interpretive resources to make sense of their own experience—or, more relevant here, when the interpretive frameworks available to them are declared inadequate by those in power.

Blumenthal's video enacts both forms.

When she tells international law experts that their frameworks "just don't fit," she is committing hermeneutical injustice: declaring that the tools developed over decades to analyze exactly this type of situation are insufficient, without offering any alternative except silence. When she positions herself as an authentic voice of "the people" and reduces critics to outsiders who lack the necessary understanding, she is committing testimonial injustice: asserting that their expertise is less valid than her emotional connection to the events.

Consider the practical implications of her standard. If we accept that international legal analysis "doesn't fit" this situation, who gets disqualified? International law scholars. Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International. The United Nations. Anti-war activists. Iranians inside Iran who oppose both the Islamic Republic and the bombing of their schools. Norwegian and Belgian foreign ministers. The European Journal of International Law.

Who remains? Only those who agree with Blumenthal.

The "silence command" is not about expertise or complexity. It is about control. It is an attempt to narrow the field of acceptable discourse to a single position: the bombing was good, the dancing proves it, and anyone who raises questions is either naive or complicit.

The institutions she tells to "stop now" are not strangers to Iran. The UN Human Rights Council's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran heard testimony from more than 300 people and collected over 38,000 pieces of evidence documenting the Islamic Republic's crimes. These are the same institutions whose work provided the evidentiary foundation for Blumenthal's own tearful parliamentary speech in 2022. Without their documentation of Iranian regime violence, her speech would have had no factual basis.

She used their work when it served her narrative. She tells them to be silent when it does not.

X. Conclusion: Protecting the Principles, Not the Persona

The question for Maryam Blumenthal is not complicated. It is, in fact, the simplest question in democratic politics: do you believe that the principles you invoke apply to everyone, or only when it is convenient?

If a politician believes she is "above the principles" because the situation is "complex," she becomes a threat to the democratic order she claims to serve. The entire structure of constitutional governance rests on the idea that no one—no politician, no state, no military alliance—is exempt from the rules. The moment you carve an exception, you have not solved the complexity. You have destroyed the framework.

The honest position is this: Khamenei's death is a relief. The manner in which it occurred—in a military operation that killed 201 people including 148 schoolchildren on day one, conducted without UN authorization, in violation of international law as assessed by multiple independent legal scholars—raises profound legal and moral questions. Both of these things can be true simultaneously.

That is actual complexity. It is the complexity that Blumenthal claims to champion but refuses to practice.

Senator Blumenthal: the system that gave you asylum, education, and political power is the same system you are now asking others to dismantle. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a menu from which you select the clauses you like. The Geneva Conventions are not optional when the victims are from a country whose government you despise. Article 16a of the Basic Law, the article that made your life possible, exists because people in 1949 understood that universal principles must be universal—or they are nothing.

You sit in the Bundesrat. You hold power in one of the most advanced democracies in the world. That power was given to you by a system that believes in the rule of law. You cannot use that seat to tell the guardians of international law to be quiet. Not without becoming exactly the kind of politician that system was designed to prevent.

The Iranian people deserve both liberation from tyranny and protection under international law. Accepting one without the other is the formula that produced Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The people who paid the price for those "complex" situations were not senators in Hamburg. They were schoolchildren in Fallujah, in Sirte, in Kunduz.

And now, in Minab.