Former ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said that Washington should step up its support of the growing protest movement in Iran, saying that the demonstrations that have unfolded over the past several days are unprecedented.
“These protests are very different than anything we’ve seen before,” she said responding to National Review’s question during a press conference. “They’re much more aggressive. They’re much more upset about what the regime is doing, and they’re fighting back.” Haley made the comments just before she appeared at the United Against a Nuclear Iran annual summit in New York City, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly where Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi spoke this morning.
The death of a 22-year old Iranian woman in the custody of Iran’s morality police on Friday has sparked a protest movement that has spread to multiple cities and prompted a government crackdown. Mahsah Amini was arrested for wearing a hijab the wrong way, and eyewitnesses say that officers beat her in a police van after her arrest last Tuesday. Since then, demonstrators have clashed with Iranian security forces, and Iranian officials claim that seven people have died. An independent report from a Kurdish human-rights groups says that security forces killed seven demonstrators, per Reuters. Meanwhile, the authorities have blocked access to certain social-media platforms, such as Instagram.
In late 2019, Iranian forces crushed protests that had been sparked by a fuel-price hike, a crackdown which resulted in 3,000 deaths by some estimates.
Haley said that the Biden administration should undertake efforts to restore internet access, or “anything that will allow the Iranian voices to be heard.” She added that “we need to make sure that we start sanctioning people that are responsible for anything that led to the brutality of what happened,” and that “we shouldn’t consider getting into a deal with anyone that treats their people this way.”
PHOTOS: Iran Protests
President Biden acknowledged the protests in his address to the U.N. General Assembly today, saying that the U.S. stands with the “brave women of Iran,” and several administration officials have condemned Iranian authorities’ actions leading up and in response to the protests. Still, the White House hasn’t shown any signs of reconsidering, over Amini’s death, its ongoing negotiations to reenter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Haley is a harsh critic of the Biden administration’s continued efforts on this front, but she allowed for one situation in which she would support U.S. reentry into the deal: “The only way we should consider an Iran deal again is if Israel and the Arab countries are at the table because they face the threat every day. It doesn’t make sense if you’re doing this just with America and Europeans.”