'Iranians for Trump' movement emerges as Biden and Harris appease Tehran
The most-liked Persian-language tweet of all time comes from an unlikely source.The winner is not Ayatollah Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s octogenarian Supreme Leader who has become a regular poster on X of virulently anti-Israel, antisemitic and anti-Western content. The unlikely winner, in fact, is closer to home.
On January 11, 2020, former President Donald Trump tweeted in Farsi his condolences to the “brave and suffering people of Iran” after regime forces shot down Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s airport, killing all 176 people onboard. The fateful flight, carrying mostly Iranian, Canadian and Ukrainian passengers, took place just hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on Iraqi bases housing American soldiers.Iranian authorities would later concede that the commercial airliner was misidentified as a cruise missile. At the time of Trump’s tweet, which garnered more than 277,000 likes, Iranians had flooded the streets of Iran to protest the regime’s targeting of a commercial airliner and called for the ousting of Khamenei.
“I have stood with you since the beginning of my presidency and my government will continue to stand with you,” Trump pledged to the Iranian people.Since then, scores of Iranian-Americans have returned the favor, praising Trump for understanding the plight of ordinary Iranians and for his aggressive stance toward Tehran’s clerical leaders. Four years on and with the US presidential election less than two months away, a new Iranian-American movement launched in early September to help bring Trump back to the White House. The movement, Iranians for Trump came about because “there was no established coalition to represent the voices of the Iranian diaspora,” Sarah Raviani, co-founder and English-language spokesperson of the movement, told The Post. Raviani added that most Iranians who had fled from their native Iran around the time of the 1979 Islam...