KNOW Stands with the Iranian People

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MARCH 2, 2026

KALAMAZOO - The recent U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran are an indefensible crime against the Iranian people, the principle of sovereignty, and international law, resulting in widespread death, destruction, and chaos across the region. These illegal military interventions are not defensive or ‘pre-emptive’ measures. They constitute a war of aggression that threatens further escalation, regional destabilization, enormous human casualties and potential global conflict. What has been presented as a humanitarian justification for unprovoked aggression is a sick joke when measured against the reality experienced by civilians on the ground.

During the first 48 hours, the US and Israel dropped thousands of munitions intensively on Tehran and across 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces, as well as in Lebanon, with retaliatory strikes coming from Iran against Israel and US military installations and targets in Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Jordan. Hundreds of Iranians have already been killed, nearly 750 injured, and the Iranian supreme leader Khamenei was assassinated in an airstrike. The deadliest single incident occurred in Minab, where a bomb dropped on an elementary school for girls killed at least 148 children, one of the largest massacres of children in world history. In Southern Iran, another airstrike killed almost 20 members of a women's volleyball team in Lamerd.

These attacks, calculated with the world's most sophisticated military technology, should make clear that this violent western intervention is not for the protection or liberation of Iranian women or civilians. It is, like in Gaza, for the destabilization and destruction of a people that demand sovereignty and resist occupation and vassal statehood. Baseless accusations of an imagined Iranian nuclear threat have been intentionally repeated by Israeli and US leaders for decades to manufacture consent for toppling a state that has long remained isolated in its non-compliance with western economic and political interests.

These strikes were not launched in response to any imminent threat to the United States, but with explicit and declared intentions of regime change. History shows where this tactic leads. Iraq was sold as liberation. Libya was framed as protection. Afghanistan was described as a path to democracy. Instead, these interventions resulted in civil collapse and fragmentation, long-term suffering, generational trauma, regressive restructuring, and client states vulnerable to western imperial exploitation and extraction.

To understand the gravity of this moment, we must situate it within the fraught history of U.S.-Iran relations. In 1953 the CIA and the UK's intelligence bureau MI6 orchestrated a coup that overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran's oil industry, which up to then had been financially controlled by British Petrolum (BP). The coup restored international control of Iran's oil, reinstalled the Shah and entrenched decades of authoritarian rule backed by U.S. support, including the empowerment of SAVAK, a security apparatus notorious for repression and torture. The memory of that intervention is not distant history in Iran. It is a foundational political memory.

The Iranian Revolution that followed in 1979 took shape from opposition to decades of foreign domination, exploitation, and domestic authoritarianism. The Shah was deposed and exiled, the monarchy ended, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded under Ayatollah Khomeini, succeeded after a decade by supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Iran's oil, which makes up more than 10% of all reserves on earth, was once again nationalized and has remained so to this day. Iran remains the only sovereign state in the middle east with no US military bases.

For nearly fifty years under Iran's current government, its relationship with western powers has been defined by cycles of hostility: U.S. backing of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by a U.S. naval vessel in 1988 that killed 290 Iranian civilians, brutal sanctions that have targeted Iran's economy and civilian population, and the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was followed by a "maximum pressure" campaign designed to cripple Iran economically. The 2020 US assassination of General Soleimani, Iran's second ranking official under Khamenei, became an inflection point amid decades of US attempts to destabilize a regime that the US and Israel could not manage to dominate and control. And it is imperative to note that the Iranian government has consistently contributed more material and ideological support to the Palestinian resistance in their ongoing struggle for liberation than all other nations.

Many Iranians are deeply critical of their government, but are terrified of its collapse. Decades of economic mismanagement, repression of dissent, and political exclusion have alienated generations. But Iranians are not naïve about the consequences of western imperial intervention. They have watched invasion, occupation, genocide and the installation of puppet regimes in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan. A bad government may be survivable. State collapse often is not.

What is unfolding now must also be understood in the broader context of impunity. In Gaza, the world is witnessing years-long full-scale bombardment of dense civilian population centers, mass slaughter of disproportionately children, repeated ceasefire violations, and international institutions responding with rhetoric and paralysis. When an empire perpetrates unchecked crimes against humanity for years on end, criminal state violence becomes the status quo. At a rapidly accelerating pace, Israel and the US have normalized collective punishment against civilian populations in Gaza, Venezuela, Cuba—whether through bombardment, invasion, siege or sanctions that strangle entire populations—eroding what little remains of the guardrails of international law that were designed to restrain the depravity of war.

We need not to defend or critique a sovereign government in order to reject US imperial militarism which invokes “freedom” to justify violent interventionism, destabilization, manipulation and resource theft. Freedom delivered through drone strikes and regime collapse has repeatedly meant devastation for the people of that land. This war does not serve Iranian civilians. It does not advance human rights. It expands the architecture of violence that has already destabilized the region. When governments can bomb, sanction, and escalate without accountability, the absence of consequence becomes permission.

The US and Israel's illegal campaign of terror against Iran is neither defensive nor humanitarian. It is a deadly campaign whose victims are children, families, and communities whose lives are being shattered. The bombing of a girls’ school, the mounting civilian casualties, and the explicit framing of regime change make that plain. We condemn this illegal war of aggression that risks widening an already catastrophic regional crisis. We stand with the Iranian people and reject any justification that cloaks this violence in the language of protection. We call on you to join us.

HANDS OFF IRAN. HANDS OFF GAZA. HANDS OFF LEBANON.

Sunday | March 8 | 12pm - 1pm
Kalamazoo Federal Building
410 W Michigan Ave

Bring your signs. Bring your friends. 

Signed,

Kalamazoo Nonviolent Opponents of War