A Lebanese opposition figure has urged his government to expel Iran’s envoy in Beirut after senior Iranian official Ali Larijani reaffirmed Tehran’s backing for Hezbollah, deepening the controversy over Iran’s role in Lebanon.
Milani told Eye for Iran podcast that Iranian women are at the heart of today’s opposition.
“The Iranian woman who decides to walk in the streets of Tehran, Shiraz, Bandar Abbas, without a veil… that’s the most potent opposition to this regime,” he said.
Despite intensified crackdowns, women continue to defy compulsory hijab laws.
Public opinion surveys point in the same direction. A poll conducted last summer involving more than 77,000 people found that a majority reject the Islamic Republic and favor either regime change or a structural transition.
Milani said the most authentic expressions of opposition are found in cultural acts, not exile politics.
“It is the manifesto of the future of Iran,” he said.
Milani highlighted a recent production at Stanford University by acclaimed playwright Bahram Beyzaie, a reinterpretation of the revolution through the eyes of women. The play drew widespread interest inside Iran, with audiences requesting online access, while receiving little notice outside.
Awakening from a 'nightmare'
“Iranians have woken up from this nightmare,” Milani said referring to the Islamic Republic, “but now they need to get rid of the source of this nightmare, which is dogmatism, which is religious domination, which is velayat-e faqih. (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist)"
Milani’s remarks come as Iran faces one of its harshest crackdowns in decades. Rights groups say more than 1,000 people have been executed in the past year, many in public.
In Isfahan, authorities have begun ordering the confiscation of Baha’i homes and assets — a move the community’s representatives described to Iran International as “economic strangulation.”
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of labor activist Sharifeh Mohammadi, and women’s rights defender Hasti Amiri has been sentenced to three years in prison after protesting executions and appearing unveiled in public.
The long shadow of 1953
Milani argues that Iranians have too often been trapped in emotional narratives of the 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, casting the monarchy and the Islamic Republic in black-and-white terms.
"The Shah was, at worst, an authoritarian leader. At best, he was a modernizer,” Milani said. “This regime, at best, is a pseudo-totalitarian regime. And at worst, totalitarian.”
The difference, Milani said, is that while the monarchy did not attempt to reshape private lives, the Islamic Republic has tried to engineer a “new man and woman,” reducing women to second-class citizens and criminalizing dissent.
Milani argued that younger Iranians are less interested in “black and white” narratives about 1953 that toppled the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, and more focused on freedom, equality, and dignity in their daily lives.
The Islamic Republic has long invoked the 1953 coup to justify hostility toward the United States, while downplaying the fact that Mosaddegh’s supporters were outlawed after 1979.
In 2023, the CIA for the first time described its role in ousting Mosaddegh as “undemocratic.” Yet Milani says the coup cannot be reduced to CIA intrigue alone, arguing that Iran’s clergy were decisive in turning against Mosaddegh.
Iran's future in people's hands
Seven decades on, he believes the lesson is clear: Iran’s future will not be decided by nostalgia or in-exile politics but by the resilience of ordinary citizens.
“The future of Iran,” Milani said, “is in the hands of those women, those teachers, those citizens who refuse to live by this ideology. They are the opposition to this regime.”
“Iranian society is more represented by intellectuals who used to be religious and now go and kiss the feet of a Baha’i and say, I’m sorry for everything we have done to you,” he added. “That’s the future of Iran. Those women are the future of Iran. They are the opposition to this regime.”
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Elie Mahfoud, head of the Change Movement, said on X that Larijani’s comments amounted to “shamelessly operating Hezbollah’s militia” and called on the Lebanese government to “immediately cut relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and expel its ambassador and diplomatic staff.”
The remarks came after Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said in an interview with Supreme Leader’s website that Hezbollah was created by Lebanese themselves in response to Israeli occupation, but acknowledged Iran had provided and would continue to provide support.
“We do not deny that we helped; we say openly that we helped and we will help,” Larijani said.
He described Hezbollah as “a national asset for Lebanon,” stressing that the group had rebuilt after suffering losses and retained strong resolve among its younger members.
“I saw their leadership and their youth determined,” he said, citing his recent visit to Beirut where he met Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem.
Larijani rejected accusations that Tehran controls Hezbollah, saying the group acts independently.
“They are connected to us because they are our brothers, not because they take orders,” he said. He added Iran respected Lebanon’s sovereignty, saying: “Our approach is not to impose. We believe Lebanon’s government must be strong, just as Iraq’s and Saudi Arabia’s should be strong.”
The interview followed Larijani’s trip to Beirut earlier this month, which drew official protests from Lebanese leaders who told him no group should bear arms outside the authority of the state. President Joseph Aoun said at the time that reliance on foreign backing was unacceptable.
Lebanon’s newspaper Nidaa al-Watanreported this week that Hezbollah had become “a tool of Iranian influence,” warning that the movement’s weapons threatened both national sovereignty and regional stability.
The paper described Lebanon as “a hostage to regional power struggles” and accused Iran of using Hezbollah to project influence beyond the country’s borders.
Hezbollah, founded in 1982 with help from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, is Lebanon’s most powerful military force and has repeatedly fought Israel.
The Lebanese cabinet earlier this month ordered the army to devise plans to disarm the group, prompting sharp criticism from Tehran.
On Thursday, Lebanon began implementing the plan to disarm Palestinian factions in refugee camps, starting with the handover of weapons from Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut to the army, the prime minister’s office said.
The move, part of a wider push to establish a state monopoly on arms under a US-backed truce with Israel, is expected to extend to other camps in the coming weeks.
Larijani dismissed such moves, arguing Hezbollah’s arms were the product of Lebanese resistance. “People will not surrender. Why should they? To whom?” he said. “Hezbollah emerged when Israel occupied Beirut. That history cannot be erased.”
Earlier in August, Hezbollah leader Qassem warned that moves to strip the group of its weapons risk plunging Lebanon into war, vowing that the Iran-backed movement would not surrender its arsenal despite a recent government decision to disarm it.
