January 24, 2020

Omid Nouripour: the avant-garde voice of reason

topic:	Refugees and Asylum
located:	Germany, Iran, USA
editor:	Gurmeet Singh

Omid Nouripour is the type of person who infuriates and embarrasses bigots; a refugee from a developing nation who is more liberal than many in his adopted home, he has made a lot of people not only look silly, but immoral.

Nouripour was born in Iran and moved to Germany in his early teens with his parents. Since then, he has become a vocal member of Germany’s Green Party. He has often featured on videos and newscasts standing up to the far-right AfD inside the German Bundestag.

Now he’s posted a video directly to Instagram, where he describes the current cynical approach to Human Rights by the AfD.

He describes AfD members “going to Damascus to meet with Bashar Al-Assad, to tell him what a great job he’s doing, so that they can have Syrians return to their war-torn country”. Point being is that the party claims that there is no human rights crisis, that Syria is a safe country, and the refugees to Germany should leave.

He goes on to call the party “Nazis” and says their main objective is to have “every foreigner thrown out of Germany”, including refugees.

But this particular video isn’t a simple calling out of racism and cynicism. Nouripour is highly critical of the Iranian regime and draws a parallel between the AfD and various Iranian regimes. He compares the AfD’s position on the Holocaust as similar to that of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former President of Iran who was infamously unstable. What’s more, Nouripour goes on to criticise the actions of the current regime and calls for more support behind the nuclear deal. In his own words, he hopes “Iran and Saudi Arabia never get their hands on a nuclear weapon”.

In doing so, he calls out the cynical approach to international politics and human rights across the board: there are human rights abuses in Iran and the Middle East, and it is right to call them out. To adopt a position of silence may be desirable, given that on the other side of the crisis is President Trump, but doing so only contributes to the AfD’s tactics of claiming that ‘everything is OK’ in the Middle East.

Hannah Arendt once called refugees the “vanguard of their peoples”, in that, they break new ground for their communities, and demonstrate how their communities might live. But she goes on to talk about how refugees represent an avant-garde – in that their presence demonstrates to the host nations what it actually believes. Nouripour is a kind of avant-garde figure. By speaking out, his background, his presence, his political status show both Germany and Iran what they actually believe. Do these countries believe in human rights, or not? Is he taken seriously, or is he just another immigrant complaining?

By the end of the video, it’s unclear as to whom Nouripour is labelling Nazis – the AfD, or the Iranian regime? Maybe both. The point is clear and brave: you don’t need to be silent on one issue to stand up for another. Indeed, doing so might be fatal.  

Omid Nouripour's video with English subtitles on Youtube. 

Header image: Youtube screenshot

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