Three flags flew side by side last weekend in the parking lot of a plaza along Yonge Street in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, as thousands of demonstrators gathered: the American flag, the Israeli flag, and Iran’s pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag — banned inside Iran because it represents the monarchy that was overthrown in 1979.

The demonstrators framed their actions as expressions of solidarity with people inside Iran demanding an end to corruption, mismanagement, repression, and autocratic rule. More than 2800 people are reported to have been killed and over 18,000 detained since the unrest began two weeks ago, though the true toll remains difficult to verify amid a near-total government-imposed internet shutdown. “Fast trials and executions” are now planned for those detained.

On the surface, the message sounded familiar, echoing the language of popular uprisings of the Arab Spring. But they don’t tell the whole story. 

What was missing were the political and historical nuances that shaped both the symbolism on display and what it reflects about a dramatic shift within parts of the Iranian diaspora. These demonstrations were markedly different from earlier rallies that followed the killing of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, after being detained by the government’s “morality police” for not complying with Iran’s veiling laws. Her death sparked global protests and the Women, Life, Freedom movement, demanding fundamental human rights, equality for women and girls, LGBTQ+ people and other minorities, who have experienced systemic discrimination and violence.

This time, the tone has been different. 

The GTA city of Richmond Hill has a significant Iranian population, with more than 10 per cent (more than 20,000 people) residents reporting Iranian origin in 2021, much higher than the general Ontario average. 

Pro-monarchist chants, placards bearing the former Shah of Iran’s face, and the conspicuous presence of U.S. and Israeli flags. In downtown Toronto on Tuesday, demonstrators defaced Iran’s closed embassy in Ottawa during a protest calling for Trump to military intervene in Iran. The embassy has been vacant since Canada severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2012.

This shift is neither incidental nor benign. It signals a more troubling change in how opposition politics are being articulated outside Iran — one that risks serving external political agendas rather than staying true to conditions inside the country.

Dr Nassim Noroozi, an Iranian lecturer at Concordia University whose research focuses on the ethics of resistance in today’s colonial context, says this evolution draws on a longstanding tendency in Iranian political culture to define political virtue through opposition itself. 

“It’s a kind of reflexive overthrowism. It defines our character to be anti-establishment,” she says. “We’re generally pretty anti-justice. We’re proud of it and we never dissect the nuances of it. We just assume that by being against the current visible establishment, we are by default positioning ourselves as sublime human beings.”

This mindset helps explain the seemingly sudden resurgence of monarchism among younger Iranians in the diaspora who never lived under the Pahlavi monarchy. For some, the Shah represents a symbolic negation of the Islamic Republic: a placeholder for “anything but this.”

“History has been whitewashed,” Noroozi says, pointing to years of influence from Manoto TV, a popular Persian-language satellite channel based in the UK. “They really were successful in whitewashing the Pahlavi period.” 

Ruling between 1941 and 1979, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s reign was propped up by Britain and the United States after the CIA and MI6-backed overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. He presided over a deeply repressive state, enforced by the notorious SAVAK secret police, while remaining a key Western ally in the region.

While the Shah became marginal after the revolution, monarchist networks never fully disappeared. They regrouped, cultivated foreign allies, and invested heavily in media and messaging in exile — laying the groundwork for a return to relevance. 

That revival has unfolded alongside both Tehran’s sidelining of reformist voices inside Iran and amid documented foreign efforts to shape opposition narratives, adds Noroozi.

Chief among those efforts, according to multiple recent investigations, is Israel.

Last fall, Israel newspaper Haaretz revealed that a coordinated network of more than 50 inauthentic social media profiles was running an AI-assisted influence operation. The network spread narratives in Farsi, English, and German and incited Iranian audiences to revolt against their government. Their messaging continues to this day.

The timing was notable. Researchers found that the network’s activity appeared synchronized with Israeli military actions against Iranian targets in June 2025.

Around the same time, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab uncovered a parallel Persian-language influence campaign. Its report found evidence that online messaging was closely aligned with the same Israeli strikes in Iran, and included content that appeared to anticipate strikes before they were publicly reported.

One example points to Israel’s June 23 attack on Tehran’s Evin Prison, which houses political prisoners. The strike began around 11:15 a.m. Before Iranian media reported the attack, accounts linked to the network were already posting about “explosions in the prison area,” presenting themselves as local eyewitnesses.

Soon after, the same network circulated a video purportedly showing the blast. The footage was later debunked by The New York Times as inauthentic and likely AI-generated. But it already spread widely across international media. 

The cumulative effect of all these propaganda efforts, Noroozi argues, has been a deep distortion of political thinking in the minds of Iranians — one the Iranian government itself helped create by silencing, imprisoning, or driving out dissidents and reformist figures. “The government did not realize that they were just getting rid of all the people that genuinely love Iran. And it made the thinking more diluted, more shallow, more theater-like. It’s very theatrical.”

She is skeptical that monarchism itself is the real appeal. Instead, she sees a deeper identity crisis shaped by Iran’s long encounter with Western modernity — one that idealizes a pre-Islamic past while blaming Iran’s present problems on Islam or Arab influence, often ignoring Iran’s own rich Islamic intellectual traditions. 

She is also blunt about the organic drivers of dissent, attributing it to both genuine injustice in the country and the impact of U.S. sanctions. “Whether it was corruption or not, a lot of things happened because of sanctions.”

The debate is personal for her. Two of her family members are monarchists. “I ask them: ‘Do you think this current regime came from Mars? No — an overwhelming number of people supported it [in 1979]. 

“If you tell this to them, they go crazy on you. They don’t want to accept it. Nobody wants to accept it. Everyone’s parents were revolutionaries [supported the overthrow of the Shah in favour of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979]. But nobody takes responsibility for that anymore.”

That refusal, she suggests, circles back to the same instinct to define oneself solely in opposition.

This disconnect matters because dissent inside Iran looks different from what is often projected from abroad. Kayhan Valadbaygi, a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam notes that recent protests have drawn in groups once considered pillars of the system. 

Bazaar merchants in Tehran, who have historically aligned with the government and were instrumental in the 1979 revolution, were the first to take to the streets in this new wave of protests, prompted by the collapse of the country’s currency, soaring inflation and decades of crippling U.S. sanctions. 

The flags on Yonge Street, by contrast, do not represent a unified Iranian voice. They revealed a fractured one, shaped by exile, memory, media and power. Iran’s crisis cannot be reduced to monarchy versus mullahs, or the West versus Islam. When protests flatten that complexity, they risk — perhaps unintentionally — aligning with geopolitical agendas that treat Iranian suffering as a means to an end. Just yesterday, Israeli media reported that protesters in Iran were being supplied with live firearms by foreign actors, explaining the deaths of police and security personnel.

This risk becomes particularly clear in Pahlavi and his supporters’ open alignment with Israel. Even if a return to monarchy is framed as a means to removing a widely unpopular government, does it not also strengthen the Iranian Supreme Leader’s long-standing claim that Israel and the United States seek to turn Iran back into a client state? 

That is the question Iranians, at home and in the diaspora, ultimately need to confront.