This in practice makes Bahá’í Faith a pretty lib religion overall, because Bahá’ís are just deathly afraid of rocking the boat, and have justified this fear through spirituality.

This is my impression as well. Bahá’ís tend to eschew politics and they retreat to very sweet but incredibly naive positions about just wanting everyone to get along. I guess that is hard-coded into their faith though.

I think it would be silly to deny the fact that Bahá’ís face a ton of repression from the Iranian government because it’s really no secret and it’s not like we’re talking Falun Gong “They kidnap us and harvest our organs but nobody has ever been able to prove this, we don’t have pictures as evidence of recent surgery or even just scarring, but all the proof we need is to wave our hand at some statistics that may or may not be falsified” kind of nonsense here either.

As a rule of thumb with this stuff, the more morally outrageous the claims of government persecution are the more skeptical I become. That’s not to say that therefore those morally outrageous atrocities don’t occur, such as with Abu Ghraib Prison, but if you look at how Pissrael treats Palestinians - it’s not like they are forcing them to get married to pigs or denying them all fuel sources but providing an overabundance of Qur’ans so that Palestinians are forced to burn the Qur’an to survive. It’s the basic shit - denying them healthcare, education, food, clean water, economic opportunities, participation, freedom of movement etc. That alone is outrageous enough that you don’t need to pull on liberal heartstrings with some fanciful narrative to make them feel bad and you don’t need some western dork who just graduated from university studying anthropology to start tweeting about how Chinese public health campaigns teaching Uyghur children good dental hygiene practices is evidence of cultural genocide.

(Shit, do Uyghurs even use miswak? Is the Chinese government suppressing the use of miswak? How integral is the use of miswak to the islamic faith anyway? At this point you might as well be arguing that having plumbing at a mosque for adherents to make wudu with is cultural genocide because it replaces more traditional ways of supplying water to people who are going to pray…)

I’d say that most of the repression and persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran is very “mundane” - in the sense that it would be exclusion from jobs and economic participation, getting harassed by the cops, lengthier sentencing in courts and a lower standard of evidence for convictions, beatings, torture, forced disappearances, desecration of sacred sites, ostracism etc. If this sounds familiar then you know the playbook because it’s almost certainly happening in your own country right now, except probably to a lesser degree.

But of course the US government is using the repression of Bahá’ís as a wedge to drive their geopolitical agenda.

Did the CIA act out of concern for Tibetans when they armed and trained the population, including monks, to act as an insurgent force to resist China’s annexation of Tibet? Fuck no, it was just a cynical (and half-arsed) attempt to frustrate China and to destabilise the region by fomenting unrest and nothing more. The CIA dropped those Tibetans like a hot potato just as soon as they realised that it wasn’t going to pan out well for them and they got distracted with meddling elsewhere in the world. They didn’t give a fuck if they lived or died. They were just pawns for them to use and discard at whim, as is the case with Bahá’ís and Iran and as it is with so many other causes.

If we were to take a fairly jaded assessment of the situation for Bahá’ís in Iran and the geopolitics of West Asia, I don’t see a situation where Iran becomes the next Libya or Syria as being anywhere near preferable to what they’re currently facing - you don’t have to be Yazidi to realise what would happen to Bahá’ís if Iran was wracked by civil war.

Does that justify or excuse what Iran is doing? Nope, not at all.

But ultimately it makes me exceedingly skeptical about the performative concern for the plight of Bahá’ís in Iran when what the US would love is to see most is Iran destabilised, which would very likely be disastrous for the Bahá’ís that they profess to care about.