‘They're absolutely a fringe’: Iranian

At the height of protests in Iran this January, Mona Ghassani, the president of the Iranian Canadian Congress (ICC), was invited to speak on CBC.

Amid news reports estimating government forces had killed upwards of 20,000 civilians, Ghassani told host David Cochrane that the events unfolding in Iran did not “exist within a vacuum.” Ghassani blamed American sanctions, which had cratered the Iranian rial and Israel, particularly its intelligence agency — the Mossad — for conducting “influence operations” across the country and sowing discord.

“I want to emphasize that they have no interest in the Iranian people and they are only interested in their personal interests in the region,” Ghassani told the Canadian broadcaster.

Ghassani’s remarks struck a discordant note on air, largely out of sync with the majority of Canada’s nearly 300,000-strong Iranian community. Most Iranian-Canadians see the Islamic Republic as a fundamentalist regime in need of toppling. A survey published by National Post in April found overwhelming support among Iranian Canadians for regime change and broad backing of the American-Israeli campaign to degrade the country’s military.

Throughout Ghassani’s appearance, there are odd pockets of silence and awkward transitions as they (Ghassani uses they/them pronouns) struggle to articulate how mainstream Iranian-Canadians feel about the crisis and where the ICC fits into the broader tapestry of the diaspora.

Ghassani comes off overly conscious of word choice, a tension reflected across the group’s Instagram page throughout the upheaval, which began in late December 2025. Not until Jan. 24, 2026, did the ICC release a generic message expressing “our condolences to the grieving families of the deceased among our compatriots in the recent unrest in Iran.” A similarly nondescript message, “wishing patience and peace for all survivors,” was published on Feb. 17.

But who killed them and why they were killed were left unanswered.

The CBC interview sparked an immediate backlash across the Iranian-Canadian community, highlighting the disconnect between the ICC and much of the community it ostensibly represents. The CBC even issued a rare apology for, as Cochrane said, unwittingly serving as “a platform for the narrative of the Iranian regime.”

Just days after Ghassani’s appearance, Cochrane invited Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, a University of Toronto linguistics professor, to speak about the ICC’s misrepresentation of widely held Iranian-Canadian beliefs. He dismissed Ghassani’s rhetoric as “offensive to the Iranian Canadian community” and said the ICC represented just a fraction of Iranian Canadians.

“I think they’re absolutely a fringe,” Kahnemuyipour told National Post. “They’re fringe in the Iranian Canadian community. They have much more support outside of the Iranian Canadian community.”

“Even with the support that they have from the non-Iranian community, go look at their rallies,” he continued. “If they dare have a rally, it would be maybe 50 people, 100 people outside of the U.S. embassy.”