Masih Alinejad returned to the headlines after posting an emotional video reacting to the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. “Finally, you’re dead, finally, you’re gone, Ali Khamenei,” she said, her voice breaking. In the same clip, she is seen hugging strangers in New York. For Alinejad, those embraces were not theatrical. They were, as she later explained, acts of survival.Responding to comments about “hugging strangers”, she wrote that when you live in exile and cannot safely hug your own mother, strangers stop feeling like strangers. The people she embraced, she said, saw both joy and grief on her face. “That’s not performance. That’s survival.” She added that America had saved her life three times and that the people around her have become her new family. For Alinejad, developments in Iran are never abstract political events.
