It’s the 30th anniversary of the Tehran embassy seizure. The Iranian dissidents are out in the streets. But they’re not condemning U.S. imperialism. They’re condemning the brutality and avarice of the Iranian regime, and reclaiming their revolution. And they’re risking life and limb to do it.

At one point, one crowd of protesters turned its message toward the American President Barack Obama, chanting, “Obama, Obama, You are either with us or with them.”

Now, luckily for us in the U.S., there are Iranian organizations that support the dissidents and raise awareness about them, like Trita Parsi’s National Iranian-American Council or Hadi Ghaemi’s International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Yet over the last several days, journalists like the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg have shrugged at the differences between Parsi and the Iranian regime. The Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl has called the opposition “unlovely” because it’s made up of Iranians, who possess an Iranian agenda, not an American neoconservative one. Great timing, gentlemen. You couldn’t be doing Ahmedinejad’s work for him any more thoroughly if he paid you. Not that I’m accusing him of paying you, of course. I have no evidence of that.