And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colours. They frothed day and night about a ‘murderous regime’ – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle Eastern people revolt against their genuinely repressive rulers, they’ve gone schtum.
It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors
What is it about revolts in Iran that rankle the activist class? These people love to yap about ‘resistance’ and ‘oppression’. Yet the minute men and women in Iran rise up in resistance against the oppressive theocracy that immiserates and subjugates them, they go coy. Their solidarity evaporates. Their flag-waving ends. They go back to tweeting about TV.
It’s happening again as the latest Iranian uprising enters its seventh day. In cities across Iran, people are protesting the economic mismanagement and clerical tyranny of the Islamist ruling class. It started a week ago, in Tehran, when shopkeepers shuttered their businesses and hit the streets to express their anger about yet another sharp fall in the Iranian currency against the US dollar. They were swiftly joined by other Iranians furious about declining living standards.
The protests are morphing into a collective rage against theocracy itself. Students have joined: young women and men sick of being told what to wear and how to think by the ayatollah classes. It is now the largest revolt to have shaken Iran since the uprising in 2022 over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman from Iranian Kurdistan who was accused by the morality police of not wearing her veil properly.
There have been images of unimaginable bravery from the past week. We’ve seen young women dancing and laughing, their hair freely flowing, in defiance of those cranky old men who think such ‘sinful’ creatures should cover up and shut up. We’ve seen a lone man sitting in the middle of the road, blocking the way of the regime’s riot goons on their motorbikes. It has echoes of Tiananmen Square’s ‘tank man’.
For those of us who love liberty, who support the freedom of the individual against the dictates of theocratic strongmen, these are stirring scenes. It is especially electrifying to see Iran’s young women once again raise a collective middle finger to their Islamist oppressors. Women in Iran face huge legal and social discrimination – that many are throwing off their hijabs and saying ‘No more’ is a wonderful blow for equality against cruelty.
So where are the solidarity marches? Where are the gatherings outside Iranian embassies to echo the protesters’ cry for an end to the sexist, regressive rule of the ayatollahs?
It’s an anti-war uprising too. Protesters are chanting ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’, in glorious protest against the regime’s wasteful spending on its anti-Semitic proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah. Where are the Western anti-imperialists to cheer this demand for social spending over the squandering of billions on a medieval war of attrition against the world’s only Jewish state?
This is where we get to the ugly truth of the left’s creepy silence on Iran. Where Iranian progressives understand that Hezbollah and Hamas are brutal outfits doing the bidding of a ruthless regime, our activist class has a tendency to view them as ‘resistance’ movements.
They could never get behind the Iranian people’s cry for those neo-fascist militias to be defunded because they are drunk on the delusion that these terrorists are an important bulwark against the ‘real menace’ in the Middle East: Israel. Their Israelophobia has so thoroughly shattered their moral compasses that they bristle at the very suggestion that Iran should stop funding Israel’s hateful foes and instead should focus on improving the lot of the Iranian people.
We end up in the truly perverse situation where the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West instinctively want the Iranian regime to survive – in order that it might continue sticking it to evil Israel – while the young of Iran dream of the regime’s withering away. The revolt in Iran has exposed not only the crisis of legitimacy of the ayatollah classes but also the treachery of Western progressives. It’s now clear that their luxury cause of madly hating Israel takes precedence over everything else, including offering solidarity to the freedom-yearning people of Iran. Your liberty will have to wait, guys – we haven’t destroyed the Jewish state yet.
There’s another ingredient in their moral cowardice – the fear of being thought ‘Islamophobic’. A generation raised to believe that everything from criticising the Koran to dissing the hijab is a form of bigotry is never going to be able to stand with people who are throwing their hijabs on to open fires and taking the mick out of their Islamic rulers. The left’s snivelling silence on Iran speaks to how far they have fallen down the well of moral relativism.
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