From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   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.   
      
   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.   
      
      
   Brendan O’Neill   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)