The sound of silence

Since December 28th, the people of Iran have been engaged in a series of nationwide protests with the goal of toppling the current Iranian regime – a brutal Islamic Theocracy that polices belief, treats women as chattels, silences dissent, and has ruled through fear for almost 47 years.

So when ordinary people rise up against that system, when women burn their hijabs and young men face bullets for demanding freedom, you would expect the Western left to be unambiguously supportive – right? After all, this is a movement which claims to oppose oppression, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and state violence.

And yet the response from mainstream media, politicians of the left, and (inexplicably) those who have spent the past two years marching in the streets demanding a ‘free’ Palestine has been strangely silent. This doesn’t mean that most of us aren’t aware of these protests – but we’ve gleaned that information through social media because mainstream media coverage and marches demanding a ‘free Iran’ have been missing in action. Indeed, this silence has been so obvious that it has quickly become the focus of outrage – and the hypocrisy between the intensity of pro-Gaza protests and the utter indifference, by those same protestors, to the plight of the Iranian people has done more to highlight the moral bankruptcy of that movement than anything that their detractors could have done or said.

But most of what I’ve seen and read about this failure of the left misses the the real reasons that the usual voices are so visibly absent in this conflict. It’s not just that the left WON’T support the people of Iran – it’s that they can’t.

There are at least six reasons for this:

1. Iran is the poster child for Islamic rule.

The first and most fundamental reason that the left cannot support the people of Iran is this: Iran cannot be criticised honestly without threatening the moral immunity that the left has extended to Islam everywhere.

Think about it: Iran is not a fringe or corrupted version of Islamic government. It is not an aberration that can be carved out and dismissed as a local failure. It is the most complete, internally coherent, and theologically serious example of Islam as a governing system in the 21st century.

And that is precisely the problem. The Iranian regime is not pretending to be Islamic. It is a clerical state, run by religious zealots, enforcing religious law, grounded explicitly in Islamic theology. It does not apologise for this. It boasts of it.

If such a system is acknowledged to be tyrannical, misogynistic, violent, and fundamentally incompatible with human freedom, then the argument cannot stop at Iran. The logic travels. You can’t condemn Iran without raising unavoidable questions about political Islam itself. About Sharia. About clerical authority. About the treatment of women. About the fusion of mosque and state. And once those questions are admitted in Iran, they become legitimate everywhere.

This is the house of cards the left has built, and Iran is the keystone holding it up.

The left attacks Christianity relentlessly for historical abuses, even when those abuses are centuries old and explicitly repudiated. Islam, by contrast, is shielded from present day scrutiny, even when the abuses are contemporary, systemic, and lethal. Iran shatters that asymmetry.

For years, the left has insisted that Islam is uniquely misunderstood. That abuses carried out in its name are cultural distortions, colonial legacies, or Western misreadings. That Islam, properly understood, is compatible with liberal values, women’s rights, and pluralism.

Iran makes that claim impossible to sustain.

Iran is what political Islam looks like when it is not constrained by Western law, diluted by secular institutions, or softened for Western audiences. It is Islam governing itself, by its own rules, in its own voice. If that system falls, it does not merely topple a regime. It exposes a truth the left has spent decades denying. That the problem is not misunderstanding. It is doctrine applied as law.

That is why the Iranian uprising cannot be framed as a narrow, local injustice. To support it honestly would be to concede that Islam, when elevated from belief to governance, produces outcomes that the left routinely condemns in every other context.

Most hauntingly – this is what western nations will look like if (or in some cases, when) they reach the tipping point that elevates Islam to a position of control – the very issue that the nations of Europe are facing as we speak.

The people protesting in Iran are not asking the West to help them to implement a more acceptable form of Islam. They are rejecting it as a governing authority altogether. Women burning hijabs are not making a nuanced theological critique. They are making a political one. This system is evil, and it must end.

The left understands this perfectly well. Which is why it cannot bring itself to say it out loud.

2. Support for the Iranian people is seen as support for Israel.

Most people understand the hypocrisy of the media silence on Iran when contrasted against the extraordinary media bias and misinformation about Israel that we are subjected to day after day – but they don’t necessarily understand ‘why’ this hypocrisy exists. Here’s why. Over the past few years the left has flattened global politics into a single dichotomy in which Israel is cast as the villain. Within that framework, Iran has been cast as a counterweight. Not because it is good, but because it opposes the right enemy. That perceived role, alone, persuades to left to turn a blind eye to civil abuses in Iran in the interests of the bigger cause – the end of Israel.

As such, the left portrays Iran as a regional power standing against Israel and, by extension, against Western influence. Supporting a popular uprising against that regime would disrupt this narrative. It would weaken a state that has been framed, however cynically, as part of a broader moral struggle.

For this reason, any movement that threatens Iran risks being interpreted as ‘helping Israel’. And for a movement that increasingly treats opposition to Israel as a moral absolute, that can’t be tolerated.

Separate from this, but closely related, is another problem the left prefers not to articulate openly.

3. Iran funds regional ‘resistance’

Iran is not just rhetorically opposed to Israel. It is the primary sponsor, financier, and enabler of Islamist militant movements across the region. Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed groups could not exist in their current form without Iranian money, weapons, and training.

Supporting the overthrow of the Iranian regime would mean disrupting those supply lines. It would mean weakening the infrastructure that sustains groups the left now marches for, chants for, and rebrands as resistance movements.

This creates an obvious contradiction. The left claims to oppose violence and terrorism, yet cannot bring itself to support an uprising that would materially reduce the power of one of the world’s most significant sponsors of militant violence, because doing so would undermine causes it has emotionally and politically invested in.

But there is also a deeper structural problem.

4. Helping the Iranian people doesn’t further the claims of the left

The left’s moral worldview depends on simple binaries. Oppressor and oppressed. Coloniser and colonised. Power and victim. Iran does not fit neatly into any of these categories. The oppressors in Iran are not Western. They are not white. They are not Christian. They are not capitalist. The victims are not being crushed by colonial forces or multinational corporations. They are being crushed by their own rulers, their own religious authorities, and their own state ideology.

There is no external empire to blame. No Western villain to chant against. And without a usable narrative, the left disengages.

This failure is most grotesquely exposed in the treatment of Iranian women – who are, right now, risking death to reject compulsory veiling, religious control, and patriarchal law. These are women demanding precisely the freedoms Western feminists already enjoy. And yet large parts of the feminist left hesitate, equivocate, or remain silent, fearful of offending cultural or religious sensibilities.

In the hierarchy of left wing values, identity politics now outranks women’s rights. Cultural deference matters more than individual freedom. And so the preservation of Islam is regarded as being more important than the rights of Iranian women, who are, therefore, left to fight alone.

5. The Iranians want what we have

There is also an inconvenient truth the left would rather avoid. Many (most?) Iranian dissidents admire Western democracy. Many oppose Islamism globally. Many are hostile to Hamas. Some openly support Israel’s right to exist.

Supporting them would mean accepting that oppressed people do not automatically agree with left wing ideology. That anti Islamism is not the same thing as racism. That moral clarity does not belong to one political tribe.

This is clearly unacceptable to the left, who have spent decades trying to convince us that western democracy, capitalism and western values are the source of all evil. Supporting a cause, and people, that want these same things would threaten the very foundations of a movement built on self-loathing.

6. A need to be right at any cost

And finally, there is the simplest reason of all. Supporting the people of Iran would require the left to admit that it has been wrong. Wrong about political Islam. Wrong about Iran. Wrong about who the real victims are. Wrong about who speaks for the oppressed.

Movements built on extremist ideology rarely do that. They double down. They change the subject. They go quiet.

And so we are left with the spectacle that we see today. Years of endless outrage against Israel and rapturous support for Hamas. Protesters chanting for resistance movements backed by one of the most brutal regimes on earth. But near silence when ordinary Iranians rise up against tyranny.

That silence is not neutral. It is a choice. And it exposes the utter hypocrisy of the modern left. A movement that claims to stand with the oppressed, but only when the oppression comes from the right people, against the right enemies, and in service of the right narrative.

This isn’t the rights based left of your Mum and Dad. The kind of left wing activism which sought ‘better conditions’, ‘better pay’ and a fair go for women and minorities. This ‘new left’ is an evil, extremist, movement – far further along the spectrum – and ready to destroy our society and our way of life in the support of ideologies like that which has enslaved Iran for 47 years.

The people of Iran deserve better than that.