Why are the world’s loudest ‘progressive’ voices silent on Iran?

 

Why are the world’s loudest ‘progressive’ voices silent on Iran?

 

Jake Wallis Simons

 

It is stunning that the Left of today has still not learnt from the 1979 Islamic Revolution

 

The Iranian uprising is one of the three most moving expressions of human defiance so far this century. If the regime is toppled, it will constitute a fulcrum in the history of the world. Yet the hypocritical response from the liberal establishment has been as nauseating as it has been infuriating.

From Keir Starmer to Gary Lineker, a startling number of our loudest “human rights” voices seem to be taking the words of the Persian mystic Rumi – “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there” – rather too literally.

Surely, if there was ever a moment not to go beyond “ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”, now would be the time. Yet in addition to Starmer (a weakling statement with France and Germany, and refusing to proscribe the IRGC) and Lineker (silence), armies of Western notables are either downplaying or simply ignoring this dramatic struggle for freedom.

These are the people that are passionate when their activism harms the West, but whose voices seem to desert them when the tyrant wears a turban. This is especially true of those who have built their politics on an obsession with “Palestine”. Which, coincidentally enough, is something they have in common with the Iranian regime.

Remember, for instance, the UN’s oily humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher? He who falsely claimed that “14,000 babies” were facing starvation in Gaza, and went on to post preening video selfies of himself bravely helping the Palestinians? So far, as far as I can see, the chap has posted nothing on Iran. Which, for the “under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs”, is quite the omission.

This wholesale depravity from those who signal their virtue loudest is enough to make you vomit with rage. But it should hardly be a surprise: the Left has form, especially when it comes to Iran.

Rewind to 1979 and progressive intellectuals were falling over themselves to support the Ayatollah as he overthrew the Shah and seized power.

Tehran, 1979: As many as 17 million people marched peacefully to demand the removal of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini Credit: Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images

Take the Leftist French philosopher and paedophile Michel Foucault. In his sage opinion, the rise of the Ayatollah was an example of “spiritualité politique” and a “great insurrection against global systems”.

Similarly, Edward Said, the father of “postcolonialism”, justified the revolution as “a concrete response to the specific policy injuring them as human beings” and criticised the Ayatollah’s Western detractors for their Orientalist “caricatures” of the Islamist leader.

Between them, these two men – and others like them – are responsible for all the anti-Western brain rot that intellectually cripples our students today. Is it any wonder that the United Arab Emirates is withdrawing its citizens from British universities to protect them from radicalisation? Is it any surprise that we have seen no campus encampments for the courageous people of Iran?

Here’s the truth: the Left loves nothing more than a revolution, but only when it harms the West. In 1967, when the Shah visited West Berlin, he was met with Leftist protests that quickly turned violent. This contributed towards the radicalisation of German progressives – who allied with Iranian revolutionaries to help them overthrow the Pahlavi dynasty – and the subsequent emergence of the murderous Baader-Meinhof gang.

That’s not to say that the Shah was some kind of liberal democrat. He was authoritarian, corrupt, extravagant and brutal. By comparison with the theocracy that replaced him, however, he was practically a humanitarian and had the advantage of greatly favouring the West.

As Ronald Reagan pointed out in 1984: “The Shah had done our bidding and carried our load in the Middle East for quite some time, and I did think that it was a blot on our record that we let him down,” especially since that meant enabling the ambitions of the “maniacal fanatic” Khomeini.

It is stunning that the Left of today has still not learnt from its mistakes. During the 1979 revolution that swept the Ayatollah to power, Iranian communists, Marxist-Leninist guerrillas, Left-wing democrats and students threw themselves against the Shah in a “strange union” with the Islamists.

As soon as Khomeini became supreme leader, however, his secular allies were systematically purged, criminalised, imprisoned, executed and crushed.

Tehran, 1979: Ayatollah Khomeini speaks from a balcony in Tehran Credit: Reuters

The lesson was clear: like the crocodile offering a ride across a river, Islamists will devour you once they’ve finished with you. It’s in their nature. Yet here we are again, with progressives holding their tongues about tyranny because their true animus is still reserved for capitalist democracy, especially its outpost in the Middle East.

The hypocrisy could not be clearer. In the eyes of the Left, human rights only matter when they can be used as a weapon against the West. For the Islamists, it is a match made in heaven: from West Midlands Police to our universities, from the UN to the streets of our cities on Saturdays, is it any wonder that the jihadis are finding the job of manipulation so easy?

As I write, young Iranians are being gunned down by cowardly jihadis who lust after the apocalypse. Already, the revolution has its icons: the young man who attacked a motorcycle death squad with a homemade flamethrower; the women who have been bravely photographed lighting their cigarettes with pictures of the Ayatollah; the activist who tore down the regime’s flag at the embassy in London on Saturday.

Tragically, it also has its martyrs. The 23-year-old Tehrani student Rubina Aminian, who was shot in the back of the head and buried by the roadside, is just one sickening example. Footage has revealed young women peering out of prison vans as they are carted off to the dungeons. Distraught parents have been filmed in morgues, searching for their children in the body bags.

Along with the Israelis standing steadfast on the frontline of jihad and the Ukrainians facing down Putin, these are the true heroes of our time, not those craven, plastic hypocrites of the Left. The Persian protesters are the true embodiment of the words of Rumi: “Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.” Viva la revolución!