There is a deafening silence on the Left about Iran. Now, in the third week of a popular uprising against tyranny, not a peep of support has been heard from the likes of Greta Thunberg, Zohran Mamdani, the Columbia faculty lounge, or the Harvard student body.
Why is this? The protesters’ reasonable claim for support is overwhelmingly clear. Iran’s 92 million people are sick, literally to death, of repression by a regime that has murdered, arrested, beaten, and imprisoned them for 47 years. The bravest have taken to their city streets, mostly unarmed, to demand freedom.
The ayatollahs have responded, as they always do, with more murder, arrests, imprisonments, and beatings. At least 2,000 citizens have been gunned down so far, and perhaps as many as 12,000, with the toll rising each night after official daytime pro-government rallies are finished and genuine, not astroturf, demonstrations begin with the gathering darkness. After more killing, the mullahs distribute videos of corpses in body bags as a threatening message to their own people. Human rights organizations send out the same videos to show the rest of the world what outrages the regime is perpetrating.
So where are left-wingers whose pose is normally to be the moral conscience of the developed world and who rarely miss a chance to boast that they are on the side of the little guy? In the past year, these supposed champions of democracy have said nothing so often as they have claimed they stand strong against autocracy. Yet an oppressed people is demanding an end to autocracy with obvious justice, and left-wingers have not even chirruped in solidarity.
Those few who have spoken at all mostly side with the oppressors. Columbia Prof. Hamid Dabashi defamed the Iranian uprising as an “Israeli instigated revolt.” This echoes the line or argument of those in power in Tehran, where the army, for example, said it would “safeguard national interests, strategic infrastructure, and public property” — it was presumably referring to buildings, including a mosque, that had been burned by the protesters, and would “thwart enemy plots.”
An X account, purportedly linked to the Democratic Socialists of America, tweeted, “Long live Ayatollah Khamenei and the Islamic Republic of Iran,” accompanied by a celebratory video of an Iranian missile attack on Israel. A British member of Parliament, Adnan Hussain, sneered at author J.K. Rowling for criticizing leftist indifference to Iran’s protesters, “Forgive us for being reluctant to join the crowd that commits/cheers on/supports genocide as it now itches for regime change in the same region … Something tells us it’s not human rights or freedom that motivates their sudden moral awakening.”
Physician, heal thyself. These repeated references to Israel and the false equivalence they try to draw between the Iranian regime and the state of Israel shines a klieg light on the reasons the Left refuses to side with Iranian demonstrators. They won’t do it because it would oblige them to acknowledge that the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel was not conducted by an oppressed people fighting for freedom but was a pogrom by Hamas terrorists whose assault was paid for and instigated by the murderous government in Tehran.
It would do significantly more than that. It would also force the Left to criticize Muslims, which you’ll notice they never do unless they are Muslims allied to Washington, and acknowledge that political Islam is not motivated by a justified yearning to lift the “global South” out from under domination by developed nations of the West. It would force the Left to face the truth that political Islam is itself determined to be dominant at any price and to impose its religion, law, and customs on those who do not want them. That includes us. It would expose the matrix of lies that seek to conceal the connected aims of the Left and of Islamism. The former is a self-hating, extreme egalitarian desire to wreck the success of the free world; the latter is the determination of extreme political Muslims to overwhelm the United States and the countries of Europe — essentially what used to be called Christendom.
The cooperation of the radical Left and jihadist Islam, the red-green alliance, is a phenomenon that boggles the mind of ordinary, intelligent people in the West. But the two parts fit together very well in the immediate and medium terms, even though they have different ultimate goals.
Red is the color of Marxism, and in this alliance, the red faction is made up of leftists who, for two generations, have assaulted the traditional values and norms that undergird our civilization. With growing ferocity, they have worked to tear down the moral and cultural foundations of a free society, one in which people can live, raise families, and build wealth in peace and prosperity.
Green is the color of Islam, and the green of the red-green alliance are the terrorists who murder French cartoonists, bomb German nightclubs, drive trucks into Christmas crowds, intimidate American Jews in their homes and businesses, rape their way through Western cities, and shoot Jews picnicking on Australian beaches.
The red-green alliance is not a marriage made in heaven but in another place. It is what produces mass demonstrations in cities across America and Europe in support of Hamas and Hezbollah, the international henchmen of Iran’s ayatollahs, after they launched a genocidal attack on our ally, Israel, two years ago.
It accounts for the absurd folly of the LGBT+ crowd joining chants of, “From the River to the Sea,” not knowing which river and sea they are referring to, let alone understanding that if the Islamists achieved the conquest they demand, the conquerors would throw gay and transgender people off the tops of buildings or otherwise murder them cruelly and without hesitation.
It accounts, too, for radical women screaming “Free Palestine” on city streets all over America, untroubled by the fact, perhaps untouched by the knowledge, that if such “freedom” from Jews were accomplished, it would be by people who believe infidel women should be raped before being executed so as to ensure they are defiled and could not be admitted to heaven.
The Palestinian flag of red, green, black, and white, aptly symbolizes the alliance. The red and the green live side by side, parallel in the direction they are headed but in truth never meeting, incompatible. One of them must lose. They can share the same space temporarily because they also share a black and white view of the world divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Developed, successful, wealthy nations (including Israel as an honorary white supremacist state) are the oppressors, and Muslims are identified as among the oppressed. In these circumstances, the Muslim rulers of Iran, allies who want “death to America,” cannot, must not, be tainted as persecutors.
The red-green alliance is more vigorous today than it has ever been, but it is far from new. It is a mostly forgotten irony that this very alliance created the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was an axis that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, allowing him to jet into Tehran from Paris in 1979.
The overthrow of the Shah was not undertaken, as most people now assume, solely or even primarily by Islamists, but also by leftists who had mounted guerilla operations inside Iran long before Khomeini arrived like some deus ex machina. The two main militant groups who brought down the Pahlavi dynasty were the Mojahedin, founded in the mid-1960s by left-wing Iranian students, and the Fedayin, an insurgent Marxist organization set up in the early 1970s.
MY PART IN THE AYATOLLAH’S DOWNFALL
These were not religious zealots but anti-monarchists. They were first duped by Khomeini’s blandishments about tolerance and then liquidated by the Islamic Republican Guard Corp, the same force that is out on the streets of Tehran as you read these words, slaughtering their fellow Iranians.
One might say, given this, that it is obvious why left-wingers will not side against the ayatollahs’ regime. Why would they do so when it was left-wingers who helped create that loathsome government? Left-wingers half a century ago fooled themselves that Islamists were on their side for the simple reason that they were violently opposed to an establishment that was, not coincidentally, an important ally of the West. It still thinks the same thing today.