Don’t cry for Iran’s theocrats

Since Israel and Iran began exchanging rocket fire last week, London’s anti-Israel protesters have added Iranian flags to the keffiyehs, placards and Palestinian flags that make up their habitual adornments. These attempts at ‘solidarity’ with Iran must surely be cold comfort to those suffering under its oppressive regime.

The brutality of the Iranian theocracy cannot be overstated. Last week, at the very moment Western activists were busy sourcing Iranian flags, Mojahed Kourkouri was executed in Iran. He was arrested following anti-government protests that swept the country in 2022, and accused of killing a nine-year-old boy, Kian Pirfalak. Kian’s family have repeatedly denied that this was the case: they claim their son was killed by the Iranian security forces. Yet after being subjected to torture and a trial Amnesty International has described as ‘grossly unfair’, Kourkouri became the 11th person to be executed in connection with the protests. They join hundreds of others who were killed by the security forces at the time of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ demonstrations, as the regime engaged in a deadly struggle to impose order.

The 2022 unrest in Iran was sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been detained by the regime’s morality police for showing her hair in public. The regime’s strict Islamic laws compel women to wear the hijab when in public and to cover their arms and legs. Amini’s refusal to comply with this oppressive ruling led to her arrest and, ultimately, her death. Witnesses say officers attacked Amini in the back of a police van. The Iranian police deny this allegation and claim she suffered a ‘sudden heart failure’. But her father told journalists his daughter was ‘fit and had no health problems’ prior to her encounter with the police.

Little has changed for women since Amini’s death and the protests that ensued. In April 2024, another 22-year-old woman, Aida Shakarami, was detained by the morality police in Tehran for the crime of ‘not adhering to compulsory hijab’. Aida’s younger sister, Nika, took part in the 2022 protests. A video of Nika, just 16-years-old, shows her standing on top of a rubbish bin and setting fire to headscarves. Her family found her body 10 days later in a morgue. The security forces claimed she had fallen from a building, but her family believes she was abducted, sexually assaulted and killed by the security forces. In October 2024, six months after the arrest of her older daughter, Aida and Nika’s mother, Nasrin, was also arrested. She was sentenced to one year in prison to be followed by numerous punitive restrictions on her movements and activities.

It’s not just women who suffer under the tyranny of Iran’s theocratic rulers. Homosexuality is illegal and can be punished with death. Since Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, issued a fatwa allowing gender-reassignment surgery in the 1980s, gay people have been under pressure to live as the opposite sex in order to appear to be heterosexual. Iran now carries out more ‘sex change’ operations than any country in the world besides Thailand – a fact that, in 2007, allowed then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to boast that there were no homosexuals in Iran.

A regime that treats its own citizens in this way has no mercy for its enemies. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, opposition to Israel has been fundamental to the Iranian state’s ruling ideology. Iran not only refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist, it actively seeks its eradication, too. Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called Israel a ‘cancerous tumour’ that ‘will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed’. In the hands of such an anti-Semitic regime, nuclear weapons pose a real threat to the world’s only Jewish nation.

Western protesters waving the Iranian flag cannot claim to be simply anti-war, peace-loving pacifists. They are actively siding with a regime that seeks the extermination not just of its Jewish neighbours but also of many of its own citizens. To wave the Iranian flag is to lend support to the Islamist theocrats who will stop at nothing to eradicate Jews, homosexuality, women who show their hair in public and critics of this oppressive dictatorship. People such as Mahsa Amini, Mojahed Kourkouri, Nika, Aida and Nasrin Shakarami have demonstrated immense bravery in standing up to the Iranian state. Tragically, many have paid with their lives. Westerners waving the Iranian flag insult their memory.

The fall of the Iranian regime would mean an end to the horrific oppression of Iran’s citizens and greater security for the people of Israel. It is only protesters in the West who are so consumed by Israelophobia that they prefer to show solidarity with Islamist autocrats rather than women, gays and Jews.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com/