Iranians are rising up against their brutal Islamist rulers

Widespread, anti-regime protests have been roiling Iran for nearly a week now. Not that you would necessarily know this given the scant attention they have received in the Western media and the broader ‘progressive’ ecosystem. In fact, it’s only now that US president Donald Trump has threatened to intervene in Iran, in some as-yet-unspecified way, that the protests are now gaining some front-page exposure.

This wilful lack of attention is ostensibly hard to understand. After all, these protests really are significant. Six months on from Iran’s humiliating 12-day war with Israel, which blew a hole through its defences, set back its nuclear programme and dealt a severe blow to Iran’s governing theocrats, an already restive Iranian population is now taking to the streets in protest against its rulers.

This week’s protests were sparked off on Sunday, when a large number of Tehran’s shopkeepers, outraged over the effective collapse of the Iranian currency, pulled down the shutters and promptly stopped selling electronic goods, including mobile phones. This financial cry for help touched an already exposed nerve among broad sections of a long-suffering Iranian populace. In the hours and days since, other shop owners have also shut up their premises and protesters have taken to the streets. The demonstrations quickly spread to Tehran’s historic Grand Bazaar before engulfing other towns and cities around Iran. In response, the Islamic Republic’s security forces have begun to move in, bullets and tear gas at the ready. So far at least seven people are known to have died.

The economic plight of this sanction-hit nation, its funds abroad frozen and access to foreign exchange limited, is certainly desperate. The currency has plunged over the past six months, dropping to 1.42million rials to the US dollar, a decrease in value of 56 per cent since July. Inflation has also predictably soared, reaching 42 per cent by last month. And the daily effects of this economic chaos are now all too apparent. Over the past year, food prices have shot up by 72 per cent, while healthcare costs have risen by 50 per cent. To compound people’s anger, their rulers have long seemed more concerned with backing and funding Islamist terror groups abroad than tackling their own nation’s chronic problems. It’s telling that support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis over the past two years has been far more prevalent among Western middle-class ‘progressives’ than among ordinary Iranians.

But the anger of increasing swathes of the Iranian populace is fuelled by more than the Iranian state’s economic mismanagement, terrorist sponsorship and corruption. It is driven just as much by deep and growing opposition to the brutal, repressive nature of the Islamic Republic itself. An opposition to its religious rulers and above all the ayatollah. An opposition to their strict imposition of Islamised law. An opposition to their determined denial of many Iranians’ demand for freedom.

Not for nothing have the protests rapidly mutated from anger over the currency collapse to calls for substantial political change. Demonstrating workers, shopkeepers and students have been heard chanting ‘death to the dictator’ and ‘woman, life, freedom’ – slogans that could land those chanting them in prison.

We’ve heard these slogans before, too. ‘Death to the dictator’ was shouted at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during the mass civil rebellion of 2019, as increasingly working-class anger over a petrol-price hike morphed into widespread calls for an end to the Islamic Republic. And ‘woman, life, freedom’ was the mantra of those brave women and not a few men who rose up in 2022, in opposition to the mandatory hijab law following the morality police’s killing of Mahsa Amini.

That these political sentiments have come to the fore once again is a testament to the continuing and deepening antagonism among Iranians towards the Islamic Republic. Their growing opposition to the ayatollah’s repressive reign is clearly not going away. The election of a ‘reformist’ president in the shape of Masoud Pezeshkian in July 2024, following the death of Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash, has done little to appease a restive public. This is hardly a surprise, given the president’s already limited powers are trumped by the ultimate authority of the ayatollah and the military strength of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iranians know full well where the real power lies.

It should be said that the Islamic Republic is not about to fall. But these protests show that it is in trouble. Many in Iran were already turning against their repressive Islamic state in the years before its shadow war with Israel broke out into the open in July last year. Since then, the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy has been further undermined. And what happens in Iran won’t stay there. It will have profound ramifications for a region shaped for years by the Islamic Republic’s regional power-plays.

All of which makes the relative lack of interest in the protests on the part Western liberal media and the broader ‘progressive’ class seem even more puzzling. Many news outlets have paid them a cursory notice, with BBC News finally publishing its first bit of coverage of the protests three days in – this despite the presence in the region of its much-vaunted channel, BBC Persian. Elsewhere, the NGO-ocracy, which likes to imagine itself a keen advocate of civil rights, appears to have little interest in Iranian security forces turning guns, tear gas and water cannons on their own people. Indeed, Amnesty International spent the past few days tweeting about fossil fuels, systemic racism and the rights of indigenous reindeer herders – not a mention of Iranians’ brave struggle for more freedom. Middle-class progressives, who have spent the past couple of years obsessing over Israel’s role in the Middle East, barely seem interested in Israel’s principal antagonist.

It would be easy to put the scant attention given to the protests down to the distractions of the so-called holiday season. But that ignores a darker truth. The West’s ‘progressive’ classes struggle intellectually and ideologically with criticising the Islamic Republic of Iran. To support Iranians struggling against the regime’s harsh Islamic strictures, including mandatory hijab-wearing, sits uneasily alongside progressives’ support for Muslim identity politics, and a warped ‘anti-imperialism’ that more often sees Iran as the victim. And so they prefer to look away, and talk about something else, like reindeer herders.

This happened in 2022, when the ‘Women, life, freedom’ protests shook the Islamic Republic to its foundations and cost the lives of hundreds of protesters. In response, Western ‘progressives’ barely managed to murmur some vague words of support for those brave men and women before they got back to championing the hijab as a symbol of liberation and ‘calling out’ Islamophobia.

This time around, the world must not look away. As the Iranians struggle to free themselves from the deathly grip of Islamic theocracy, they deserve our enduring solidarity.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.