The hypocrisy of the West’s weepers for the Islamic Republic

I almost feel sorry for the left. For today they’re going to have to pretend to give a damn about Iranian life despite having ignored the slaughter of thousands of Iranians by the demented Islamic regime literally just last month. They’re going to have to take to social media and cry ‘Oh no, Iranians might die’, despite having said nothing when Iranians did die in their thousands at the hands of the theocratic tyrants who rule over them. They’re going to be forced, by events, to make a spectacle of their own depthless hypocrisy, to expose to the world the cant and outright inhumanity that too often fuels what passes for ‘anti-imperialism’ these days.

It’s happening already. No sooner had the US and Israel launched airstrikes against regime targets inside Iran than the anti-war left was fuming all over the internet. They’re raging against these ‘rogue states’ that have declared war not only on Iran but on ‘the whole world’. It’s an ‘illegal war of aggression’, they say. ‘It’s US imperialist aggression’, they cry. Early reports that there have been small numbers of civilian casualties have got them hollering about ‘murder’. So it’s murder when Iranian innocents tragically die as a result of war but not a big deal when Iranian innocents are intentionally butchered by Islamist monsters who loathe them for wanting freedom?

Protests are already being planned. There’s an ‘emergency protest’ outside Downing St today. ‘Hands off Iran’ is the rallying cry. I’ll say it: if you didn’t say ‘Hands off Iran’s dissidents’ during the revolution of the past two months, then I don’t want to hear a damn word from you about the striking of the regime. If you didn’t say ‘Hands off the freedom fighters’, ‘Hands off women’s hair’ or ‘Hands off their throats’ as untold numbers of Iranians were massacred by the regime and its religious heavies from Iraq and Lebanon, then spare us your moral posturing. For you have already made it clear that Iranian life and liberty are utterly meaningless to you.

Where were your ‘emergency protests’ in solidarity with the millions of workers and students who have been waging a most valiant revolt against the Islamic Republic? I attended two of the big pro-Iranian gatherings in London and the keffiyeh classes were notable by their absence. Not one of those bourgeois preeners who have worn down the soles of their shoes by marching every week ‘for Gaza’ could be arsed to say a single word ‘for Iran’. If the reported deaths of some regime goons make you angrier than the proven deaths of thousands of everyday Iranians, then it’s not Iran you sympathise with – it’s the ruthless theocracy that has been squatting on that once great nation for nearly 50 years now.

How do we explain a moral universe where there can be more fury over strikes against a government than there was over that government’s mass murder of its own citizens? This, sadly, is what has become of ‘anti-imperialism’. That old noble cause was once about defending the independence of nation states that found themselves in the crosshairs of the Great Powers. In recent years, however, it has curdled into a cynical, blind loathing for America. It’s just anti-Westernism now. It is fuelled less by a love of sovereign rights than by a kind of cultish self-flagellation, where the fashionable suspicion of all things Western gets falsely dolled up as ‘anti-war activism’.

This idea that the West is always wicked, and thus its enemies deserve empathy, is less the heir to the great peace movements of old than an outgrowth of the anti-civilisational trends that run riot in the academy and across the cultural establishment. We end up in the sick-making situation where the moral guardians of the new left are silent when a people’s revolt is savagely put down but agitated when the men responsible for it get a missile through their bedroom window. Because according to the juvenile commandments of anti-Westernism, America is the source of every earthly problem. Thus when America causes a death in Iran, it’s World War III, it’s a crime against humanity. Yet when the regime causes infinitely more deaths in Iran, meh.

There’s a curious reverse racism to this insistence on blaming the West for everything bad. It infantilises the regimes of the world, treating their crimes almost as instances of diminished responsibility rather than true offences against the human spirit. To see imperialism in action, look no further than the Islamic Republic. It deploys cruel proxies to enforce its theocratic writ everywhere from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It green-lit the Islamofascist invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, as a warning to both the Jewish State and the Saudis who were repairing their relationship with it. It calls home its brutish proxies every now and then to deploy them against the Iranian people themselves – classic coloniser behaviour. If you’re an anti-imperialist, the Islamic Republic should offend your ever moral fibre.

I know, it has long been a tactic of the interventionist lobby to call the critics of their wars ‘pro-regime’. Those of us who opposed the lie-fuelled invasion of Iraq and the reckless US-UK intervention in Libya were slandered as Saddam sycophants and Gaddafi apologists. But in this instance, isn’t it justified? ‘Anti-war’ leftists made apologies for Hamas. They shed more tears over the exploding bollocks of Hezbollah militants than they did over the Druze kids killed by those militants. They chanted for the anti-Semitic brutes of Iran’s personal army in Yemen – the Houthis. There is a serious discussion to be had about the wisdom of what is happening right now. Many of us remain wary of external intervention, believing it is more likely to deepen regional and global tensions rather than liberate the oppressed populace. But we are well within our rights to wonder if those saying ‘Hands off Iran’ really mean ‘Hands off this regime that slaughters innocent men and women because at least it is anti-American like us’.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.