The Ignorance of Iran’s Western Cheerleaders

In Tel Aviv a man walks past a mural with the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom," used during the 2022 Iranian protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, who died while in custody for allegedly violating the dress code for women, on October 14, 2024.

In Tel Aviv a man walks past a mural with the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” used during the 2022 Iranian protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, who died while in custody for allegedly violating the dress code for women, on October 14, 2024.

Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP

Pro-Palestine leftists have become apologists for an Islamic theocracy.

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It should surprise precisely no one that Western leftists have decided to put their weight behind an antisemitic, misogynist, theocratic, murderous regime. When Israel launched its attack on Iran last week, the pro-Palestine set immediately began to cheer for the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

British journalist Owen Jones declared that Israel had “launched a new war of aggression against Iran.” Pro-Palestine protesters in London waved Iranian flags. In Berlin, demonstrators clapped, cheered and played music to celebrate Iran’s attack against Israel. Even European leaders, like UK prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, who have tentatively supported Israel, called for “restraint” on all sides. 

The justification for this response from activists, politicians, and commentators alike is a supposed sympathy with the Palestinian people—that their cheerleading for Iran is borne out of compassion for the suffering of innocent civilians, rather than for outright Israelophobia. This  response has exposed the moral bankruptcy of the pro-Palestine movement. Iran is by no means some noble power, bravely fighting in the defence of an oppressed people. It is a barbaric theocratic regime that is dead-set on the destruction of Israel.

As much as the Iranian government has declared on X to “Remember we didn’t initiate it,” this is patently false. For starters, Israeli intelligence claims to have discovered that Iran was planning to weaponise its enriched uranium and would have potentially been able to produce 50 nuclear bombs. Iran had also already launched almost 200 ballistic missiles directly at Israel back in October. And it was, let’s not forget, Iran that helped start Israel’s war against Hamas in the first place. Hamas is one of the many Iranian proxies operating in the region, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. And it was, of course, the Iranian-backed Hamas fighters that executed the mass rape, murder, torture, and kidnapping on October 7th 2023. 

The Iranian regime is one fuelled but a vile, antisemitic hatred. It has reiterated time and again its express intent to wipe Israel—and no doubt by extension, the Jewish people—off the face of the Earth. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as recently as 2020 described Israel as  a “cancerous tumour” that “will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.” This echoes the sentiment of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad —who was a Holocaust denier to boot—that the “Zionist entity” was to be “wiped from the pages of history.” This is exactly the project that Hamas began with the October 7th pogrom. 

This is precisely why the cheering for Iran in the West is so sinister and so indefensible. But it is clear, too, that European and American ‘pro-Palestine’ activists have no idea what they are even cheering for. The charitable assumption is that they must not realise that this is the same regime that quite literally kills women for not wearing hijabs in public spaces. Remember Mahsa Amini? She was the 22-year-old woman who was highly likely to have been killed as a result of police brutality, after she was arrested by Iran’s so-called Morality Police in 2022. She was detained, severely beaten, and died for the ‘crime’ of wearing a headscarf incorrectly. 

Remember, too, the protests that erupted across Iran in the wake of Amini’s death. Iranians took to the streets to protest Iran’s medieval, misogynistic laws and to demand “life and freedom.”

This sparked the largest widespread revolt in the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and a brutal crackdown. Over 550 protesters were thought to have been killed in clashes with the police, including 68 children. This state, according to the delusional pro-Palestine crowd, is the ‘good guy’ in the Israel-Iran conflict. 

Of course, women aren’t the only victims of Iran’s repressive rule. Any and all forms of dissent are harshly punished. Political prisoners often die under suspicious circumstances and in appalling conditions. The legal age of marriage is 13 for girls and 15 for boys. Unlike in Israel, where Tel Aviv remains renowned for its gay scene, homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran. Even foreign nationals are kidnapped and sentenced to be executed. 

To characterise Iran as leading some brave resistance against a supposedly oppressive state is utterly delusional. Iran is the oppressor. It is the very antithesis of everything Western progressives claim to care about. There is no world in which you can credibly stand for human rights, women’s rights, or democratic freedoms, while simultaneously celebrating or excusing the actions of the Islamic Republic. But this is exactly the kind of mental gymnastics we are now seeing being performed in the streets of European cities and in column inches. 

It’s hard to imagine any other explanation for leftists’ flirtation with Iran than their hatred of Israel. It is certainly telling that the Left would choose to back a literal autocratic, antisemitic, woman-hating theocracy over the world’s only Jewish state and the only stable democracy in the Middle East. This is quite clearly the kneejerk reaction of a movement that hates Israel far more than it cares about Palestinians.  It also betrays, one suspects, the whiff of something distinctly more antisemitic.

The pro-Palestine crowd are too blinded by their hatred of Israel to realise they are championing a regime that would likely imprison and potentially even kill large numbers from their ranks. If ‘Queers for Palestine’ was a baffling concept, surely ‘Westerners for Iran’ is even more absurd. In a desperate attempt to cast Israel as the ultimate villain, progressive activists are flirting with a state that executes gay people and brutalises women for showing their hair. If this doesn’t make it abundantly clear that the pro-Palestine Left doesn’t actually care about Palestine, nothing will. 

Lauren Smith is a London-based columnist for europeanconservative.com

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