Demonstrators set fire to official buildings and chanted ‘death to Khamenei’ as they marched in Tehran Credit: UGC/AFP via Getty Images |
There are double standards, and then there is the Labour Government’s despicable insouciance towards the suffering of the Iranian people.
For the past two weeks, brave protesters across the long-suffering Persian nation have been standing up, in ever greater numbers, to the mullahs’ evil Islamist regime. For their heroism, many protesters have been massacred, and yet they have kept fighting for freedom, against fascistic rule and for real, tangible human rights.
The total collapse of the regime would be an extraordinary event: it would surely deal Islamist extremism a blow equivalent to that suffered by communism when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet empire imploded in 1991.
The stakes are thus extremely high, and this story ought to concern everybody in the Western world who has had to battle the growth of Islamism, extremism, sectarianism and terrorism, as we have had to in the UK.
The Iranian regime is also extremely active in intelligence and spying, and is a close ally of Moscow. Tehran describes Britain as the Little Satan to America’s Great Satan, a moniker also extended to Israel, a country the anti-Semitic regime in Iran has vowed to obliterate. Iran’s proxies include Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and various groups in Iraq. Regime change in Tehran is overwhelmingly in the British national interest.
Under such circumstances, were you a little naive, you might have expected Labour and its celebrity allies to go all out in defence of the Iranian dissidents. Many Leftists are obsessed with the Middle East, after all, and “never here Keir” (as his enemies dub him because of his endless foreign jaunts) clearly cares greatly about foreign affairs. He has spoken twice in recent days to Trump about Venezuela. He also wants to fix Greenland.
Why, then, does the Labour Government seem so uninterested in Iran? Why is the Left so ambivalent? Where is the solidarity, the avatars, the flags, the level of support that Ukraine has seen, the actors and musicians? Just like when Israel was attacked by the savages of Hamas, and many stayed silent or condemned Israel even before it had time to defend itself, it would seem that the Iranian dissidents fall into the wrong category of victim.
The hypocrisy is sickening. Starmer, Lord Hermer and the other Left-wing lawyers would love us to believe that they have dedicated their careers to justice and fighting for the underdog, so why don’t they fight for the Iranians? We are supposed to believe that the Government’s commitment to international law is what guides its approach to immigration, to Chagos, to prisons and policing, yet those sorts of rules don’t seem to animate them when it comes to Tehran’s atrocities.
We are meant to think that our Left-wing elites are implacably opposed to systemic oppression and persecution, especially when it is being meted out by a deranged, theocratic tyranny, but apparently not when it emanates from this particular totalitarian regime. There was a time when they claimed to care about women’s rights (though they have gone quiet on that front over the past few years); they are certainly still meant to oppose police brutality and any instance of authorities killing protesters (and they are genuinely upset at the death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis).
Yet when faced with a truly evil regime, an actual police state that kills and tortures dissidents, that has a record of genuine mass abuse of human rights, they have sat on their hands. Much of the activist Left has ignored or downplayed the events in Iran, proving one devastating truth: the Labour Party and its ideological fellow travellers are infected by a two-tier morality. They pick and they choose. They rightly hate Putin, so they defend Ukraine; they wrongly despise Israel, so they behave abominably after Oct 7; now they appear confused at best, or downright hostile at worst, towards Iran’s wonderful freedom fighters.
This reality is deeply distressing. The same people who were obsessed with the conflict in Gaza and all too often gave succour to a radically anti-Western movement couldn’t give two hoots about the fate of the Iranian protesters, a radically pro-Western and anti-Islamist movement. The activists who detest everything Trump does cannot be bothered to speak out against the Ayatollahs, the real anti-democratic strongmen.
Too many people on the Left have an existential problem: they can no longer tell the good guys apart from the bad guys. They are morally confused. They conflate the oppressors and the oppressed. They shouted “Free Palestine”, but cannot call for a “Free Iran”. Where are the mass condemnations of the killings, of the kidnappings, of the beatings? For shame.
Roland Oliphant: The key signs the Islamic Republic is about to fall ➤ |
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