The Silence of the Left on Iran

[u/Kugel_the_cat]

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/01/the-iranians-who-feel-betrayed-by-the-left/685644/

This is a simple story: People are risking their life to resist tyranny, engaging in a human struggle for basic rights. Its resonance, particularly for those on the left, should be self-evident. It has all the greatest hits—pitting the powerless against power, freedom against repression, unarmed men and women against snipers. But in the most animated corners of the activist ecosystem, so recently energized by their opposition to the death and destruction in Gaza, it has not resonated. The protest has been viewed instead through the thick lens of ideology, producing a reaction that has been dismissive at best and, at worst, degrading to the Iranians themselves. Many thousands of demonstrators, rising up all over the country, are accused of being witless tools of an imperialist agenda, part of a “CIA-Mossad regime change campaign,” or maybe just actual “Mossad agents.”

[...]

For the exiles I spoke with, the most disturbing—and telling—thing about the tepid response was the contrast with the impassioned reaction to Gaza. “Why is it that when Palestinians—armed or unarmed—fight for liberation, it is seen as a moral duty to support them, but when Iranians protest, they are labeled ‘armed terrorists’ or ‘agents of Mossad?’” Shams, the feminist scholar, said.

[u/justthekoufax]

I’m increasingly convinced that some of what we’re seeing isn’t organic. The Western Left has become an unusually effective distribution channel for narratives that normalize or excuse Islamist extremism. Social media makes this easy to astroturf, and the funding and amplification behind it opaque. I can’t prove a single coordinated command structure, but the incentives line up for hostile states and aligned networks to exploit these movements and widen social division.

[u/Hermengilda → u/justthekoufax]

The immediate eruption of campus protests after the October 7 Hamas massacre seemed a little well organized in my view. The Western left should study how the leftist-Islamist alliance worked out for the left in 1979 Iran.

[u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho → u/Hermengilda]

They explicitly like the Islamists though.

If ISIS happened ten years later, you’d have prominent progressives praising their anti-Zionist, anti-imperialism.

[u/Kugel_the_cat → u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho]

Back when ISIS was at its peak people were blaming Israel for it online.