DEAFENING SILENCE

It is no secret that the Iranian regime is an authoritarian state that enforces religious conformity through violence and fear. The ordinary Iranian people  are risking, and losing, their lives  in an attempt to reclaim their country and their freedom  - from one of the most frightening theocracies on earth. The regime kills those who dare to protest, having oppressed its population since the Shah was driven out. It is also no secret that the death penalty is issued disproportionately among Iran’s persecuted minorities – including Christians, Baha’i and Kurds.

Iranian women who refuse compulsory veiling, students who chant for freedom, artists who risk prison for a line of poetry, and civilians abducted from their homes all find themselves strangely sidelined. Their suffering is real, but it is not useful. Their humanity is undeniable, but it does not flatter the ideological needs of the moment.

At the same time, Iran directs its fury outward, threatening Israel relentlessly. Terrorism does not appear from nowhere; it must be cultivated, through indoctrination, hatred, and the deliberate radicalization of the young, until they are willing to die for it. That poison has now spread far beyond Iran’s borders.

The world’s most organised and persistent outrage is aimed, not at these regimes which support terror, but at one of the smallest minorities on earth: the Jews, and their state.

But all this apparently doesn’t bother the average Western student as much as Israel’s response in Gaza. The Iranian-sponsored, Hamas-led invasion and mega atrocity of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 were murdered, 251 kidnapped, thousands wounded, and tens of thousands displaced from their homes - many of which were destroyed.  

So why the silence?

Simply put, opposing the Iranian regime has become inconvenient. And it may not be incidental that Iran’s leadership has, for decades, pledged itself to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state - a reality that renders condemnation of Tehran uncomfortably close to defending Israel.

Israel and the United States are assigned the role of primary villains, and any force positioned against them benefits from a kind of moral insulation. Iran, despite its internal brutality, occupies a strange protected space, not because it is admired, but because criticizing it risks appearing to align oneself, however indirectly, with the assumed evils of the West. This same pattern revealed itself starkly after October 7. In the wake of mass murder, rape, and kidnapping, one might reasonably have expected unwavering universal condemnation. And yet, here too, the silence was striking.

Many of the same cultural figures who speak readily about injustice could not bring themselves to say a word about the hostages. Their captivity did not register as a moral emergency. Their release, when it occurred, was not celebrated. There were no statements of relief, no acknowledgments of suffering, no insistence, however minimal, that kidnapping civilians is wrong regardless of context.

This was not ignorance. It was purposeful omission. Silence was the safer bet. The same logic that applies to Iran.

This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion: it is as unfashionable to support Iranian protesters as it was to insist on the basic humanity of Israeli hostages - and the right of Israel to defend itself from implacable enemies, whose only mission in life is Israel’s total destruction.

Silence, in moments like this, is not neutral. It is a position. And it communicates something unmistakable. It tells the world that solidarity is selective. That some victims are too inconvenient to acknowledge. It suggests that suffering alone is insufficient to warrant concern, that it must first pass an ideological test.