This leftist critique of criticism of Islamism, of Islamic states and of blasphemy laws, effectively mirrors the Islamic Republic’s own self-justification – that it is engaged in a battle against the imposition of Western culture and norms. This is not just an intellectual move on the part of prominent Western left-wingers. It has practical, political consequences, too.
It allows privileged Western leftists to ignore the resistance and struggles of the Iranian people themselves. To wilfully disregard the strong strain of anti-Hamas, anti-Hezbollah feeling in Iran – ‘death to Palestine’ has been heard chanted at protests since at least 2018. It allows them to dismiss the Green Movement demonstrations in 2009, after a disputed presidential election, as just so much Western propaganda. And to downplay, in the name of anti-imperialism, the huge wave of anti-regime protests at the tail-end of 2019, which cost the lives of over a thousand protesters.
Indeed, against the background of the 2019 protests, leading American leftists, including Angela Davis, Doug Henwood and Vijay Prashad, signed a ‘Letter against US imperialism’, effectively defending the Islamic regime against US and Israeli ‘aggression’, calling for ‘political stability’ in Iran, and dismissing talk of liberal democracy and civil rights as just so much neocolonial cant.
Then there were the ‘Women, life, freedom’ protests which shook Iran in 2022. Hundreds of thousands bravely took to the streets, following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who had been detained by the regime’s morality police for showing her hair in public. Yet the Western left seemed far happier looking the other way, as Iranians put their lives on their line in the fight for the most basic of freedoms.
What we’ve seen over the past week, as zealous ‘progressives’ happily take the side of one of the most repressive, anti-Semitic states on Earth, is hardly a surprise. It is the culmination of the Western left’s dark, cultural turn. Of the degeneration of its anti-imperialism into an all-encompassing anti-Westernism.
Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1978, an Iranian feminist took issue with the Western left’s embrace of the Islamo-leftism then insurgent in Iran. She wrote that while Islam may appear as desirable to someone like Foucault, ‘many Iranians are like me, distressed and desperate about the thought of an “Islamic” government. We know what it is. Everywhere outside Iran, Islam serves as a cover for a feudal or pseudo-revolutionary oppression…’. She concluded that, ‘the left should not let itself be seduced by a cure that is perhaps worse than the disease’.
Too few Western leftists heeded her warning then. That they continue to be seduced by the ‘cure’ to Western-sickness, despite the reality of the Islamic Republic, is a sign of the left’s intellectual and moral collapse. Its descent into a form of radical reaction that the Ayatollah Khomeini himself would be proud of.
Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.
