The rank hypocrisy on display from anti-Israel fanatics who are ignoring the plight of Iranian protesters has an easy explanation: It’s not really hypocrisy at all. Pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah agitators are objectively on the side of the mullahs and IRGC thugs who are murdering peaceful Iranian protesters at will.
Ian Bremmer spoke for many yesterday when he said that American “college activists would gain a little credibility if they were demonstrating against the brutal repression in [I]ran.”
Yet it would be, frankly, shocking if they did so. The brave men and women of Iran have been out in the streets making declarations such as: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” This slogan, which is not new among Iranian anti-regime protesters, is a statement of opposition to the funding and support of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are the regime’s own proxies.
And what did the campus Gaza protests look like? Here are a couple of common sights: Hezbollah flags and shirts with Hamas officials’ faces on them.
The campus protesters are aligned with the murderous regime. Why would they advocate for the innocent Iranians who just want freedom? They are in the vanguard of the propaganda apparatus of the Islamic Republic’s goons—the very ones who have been painting the streets with the blood of innocent Iranians.
It’s like asking: Why aren’t the mullahs doing more to oppose the mullahs?
There is another dimension to the dishonesty and moral repugnance of Western academia’s Gaza industry. Iran is the preeminent colonialist, imperial power of the modern Middle East. So where are all the “decolonization” specialists?
The answer is: They don’t exist. Decolonization theory is an academic hallucination. There is no such animal. It’s a fake discipline.
Now, this sounds harsh. After all, anticolonial ideology is all over America’s elite colleges and universities. These institutions have spent millions to employ professors and build a Potemkin academic architecture around them. And think of the students! If you pay full tuition and dormitory costs to an Ivy League school, you may very well spend nearly $100,000 a year.
Decolonization theory’s secondhand smoke has also insinuated itself into broader disciplines like history and political science and the like. Which means a fair number of students have paid in full for a false education. The years lost, the futures squandered, the money wasted—it’s hard to fully comprehend the scale of the con.
Am I being unkind? Yes, but: I believe we have a responsibility to be unkind to the people who are on the wrong side of this one. Regarding Israel, the Iranian protesters are far from a monolith—many are supportive of the Jewish state, many oppose it, still others are somewhere in the middle. But we know for a fact that the actual forces arrayed against the Jewish state are the very same forces arrayed against the Iranian people.
It was an Iranian government satrapy that, on October 7, burned Israeli children alive in their homes, systematically raped and tortured women and men of all ages, took hundreds of hostages including young children and the elderly, paraded around the coffin of an infant murdered in captivity, left a trail of blood and terror unseen since the Nazis redefined the word evil.
Lebanon has been a basket case because of a different Iranian proxy. A third—the monstrous Assad regime in Syria—gassed children and likely caused the deaths of half a million of its own population.
And now this barbaric empire is teetering. We call this “justice,” or perhaps at least “progress.” In truth, very few of the many victims of colonialist Iran will see earthly justice done.
Nobody was “fooled” into supporting this—at least nobody who didn’t want to be fooled into it. The sociopaths who created the modern architecture of decolonization theory and its branches gave untold numbers of young adults the excuse they were already looking for to support the wanton murder of Jews and the destruction of anything representing Western society.
Over the past few days, there has been a slight shift in tone from many Democrats. They have found the words to unequivocally condemn Hamas and its open supporters, for example. The reason for this shift is clear: They understand that they cannot credibly condemn the Iranian regime’s identical behavior in one place and support it in another.
They will almost certainly continue to gleefully spread the Iranian war propaganda about Israel, so their rhetorical shift is modest in scope. Nonetheless, it seems to be an implicit nod to the fact that America’s enemies are Israel’s enemies are the enemies of the Iranian people yearning to be free. There are many names in this conflict, but there are only two sides.
