If you want to know what treachery means, look no further than the reactionary march through London on Saturday. To see the true meaning of betrayal, the true meaning of duplicity, the true meaning of knifing an already oppressed people in the back, witness those dumb Londoners singing the praises of the Islamic Republic at the very moment the great people of Iran are fighting to dislodge that wicked regime. ‘Freedom!’, cry young Iranians. ‘I don’t think so’, reply the Islamism-addled freaks of the British capital.
Hitting the streets to laud the ruthless theocrats of Tehran would be bad at any time. Doing it when thousands of people have been massacred by those theocrats for the ‘crime’ of longing for liberty is unforgivable. And yet it happened. Right here in free, modern London. In their thousands they traipsed to spout their conformist drivel about the dastardly Jewish State and their harebrained belief that the ayatollahs of Iran are a force for good. It was dolled up as ‘a protest’ but really it was a mass dancing on the graves of those butchered by the mullahs.
The march was called by the Palestine Coalition, a caucus of every bourgeois arsehole who mistakes hating Israel for having a personality. From the keffiyeh clowns of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign to the knackered hippies of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, they swarmed the streets to mourn the thousands of innocents put to death by Iran’s tyrants. Only joking – they were wailing about Israel. Well, what else is there?
Indeed, far from offering solidarity to Iranians, some of these fake progressives mocked those poor souls. Some cheered their killers. Some carried placards featuring the face of Ayatollah Khamenei. Others waved the flag of the Islamic Republic. And of course there was the usual demented ‘anti-Zionism’ that has seized both the liberal middle classes and Islamist radicals like a particularly stubborn pox. Privileged Gen Zers wailed about ‘kicking the Zionists out, out, out’, even miming kick movements to show just what kind of violence they’d love to visit on the evil, squatting Jews of the Holy Land. ‘Globalise the intifada’, they chanted, to make their violent urges crystal clear.
It was an orgy of bigotry of the like we have sadly got used to since 7 October 2023. But this time even worse. This was, to all intents and purposes, a pro-murder rally. It was a march in defence of medieval religious violence. It was a mass act of excuse-making for the apocalyptic slaying of thousands of civilians. I don’t want to hear a peep from the brunching classes who will plead: ‘We were only there to show our support for Gaza.’ Because the minute you saw the flag of the Islamic Republic, the minute you saw the ayatollah’s face, the minute you saw mobs praising those butchers in Tehran, you should have fled. That you didn’t, that you were content to rub along with apologists for Islamist tyranny, speaks volumes. It suggests your unhinged loathing for Israel has fried every last one of your moral faculties.
Not content with gushing over Iran’s Islamist murderers, some praised their anti-Semitic proxies, too. There were calls to de-proscribe not only Palestine Action but also Hezbollah and Hamas. Hezbollah’s goons have been deployed to brutally suppress the freedom-yearning people of Iran. Just imagine you are a 21-year-old Iranian woman whose face has been caved in by some misogynistic brute from Lebanon and then you see people in London standing not with you but with him. Calling not for you to be liberated from religious tyranny but for him to be liberated from proscription by the British government. The sense of betrayal would be overwhelming.
We need to grapple with the seriousness of what happened in London on Saturday. Mobs of people sided with Islamist fanaticism. They cosied up to the killers of women. They aligned themselves, publicly and proudly, with the venal ayatollah classes who are content to lay waste to thousands of lives if it will help them to preserve their Koranic power. Rarely has the moral decay of the protesting classes been so starkly on display – a psychotic religious regime massacres thousands and these people either say, ‘But what about Israel?!’ – or worse, ‘Good’.
Saturday’s march was a funeral for moral decency. No one of good conscience, no one of sound moral standing, can be the least bit confused as to what side to take in Iran. This is a theocracy that savagely punishes women for living freely, and which ruthlessly locks up dissenters and apostates, and which has brazenly slain thousands for daring to desire freedom. If you look at this and think to yourself, ‘It’s complicated’, then you have fully vacated the realm of reason. You have made your peace with barbarism.
Some say the Gazaholics of the activist class are being hypocritical. These people weep for the dead of Gaza but shrug their shoulders over the dead of Iran. I disagree. There’s moral consistency here. For in both their anti-Israel fury and their nonchalance over the butchery in Iran, these people are siding with the carnival of bloody reaction that is Islamist fanaticism. Their 7 October apologism and their shameful silence on the Iranian massacres spring from the same dark, warped source – a creepy sympathy for Islamism, a belief that this religious mania represents some kind of resistance to the West, to Israel, to capitalism, to modernity. Their anger over the war in Gaza and their coolness over the mass murder in Iran are both grim proof of the moral rot of identitarianism.
For how much longer will we surrender our streets to the Israel haters and the ayatollah fanclub? To the intifada-cheering middle classes and the mullah-loving Islamists? To those who think the Jewish nation fighting back against its invaders is ‘genocide’ but the mass murder of protesters by tooled-up theocrats is nothing to get worked up about? Mass solidarity with Iranians is what we need right now. The only time I want to see the flag of the Islamic Republic on the streets of London is in the minutes before someone sets it on fire.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
