A new item has now been added to the left’s ‘omnicause’ – the list of views you have to hold to be a truly ‘progressive’ activist. Alongside trans rights and opposition to Israel, you are now expected to show support for the Iranian theocracy. Yes, those lovely, fuzzy mullahs who like to publicly execute homosexuals and spend an inordinate amount of time and energy oppressing women. It seems some on the left have now decided that those fellas are the good guys.
From the left’s perspective, it makes a warped kind of sense. The Israelis are the bad guys, in their view, and Iran is Israel’s enemy. Therefore, the Iranians must logically be the good guys. This thinking was demonstrated on Saturday, following Israel’s strikes on military targets in Iran. Pro-Iran chants and signs could be seen and heard on one of the ubiquitous pro-Palestine marches in London.
This is such a childish view of the world that it is difficult to fathom how grown adults can buy into it. The Iranian theocracy is one of the least liberal governments on Earth. It is a regime that imposes the death penalty hundreds of times a year – not just for homosexuality, but also for all manner of other things we wouldn’t even consider crimes in the West. It runs a ruthless authoritarian state that hammers away at any internal opposition in the most brutal ways imaginable.
Some on the left will claim that they aren’t sticking up for the regime – they are simply saying that Iran was attacked in an ‘unprovoked’ manner by Israel. But you have to either be ignorant of the facts or be taking the mickey to adopt this position. The Iranian theocracy has funded both Hamas and Hezbollah to a huge degree, providing them with intelligence along the way. Hamas was, of course, responsible for the pogrom on 7 October 2023, which started the Gaza war. And Hezbollah has been bombing northern Israel since 8 October. Both have also helped keep alive the myth that if the Palestinians just give it one more push then, from the river to the sea, the ‘Zionist entity’ will be no more. This has resulted in more Palestinian suffering than can be imagined.
That’s before we get into all the other terrible stuff the Iranian theocracy has got up to over the past few decades, including helping the Russians in their colonialist war against Ukraine. Iran should be seen as the bad guys from any even slightly liberal viewpoint.
Yet the left increasingly lives in a deluded dream world of its own making. Losing to Donald Trump should have been a wake-up call. But instead, most leftists have only retreated further into fantasy land.
We saw the left’s misapprehensions hit a wall of reality again over the past week. Not in Iran, but in Egypt, where hundreds of Western leftists with too much time and money on their hands turned up in Cairo hoping to join a ‘Global March to Gaza’. They clearly expected to be welcomed with open arms by the Egyptians (‘Our white saviours! Finally, you have arrived to help us!’, you can imagine them dreaming). This fantasy was cruelly exposed by local Egyptians, who met them with scorn and threw bottles in their direction. Worse, the Egyptian authorities took away their passports and deported those who would leave quietly. Those who refused were kettled in the desert. This was another opportunity for them to eventually see sense. You will be unsurprised to learn that, as of the time of writing, few of them have.
The pinnacle of this episode was no doubt the ‘Welsh nurse’. Footage shows one of the marchers who self-identifies as a nurse begging indifferent Egyptian soldiers to let him save Palestine, as surely only he can. ‘For love, stand with your brothers and sisters in Palestine. I have never seen or experienced anything like it, please. I will beg you, allow us to march to Palestine. Please, you’ve got to listen to me’, he pleads, before dipping his toe into some surreal comedy. ‘The women are trying to feed their dying babies. And their breasts are empty. Do you know what that smells like?’ The soldiers were unmoved.
It was a harsh lesson about reality colliding with childish whims. Egypt, which fears Hamas-style terrorism spilling over into its territory, was never going to open the Gaza border at the behest of a few activists. Yet I can practically guarantee that the leftists on that march will learn nothing from their failures. They will somehow find a way to blame Israel. Failing that, they will fall back on the old trope of the evils of the Western world. Anything to maintain the bubble in which they live.
Watch out, ‘Queers for Iran’ is surely coming next.
Nick Tyrone is a journalist, author and think-tanker. His latest novel, The Patient, is out now.
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