Reliable reporting from American outlets CBS and Fox News puts the death toll in Iran, at the time of writing, at almost 12,000 civilians, the vast majority of whom have been killed by their own government. The anti-regime protests began three weeks ago; which means that if slaughter on this scale persisted over the timeline of the Israel-Gaza war, the final death toll would be 416,000 people, as opposed to the 72,000 the UN estimated died in Gaza over the two years of that conflict.
Yet, as I look out my window, and look at my television screens, I see no mass western protest movement. I see no urgent calls to expel Iranian ambassadors. I see no special sanctions bills being introduced in the Irish Oireachtas. I see no expressions of deep concern from the former Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. Instead of hourly tweets from Simon Harris, we’re getting very muted expressions of concern.
Note well what I am not saying here: I am not saying that protests against the war in Gaza were necessarily always illegitimate, or that many Irish people were not genuinely horrified by the slaughter. I am instead asking a question: Why are the political left so lacking in horror, by contrast, at the actions of the Iranian Government – which is of course the world’s leading global sponsor of Hamas and other terrorist groups?
Over the years, there have been half-hearted attempts to explain the difference in left-wing reaction to various events. “We expect better from a democracy” is one, for example, which suggests that Israel or the United States should be held to different standards because they are culturally “western” countries.
But this, of course, is entirely at odds with any concept of a universal declaration of human rights. What it says is we care more about your rights if you are oppressed by a democracy than if you are oppressed by a tyranny and it is in fact a clear admission that the identity of your oppressor is more important than the identity of the victims.
This is not just an Irish phenomenon. The global institutions of the left are largely silent: There have been zero UN resolutions on Iran. Not one. There have been zero emergency sessions called to discuss events. There have been no commissions of enquiry instituted. The South African Government has not rushed to the ICJ to lodge criminal complaints, and the Irish Government has not joined them. Amnesty International issued one statement on January 9th, in which their chief complaint was about Iran cracking down on the internet. There are at the time of writing no flotillas on the way to bring aid to oppressed Iranians, nor will there be. Social media is not festooned with flags of the Iranian resistance, nor will it be.
Others closer to home are at least more honest: Some of this country’s leading anti-Israel activists – I am talking here about people like Tadhg Hickey and Kneecap Manager Daniel Lambert, the latter of whom, in the midst of the regime’s slaughter, retweeted a tweet urging the west to lift sanctions on the Iranian Government – have openly shared pro-regime content. Often, this takes the mealy-mouthed (and nonsensical) form of “I’m no fan of the Ayatollah but Israel is worse”.
What conclusions are we to draw from this? We can judge a person or an institution’s priorities, fairly, by what they publicly prioritise. And the political left, both at home and internationally, clearly does not publicly prioritise the rights of the Iranian people to be free from the terror of their own government.
One would almost get the impression that the calculations being made are as callous as you could imagine: That the survival of the regime is a regrettable necessity, because the fall of the regime would be good for Israel and the United States, who are the left’s true enemies. If thousands of Iranians must die, then they are dying in the good cause of leaving the Iranian Ayatollah and his nuclear programme and his funding of Islamic head-choppers worldwide on the geopolitical chess board.
When you look at this, it puts concern about deaths in Gaza into a slightly different light, does it not? After all, Hamas carefully constructed over many years history’s most impregnable series of bomb shelters, running for hundreds of miles underneath the Gaza strip – and then systematically denied civilians entry to those tunnels during the war. Hamas’s fighting forces stayed underground, while the civilians were left above ground to face life as potential collateral damage. The deaths of those civilians was then counted as evidence of Israeli barbarism. When deaths were politically useful, in other words, they were mourned. Now, while deaths are politically inconvenient, they are downplayed and ignored.
The Iranian regime has no other obvious value to the left. It is not a democracy. It is not even really socialist. There is no left wing group on earth that says “my country should be more like Iran”. No – the only value that the Mullahs have to the left is that they provide a counterbalance to the United States and Israel in the Middle East. Were it to fall, then Netanyahu’s victory in the wars since October 7th would be complete and total.
And in a great many minds, it is clear that tens of thousands of murdered Iranian civilians is preferable, on balance, to that outcome.
The left would not be the first group of people in history to make such a twisted calculation. In 1944, Stalin tactically halted the Red Army’s march on Warsaw because he wanted the Polish resistance, then fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw uprising, to be defeated and weakened. He also denied the Western Allies – who had backed his war efforts – the use of Soviet Airbases to drop supplies to the beleaguered Poles. He saw the slaughter of the resistance in Poland as worthwhile in service of a greater good: the cold war he knew was coming.
Stalin, of course, was one of history’s greatest monsters. He, at least, did not have the downside of thinking himself the good guy. What excuse does the left, in Ireland and internationally, have today?