Iran breaks the narrative
Note the strange silence...
Within hours of news breaking that Gazan terrorists had murdered every Jew they could find on October 7 2023, Western cities were awash with Palestine flags, celebrating the people who had carried out that massacre under the guise of ‘standing against oppression’. By contrast, weeks into the deadly suppression of Iranian protests by unelected, medieval mullahs, I have seen precisely one pre-revolutionary Iranian flag being flown in London.
Everybody with more than six working brain cells (which, to be fair, rules out virtually our entire commentariat) knows why this disparity exists. The situation in Iran fundamentally undermines the narrative that states ‘Islam = peace and love’, and by extension the idea that anyone who rejects that framing—and raises concerns about the societal implications of its importation and spread—is a weird bigot (for a longer read on how this massive gaslighting operation works, see the essay linked here).
Events in Palestine, meanwhile, are relentlessly spun to portray jihadists driven by the same worldview as those currently brutalising Iranians in their millions as the victims, when in fact the opposite is true.
As such, within large swathes of the Muslim community, as well as among leftists and elite-liberal moralists, there is an obsessive focus placed on one, and not on the other.
The correct analysis.
A classic.
It is staggering, but not surprising, to watch the people who claim to be so deeply emotionally affected by events in the Muslim world when it comes to Palestine go mute as protesters are beaten, imprisoned, and executed for opposing the Islamic regime in Iran (if they aren’t actively defending the Ayatollah). After all, this type of deeply selective outrage is foundational to their entire movement. Their lack of concern about the barbarism in Iran is no different from their total disinterest in the genocide of African Christians by Muslim groups, which has claimed vastly more lives than the war in Gaza — a war initiated by Islamist fanatics. Or their silence about the lynching of Pakistani atheists, the slaughter of Indian Hindus, the beheading of French teachers, the execution of homosexuals and apostates across the Middle East…
In short, the agenda they are pushing is a trojan horse for Islamic sectarianism, wrapped up in the language of ‘social justice’. And it has been widely adopted and amplified across our cultural institutions.
The protests in Iran are inspiring in and of themselves. But beyond that, they are throwing some of the most sinister currents in contemporary socio-political life into sharp relief.
Start calling this stuff out for what it is.
Who could have predicted that?!
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