Iranians are crying for freedom – where are the mass rallies by progressives? (aka "Iran’s lonely cry for freedom exposes progressive left’s selective outrage")
The activists who chanted for Palestine are silent as Iran’s brave people risk their lives fighting a brutal theocracy.
Right now, ordinary Iranians are revolting. Protesters chant Azadi – freedom in Farsi – into clouds of tear gas. Shopkeepers shut stalls. Security forces are cracking down.
Not since the 2022 uprising sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – arrested and killed for the crime of an “improper” headscarf – have Iranians protested in such numbers. In the years since, the Islamic Republic has offered its young population nothing but darkness: collapsing wages, sky-high inflation, mass unemployment, water shortages and electricity blackouts. The same regime that kills women for their hair now asks to be taken seriously as a good-faith partner in “dialogue” via a late-night social media post. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule has been exposed further as brutal, corrupt and incompetent.
In Australia, much of the self-styled progressive left is silent or selectively outraged. In the two years following October 7, venom was directed at one target only: Israel. University campuses, the Greens, some unions and weekly inner-city marches echoed with specious slogans about “Zios”, “genocide”, “apartheid” and “colonialism”. But as Iranians risk their lives chanting “Death to the dictator”, progressive righteousness evaporates.
Where is Bob Carr, the grand moraliser of Australian foreign policy, so eager to lecture Western democracies and former friends and allies but curiously quiet when a theocratic dictatorship is shooting its own people?
Where are the self-appointed spokespeople for “justice” and “human rights” who dominate the news cycle and social media whenever Israel is in the news? Where are the anti-Zionist “Azza Jews” insisting they speak for authentic Judaism and universal ethics? If ever there were a moment to demonstrate those ethics – real, not performative – this is precisely it.
This silence is striking because Iran is not some distant abstraction in Australian life, nor has Canberra treated it as one. We know about the regime’s surveillance, intimidation and attempted attacks on diaspora dissidents. The Albanese government has imposed Magnitsky-style sanctions on officials and entities responsible for human-rights abuses. Labor also proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation and expelled Iran’s ambassador, Ahmad Sadeghi, after the IRGC’s role emerged in the torching of the Adass Israel Synagogue, bombing of Jewish-owned businesses and an apparent assassination attempt on a Jewish communal leader.
Yet this campaign of terror – enabled by an anti-Semitic regime that treats Jews everywhere as legitimate targets – passed without mass progressive rallies or sustained outrage. Instead, we saw silence, equivocation and in some quarters the grotesque claim that the violence itself was a Zionist “false flag”.
The Iranian regime is not a misunderstood victim of Western or Israeli power. It is one of the most repressive governments on earth. It jails women for removing headscarfs. It executes dissidents at a rate unseen since the early years of the revolution. It bankrolls Hezbollah and Hamas while its own people queue for bread and fuel. It has spent decades perfecting the art of oppression and terror – and exporting it. For the older, less performative version of the Western left, Iran would be front and centre. Today, Iran doesn’t fit the preferred script.
The postmodern progressive left sees the world through a single moral prism: West bad, anti-West good. Power is flattened into binaries: coloniser v colonised, empire v resistance. Once you accept this logic, Iran’s ayatollahs become inconvenient. They claim to be “anti-imperialist”, so their crimes must be minimised, contextualised or ignored. The unspoken logic is brutal: no Jews, no news – a Shia regime slaughtering its own Shia population and secular opponents simply does not generate progressive urgency. So much for solidarity.
The inconvenient truth is that the brave Iranian protesters chanting Azadi are not denouncing the American “Great Satan” or “Zionism”. They are fighting a theocratic police state that has terrorised women, crushed unions, murdered students, persecuted minorities and has stolen the future from entire generations. They are fighting for precisely the freedoms – of speech and association, gender equality, secular law – that the left claims to cherish.
Where are the pro-Iranian rebellion rallies? The chants of “From the Gulf to the sea, Iran’s people will be free”? Open letters? Campus encampments? Conference motions? Where are the Queers for Iran? The Ayatollah’s regime criminalises same-sex relationships between men and women, with the maximum punishment being death. Why was it within the remit of this oddball radical Islamist-progressive alliance to rally for Palestinians caught up in a ghastly war initiated by Hamas but not muster the same solidarity for Ukrainians under siege from Vladimir Putin’s Russian gangster state, for North Koreans crushed under the Kim dynasty or for Uighurs and Taiwanese facing repression at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party? This selective morality didn’t emerge overnight. It is the product of decades of drift – from class-based politics and a genuine internationalism to toxic identity politics and faux anti-imperialism.
When it is named and shamed, as it is here, the postmodern left whines about “whatabboutism”. Once oppression is defined not by what regimes do but by who they are aligned against, victims become expendable. Iranian women tearing off headscarfs are inconvenient. Iranian workers protesting against inflation don’t fit on placards. Iranian Jews, Kurds, Baha’is and dissidents don’t neatly slot into a Western campus hierarchy of grievance.
So they disappear, literally in some cases. There is something morally discombobulating about Western progressive activists treating the ancient, magnificent Persian people as chess pieces in a grand struggle against the US and Israel. It denies them agency and allies. This moral collapse matters in Australia. When politics becomes a theatre of selective outrage, trust erodes. Voters notice. Working people notice. Migrant communities notice. Iranian and Jewish Aussies notice. They see which lives matter and which are quietly ignored. They saw it again at Bondi Beach, not only in the activist left’s uneasy response but new “false flag” claims, where mass murder is explained away rather than confronted head-on.
History is unforgiving to movements that excuse tyranny in the name of ideology. The Iranian regime will eventually fall. When it does, the question will not be whether Australians spoke up but who did. Because Azadi means freedom for everyone. Or it means nothing at all.
