THEY CHEERED BEFORE THE BODIES WERE COUNTED
Let us be entirely concrete about what parts of the Western left are lending their names and streets to.
In Iran, right now the regime hangs more people per capita than any other country on earth. Women are beaten and imprisoned for showing their hair. Mahsa Amini was killed in the custody of the morality police in 2022 for exactly that - and when Iranian women rose under the banner “Woman, Life, Freedom”, hundreds were shot in the streets and protesters executed after show trials.
Homosexuals face the death penalty. The Bahai minority is systematically persecuted. This is not history. This is every week.
And what do parts of the Western left do? They stay silent - or excuse it as “resistance to imperialism”. The same people who can find offense in a word, find no words for the women in Evin prison.
Against Israel, right now…
On October 7, 2023, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Civilians were murdered, burned, taken hostage. The Hamas charter is built on a prophecy about killing the Jews, and Tehran funds and arms the entire ring around Israel: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. “Death to Israel” is not a figure of speech. It is declared state policy.
And what did parts of the Western left do? They took to the streets - not to protest the massacre, but to support “the resistance”. Before the bodies were counted. They tear down posters of hostages. They chant about Palestine “from the river to the sea” - a demand for Israel’s erasure - and call it a struggle for freedom.
Meanwhile in the West, the same circles fight for Islam to receive a special status no other religion gets. Criticism of Islam is called racism - criticism of Christianity is called enlightenment.
Artists and writers who draw or write the “wrong” thing live under police protection, and the left’s response is to ask what they expected. There is talk of blasphemy-style considerations, of sparing “religious feelings” - but only one religion’s feelings.
Schools, institutions and media adapt to demands they would never accept from a priest.
Place the three pictures side by side and the pattern is unmistakable:
They excuse the regime in Tehran. They cheered the movement behind October 7. And they work to give Islamism’s demands institutional power in our own countries.
It is exactly the role from 1979. Back then, the Iranian left carried the Islamists forward in the streets of Tehran, believing they were allies. And once the regime they had helped elect sat securely in power, it showed its face.
The universities - the left’s own home turf - were shut down and purged. Women who had marched freely in the revolution were forced under the mandatory hijab
And when the very leftists who had carried the regime forward began to protest what they had created, they were thrown into the prisons.
Most of them never came out. In 1988, thousands were executed in their cells on the orders of the regime they themselves had helped to power.
Today, the Western left carries the same forces forward in our streets - and in our institutions - believing the same.
The Iranian left discovered too late what they had helped into power. The women of Tehran are still paying the price.
The question is not whether the Western left has seen the evidence. It is on the table. The question is why they look away.
History has already passed its verdict on that alliance. Whoever enters it again has chosen their side. And their ending.
And to those who believe history will not repeat itself in the West - who think our democracies are too old, our institutions too strong, our freedoms too deeply rooted: The Iranians thought the same. Iran was the most modern, most educated, most Western-oriented country in the Middle East.
Tehran had universities, miniskirts and cinemas. It took nine years to turn it into a theocracy. Freedom is not a possession. It is a defense. And a defense that no one mans is just a line on a map.
Those who believe it cannot happen here are exactly the ones who never learned how it happened there.
Do you still think you should keep quiet?