History will record the early 21st century as the era of the “Great Betrayal.” We witness a profound moral collapse within Western academia, media and political movements — a collapse defined by a deafening silence regarding the systematic butchery of the Iranian people by the Islamic Republic, contrasted against the ever-present, mobilized rage against the State of Israel’s war in Gaza. This disparity is not an accident of geography or a result of ignorance. It is a calculated, ideological alignment. The Western Left — comprising Marxists, post-modernists and self-described “progressives” — has abandoned the Enlightenment principles of liberty, secularism and universal human rights in favor of a “Red-Green” alliance with Islamic totalitarianism.

We must confront the brutal truth: The Left’s obsession with Israel can be seen as a cover for deep-seated antisemitism and a hatred of Western civilization. The Left has been supporting movements that are increasingly anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Zionist. The Iranian people, who yearn for a secular, pro-Western democracy, support a movement that does not align with the modern Left.

The Left perceives the Islamic Republic not as a theocratic tyranny, but as a victim of “American imperialism.” Consequently, they view the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom not as a liberation movement, but as a “color revolution” instigated by Western intelligence. 

The anatomy of silence 

When Israel launched its counteroffensive in Gaza following the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas, the Western Left mobilized instantly. Organizations such as CodePink, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Palestine Action filled the streets of London, New York and Paris. In London alone, organizers staged over 35 major marches within months, drawing hundreds of thousands of participants to chant for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Contrast this with the reaction to the Iranian uprisings. In November 2019, the Islamic Republic murdered 1,500 protesters within days. In 2022, following the murder of Mahsa Amini, security forces killed over 500 civilians and blinded hundreds more with birdshot. In the most recent 2025–2026 uprisings, the regime’s violence escalated to “terminal phase” levels, killing thousands in a desperate bid to survive.

The lack of outcry from the Left exposes its double standard. The Left cares only about the identity of the perpetrator and the identity of the victim. If the perpetrator is a Western ally (Israel), the outrage is infinite. If the perpetrator is an enemy of the West (Iran), the silence is absolute.

Where were the encampments at Columbia University for the boys and girls shot in the eyes by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)? Where were the rallies in London for the Baluchis massacred in Zahedan? They did not exist. The Left remained in their coffee shops, their faculty lounges and their union halls, silent.

Table 1: The Asymmetry of Outrage

The Left justifies its obsession with Gaza by citing casualty numbers provided by Hamas — a designated terrorist organization — while ignoring the verified slaughter in Iran. This reflects a deliberate epistemology of ignorance. When a terrorist regime like Hamas reports numbers, the Left treats them as gospel to fuel anti-Israel sentiment. When the Islamic Republic slaughters its citizens, the Left does not put the blame on the Iranian regime. Instead, it claims that there is a Western context behind the regime’s crimes — that is, that the crimes are a direct cause of “US imperialism.”

In Iran, during the crackdown of January 2026 alone, credible estimates place the death toll in the thousands within a single week. Amnesty International described this as an “unprecedented deadly crackdown” involving unlawful force, firearms and machine guns utilized against unarmed crowds. Statistical analysis states the daily kill rate in Iran’s crackdowns exceeds the deadliest days of the Gaza war and even the Iran–Iraq war.

Yet, the Left accepts Hamas’s numbers without question. They ignore the reality that Hamas embeds combatants in civilian areas, using their own population as human shields. They ignore the warnings Israel provides. Conversely, regarding Iran, they question the numbers. They ask for “independent verification” in a country that bans all independent media. They prioritize the “sovereignty” of the butcher over the life of the victim.

Judith Butler — who can be considered a “high priest” of Leftist theory — introduced the concept of “grievability,” or the idea that power structures determine whose lives count as human. In a twist of supreme irony, Butler and their acolytes enforce the very hierarchy they claim to critique. To the modern Left, a Palestinian life lost in a war started by Hamas constitutes a cosmic tragedy, a genocide demanding global revolution. An Iranian life extinguished by the Islamic Republic constitutes an inconvenience, a complication in the struggle against American hegemony. 

Butler might have condemned Hamas’s violence after October 7, but they also spent decades framing Hamas and Hezbollah as “progressive social movements” and part of the “global Left.” This theoretical framework grants moral immunity to Islamist butchers. By categorizing Iran and its proxies as “resistance,” the Left strips their victims — Iranian women, dissidents, Jews — of grievability. The Left does not mourn Iranians because the Left views the Iranian regime as an ally in the war against the West.

This hierarchy is explicitly racial and ideological. The Left perceives Palestinians as “brown victims” of “white Zionism.” They also perceive Iranians as “brown,” but because the Iranian regime opposes the West, the Left cannot conceptualize the Iranian people as victims of that regime. To do so would require admitting that an anti-Western force can be evil. This disrupts their binary worldview. Therefore, they erase the Iranian victim.

The Red-Green alliance 

To understand why a Marxist student in New York cheers for a theocratic mullah in Tehran, we must dissect the “Red-Green Alliance.” This is not a temporary marriage of convenience; it is a deep ideological fusion of Marxism (Red) and Islamism (Green) united by a shared hatred of Western liberalism, capitalism and Zionism.

The betrayal began in 1979. Michel Foucault, the godfather of post-modernism, traveled to Iran and famously endorsed the Islamic Revolution. He saw in Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s movement a “political spirituality” that offered a potent weapon against the “hegemony” of Western liberal modernity. Foucault explicitly rejected the warnings of Iranian feminists and secularists, dismissing their fears of theocracy as “Western” anxieties.

Foucault’s endorsement established a precedent that plagues the Left to this day. Foucault viewed “human rights” as a Western construct. Therefore, the Islamist rejection of these rights became a form of “liberation” from Western discourse. According to him, the Islamic Republic’s brutality was not barbarism, but an authentic resistance to the sterile rationality of the West. Any crime committed by an “anti-imperialist” force is forgivable. Foucault ignored the execution of homosexuals and leftists by the revolutionaries because the revolution challenged the Shah, an American ally.

Today, we see Foucault’s intellectual DNA in the works of Hamid Dabashi and the editorials of The Guardian. When Dabashi claims that Israeli Mossad agents instigate Iranian protests to “distract” from Gaza, he channels Foucault’s refusal to grant agency to the Iranian people. To these theorists, Iranians cannot possibly desire Western-style freedom; they must be puppets of a foreign plot.

Classical Marxism views religion as the “opium of the masses.” However, the New Left, realizing the working class in the West had rejected revolution, sought a new proletariat. They found it in the “Global South” and specifically in Islamist movements.

This convergence rests on three pillars:

— Shared Enemy: Both identify the United States and Israel (the “Great Satan” and “Little Satan,” respectively) as the primary obstacles to their utopia.

— Shared Method: Both advocate for the violent overthrow of existing structures. The Left excuses Islamist terrorism as “armed struggle” or “resistance”.

— Shared Antisemitism: Marx identified capitalism with Judaism (in On the Jewish Question). Islamists identify Judaism with cosmic evil. The Red-Green alliance creates a seamless fusion where “anti-Zionism” serves as the socially acceptable vehicle for this shared hatred.

The Left’s silence on Iran is a direct requirement of this alliance. You do not criticize your comrades in the trenches. If Hamas and Hezbollah are the “vanguard” of the anti-imperialist struggle, as Butler suggested, then the patron of these groups — the Iranian regime — must remain protected from criticism.

Postmodernism dismantled the concept of objective truth, replacing it with “narratives” and “power dynamics.” In this worldview, there are no facts, only “colonial” or “decolonial” perspectives. The Iranian regime murders women for showing hair, whereas the postmodern interpretation suggests that criticizing the hijab law is “Islamophobic” and imposes “Western feminist standards” on a unique culture.

This intellectual acrobatics allows the Left to march for “reproductive justice” in America while supporting a regime that rapes female prisoners as policy. They view the Iranian protester demanding secularism not as a hero, but as a native informant corrupted by Western ideology. This is why the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” found few takers among the Western radical Left; it is too universal, too liberal and too aligned with Western values.

The genocide libel and the antisemitic core

The Left’s hypocrisy crystallizes in its application of the term “genocide.” The Left accuses the Jewish state of the very crimes the Iranian regime commits daily, yet the Left remains silent on the latter. If they are as concerned about “human rights” as they claim, then they would not be so silent about the crimes being committed in Iran. The disproportionate outrage at Israel over the Iranian regime leads me to believe that antisemitism, more than a genuine concern for human rights, is the motivator. 

Let us compare the conduct of the war in Gaza with the repression in Iran.

— Intent: Israel targets Hamas combatants embedded in civilian areas. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) provides warnings, corridors and aid. The casualty ratios, even accepting Hamas figures, fall well below the norms of urban warfare. Of course, this does not mean that every action taken by the IDF is beyond criticism, nor that all operations have been flawless.

— Iran’s Intent: The Iranian regime explicitly targets its own civilians — women, students, shopkeepers — with lethal intent to preserve power. They use machine guns on crowds, execute prisoners without trial and deliberately blind protesters.

The Left labels Israel’s defensive war a genocide but refuses to apply even the term “massacre” to Iran’s actions. When the United States or Israel threatens to intervene to stop the killing in Iran, the Left characterizes them as imperialist, opposing external intervention even amid reports of repression. They mobilize to protect the regime from consequences, effectively ensuring the slaughter continues.

Antisemitism as the organizing principle

Why this disparity? The answer lies in the identity of the perceived “imperialist.” The Left perceives Jews as “white,” “wealthy” and “powerful” — the ultimate oppressors in the intersectional hierarchy. Israel, as the collective Jew, represents the success of a distinct nation-state and Western values in the Middle East.

Conversely, the Left views Muslims as the ultimate victims. Therefore, a Muslim regime killing its own people causes “cognitive dissonance” in the Leftist mind. It disrupts the narrative of “White/Jewish Oppressor vs. Brown/Muslim Victim.” To resolve this, the Left ignores the crime (Iran) or blames it on Western sanctions.

But when Jews fight back against Islamist aggression? That confirms the Left’s worldview. The charge of “genocide” becomes central to that framing. Like other criticisms of Israel, the accusation of genocide isn’t inherently antisemitic. However, when it is deployed selectively, detached from legal standards, and used to equate Jews with Nazis, it functions less as legal analysis and more as moral inversion — absolving the West seems to prove that the Left does not care about dead Muslims; they only care about dead Muslims if they can blame Jews for the deaths. 

The Red-Green alliance uses anti-Zionism to mask its antisemitism. However, the mask slips when we observe their reaction to the Iranian opposition. The Iranian people — who I consider the bravest freedom fighters in the world — overwhelmingly support Israel. They chant “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran.” They wave Israeli flags and thank Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his support.

The Left hates this. They hate that the “noble savage” (in their eyes) refuses to play the role of the anti-Zionist victim. Because the Iranian people support Israel, the Left views them as tainted or puppets. This reveals the terrifying truth: The Left would rather see Iranians die under the Mullahs than live free in a pro-Western, pro-Israel democracy.

The 2026 crisis and Western complicity

The uprising of 2025–2026 in Iran marked the terminal phase of the Islamic Republic. The regime, bankrupt and devoid of legitimacy, unleashed hell upon its population. The Western Left’s response constituted an act of complicity that history will judge as severely as the Stalinist apologia of the 1930s.

By early 2026, the Iranian economy collapsed. The Rial lost all value, severing the social contract between the state and the Bazaaris. The regime became a “Zombie State,” existing only to kill.Protests spread to all 31 provinces, demanding not reform, but the end of the Islamic Republic.The regime responded with a “victory doctrine” of its own: total annihilation of dissent. They cut the internet, deployed heavy weaponry in Kurdish and Balochi areas, and began mass executions.

While Iranians died in the streets, the Western Left mobilized against them.

— Outlets like MintPress News and The Grayzone pushed conspiracy theories that the protests were “Israel-instigated revolts” involving “Mossad agents” hiding in crowds. This narrative serves to dehumanize the protesters, painting them as foreign agents worthy of death.

— Groups like CodePink argued that the unrest resulted solely from “US sanctions,” absolving the regime of its corruption and mismanagement. They demanded the lifting of sanctions, which would only fund the regime’s repression machine.

— CodePink and other “anti-war” groups organized marches titled “No War On Iran,” explicitly aiming to prevent Western support for the uprising. By lobbying against pressure on Tehran, these groups acted as the unpaid lobbyists of the Ayatollahs.

The Iranian people have moved beyond the “Reformist vs. Hardliner” game. They chant, “Reformist, Hardliner, the game is over.” Yet, the Western Left and the Biden-era diplomatic establishment clung to the “Reformist” hope, backing figures like Masoud Pezeshkian even as he presided over massacres.

The Left refuses to accept that the Islamic Republic cannot be reformed. To admit this would require admitting that a religious, anti-Western state is inherently evil. The Left prefers the “stability” of a totalitarian Islamist regime over the “chaos” of a pro-Western revolution. This is the racism of low expectations: They believe Iranians are incapable of democracy and destined for theocracy.

Israel and the Iranian people

In the darkness of the Left’s betrayal, one nation stood firmly with the Iranian people: Israel. This alliance, forged in shared existential struggle, exposes the Left’s antisemitism and anti-Westernism in stark relief.

Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people directly, stating, “We identify with the struggle of the Iranian people … a free Iran is no dream.” Israel did not just offer words; it degraded the regime’s suppression apparatus. The 12-Day War of June 2025 and Israeli strikes on IRGC command centers weakened the regime’s iron grip, creating the space for the uprising. Israeli intelligence penetration and precision airstrikes decimated Hezbollah’s senior command structure in 2024, stripping Tehran of its primary retaliatory lever and leaving the regime strategically orphaned. Furthermore, the Israeli Air Force used F-35I “Adir” stealth fighters to dismantle the S-300 and Bavar-373 air defense networks, proving that the regime can no longer protect its own airspace or its nuclear infrastructure in Fordow and Natanz.

Contrast this with the leaders of the Western Left:

— Jeremy Corbyn: While quick to call for a ceasefire to save Hamas, Corbyn offered only tepid, “both sides” rhetoric on Iran. He historically appeared on Iranian state TV (Press TV) and received payments of up to £10,000 (~$13,800) from the regime’s propaganda arm.

— The Squad (US Congress): Representatives who weep for Gaza remained largely silent or blamed “US imperialism” for the unrest in Iran. These members consistently vote against sanctions that would target the IRGC’s financial lifelines while simultaneously advocating for the “delisting” of groups that serve as Tehran’s regional proxies.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement found its strongest external support in Israel. Tel Aviv City Hall lit up with the movement’s slogan. Israeli civil society launched the “#IsraelisloveIranians” campaign.

The Left’s reaction to this solidarity was repulsion. Anti-Zionist activists accused Israel of purple washing or co-opting the Iranian struggle. They argued that Iranian women could not possibly want support from the “Zionist entity.” This proves that for the Left, hatred of Israel supersedes the rights of women. They would rather Iranian women struggle alone and die than accept help from the Jewish state.

Conservative modernism and regime change

The time for “containment” and “appeasement” has passed. The “Reformist” illusion is dead. The Left’s worldview has collapsed into a morass of antisemitic conspiracy theories and apology for tyranny. We must look to a new path: conservative modernism and decisive intervention.

The solution to the Middle East’s chaos is not the Left’s “secular totalitarianism” nor the Islamists’ “theocratic totalitarianism.” It is conservative modernism. This philosophy combines:

— Economic Liberalism: Smashing the state-controlled bonyads and cronyism of the Mullahs to empower the individual.

— Cultural Conservatism: Respecting tradition while rejecting theocracy; building institutions on family and property rather than martyrdom.

— Institutional Reform: Creating a secular state that protects rights through law, not religious fiat.

This vision aligns with the aspirations of the Iranian people, who desire a normal, prosperous nation-state, not a revolutionary cause.

The Left screams that intervention causes chaos. We argue that the regime’s existence causes chaos. A smart intervention strategy is the moral and strategic imperative: The US must provide direct-to-cell satellite internet (Starlink) to break the regime’s digital blockade, allowing the revolution to organize. Israel and the West must decapitate the IRGC leadership and destroy the “repression machine” (Basij centers, logistics), tipping the balance of power to the street. The West must recognize a transitional council led by figures like Reza Pahlavi, who commands the loyalty of the silent majority and can facilitate military defections.

The fall of the Islamic Republic will shatter the Red-Green alliance. Without Tehran’s oil money and ideological backing, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will wither. The Western Left will lose its primary “anti-imperialist” hero.

The evidence is damning. The Western Left has become the useful idiot of Islamic fascism. They march for Gaza because they hate Israel. They ignore Iran because they hate the West. They smear the Iranian opposition because they hate freedom.

Their hypocrisy is not accidental; it is foundational. By aligning with one of the most reactionary, misogynistic and homicidal regimes on the planet, the Left has forfeited its moral authority. They are not champions of the oppressed; they are the public relations wing of the oppressor.

We must reject their “anti-war” slogans, which are nothing more than “pro-regime” demands. We must stand unequivocally with the people of Iran and the State of Israel. The game is over. The “Reformists” are dead. The Left is exposed. The only path remaining is the total collapse of the Islamic Republic and the liberation of the Iranian nation from the twin plagues of Mullahs and Marxists.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.