The Left Is Losing the Plot on Iran
Millions of Iranians have spent every day of the last two weeks protesting against the Islamic Republic—and against the 47 years of oppression they have had to endure. The situation is dire: The regime has shut off the internet in the hopes that it might violently crack down (and kill) those in the streets before the protests spread further. Iranians have now been without the internet for five days, while they try to fight to take their country back.
For those of us not in Iran but who have loved ones still there, the past few weeks have been torture. For those on the streets, facing down the regime’s terror, it has obviously been far worse. It’s been difficult for those of us on the outside to get a full picture of what is happening—in addition to the internet outage, the phone lines have come under frequent disruption as well. But what little we know is horrifying enough.
The police are using machine guns on protesters. Doctors are warning about hospitals not having capacity to deal with the influx of injured patients. “Around 38 people died. Many as soon as they reached the emergency beds ... direct shots to the heads of the young people, to their hearts as well. Many of them didn’t even make it to the hospital,” one hospital worker in Tehran said. “After the morgue became full, they stacked them on top of one another in the prayer room.”
The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has documented protests in Iran for years, estimates that more than 10,000 people have been arrested in the last two weeks, and at least 500 have been killed. The Narges Foundation, dedicated to currently imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi, estimates the number of deaths is more than 2,000. It’s impossible to have an accurate number at this point, but what we do know is many of those killed have been children. One video from this weekend shows rows of body bags and people walking through, trying to identify their loved ones.
There is no shortage of similarities to events that are happening right here at home, the main difference being that the Iranian regime has had far more practice at being at odds with anything resembling conventional morality—the extent to which it is unbound from the strictures of decency and humanity is demonstrative of the further frontiers that MAGA hatred may one day traverse. Rather than focus on any of these facts, many of those on the American left are doing the Iranian people dirty. They’ve either greeted the pain and suffering being meted out with total silence or they’ve fallen back on familiar hobbyhorses, using Iranian pain to issue threadbare critiques of U.S. imperialism.
Over the last week, I have almost lost my mind because I’ve found myself in agreement with some of the most reprehensible people on the planet. Elon Musk may be a Nazi, but if he finds a way to get past the regime’s interference with the few Starlink units smuggled into Iran, I will be grateful. For now, changing the Islamic Republic’s flag on X back to the flag Iran had for centuries prior was at least something, and his reply to Iran’s supreme leader also was, in a rarity for Musk, right on the mark.
Richard Grenell is an absolute garbage person currently running the Kennedy Center into the ground, but his message praising the bravery of the Iranian people was a rare moment of decency. J.K. Rowling is transphobic scum, but she unfortunately made a spot-on point about those who claim to support human rights but won’t express solidarity with those fighting for liberty in Iran.
I know why Senator Ted Cruz has posted about Iran incessantly, but why hasn’t Senator Bernie Sanders? The latest round of protests in Iran began with the working class, the people who work in the bazaars who can no longer afford anything given the country’s hyperinflation. The Iranian currency has reached a truly unbelievable low, with $1 U.S. costing 1.45 million rial. The rial has lost 80 percent of its value over the last year, and 20,000 times its value over the last four decades.
Why did it take California Governor Gavin Newsom, who represents the largest Iranian population in the United States, until Sunday to express his solidarity with the Iranian people? Why haven’t the other presumed 2028 Democratic presidential contenders said anything at all?
If total silence wasn’t bad enough, what’s worse is all the accounts implying that the Iranian people are somehow nonplayer characters in their own uprising and that this is all just a U.S. and Israeli operation, downplaying the clear evidence we have seen of a mass uprising throughout Iran, and not just its capital city.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez finally said on Sunday evening that she supports “the Iranians taking to the streets to call for a better future,” Max Blumenthal insinuated she is an Israeli plant. Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada said it was because she “backs the CIA-Mossad regime change campaign.”
Glenn Greenwald—who was once an admirable journalist before turning into, well, whatever he is now—didn’t have much to say about the Iranian regime gunning people down in the streets, but he did have time to argue that the CIA and Mossad are fueling the protests.
Mirah Wood, one Democratic Socialists of America leader who calls herself “the friend of revolutionaries” in her X bio, downplayed the revolution in front of her very face, sharing one post that claimed “the police is ‘not the enemy’ of the people, but is defending their national sovereignty from US and Israeli destabilization.” It’s a twisted kind of erasure: an Alex Jones–level distortion of reality, in which Iran’s people are just crisis actors working on behalf of unseen imperial masters.
Accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers are posting these same messages: The U.S. and Israel are behind these protests. The Islamic Republic of Iran is standing up to the U.S. empire. Regime change, or intervention of any kind, would be bad because Trump is bad and Israel is bad. But this is just Orientalism in disguise, casting everything that happens in another country through a Western lens.
Iranians have agency. They have been protesting against this regime from its very beginning. In March 1979, one month after Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran, overthrew the king, and announced the start of the Islamic Republic, 100,000 Iranian women poured in the streets of Tehran to fight against the suddenly compulsory hijab. The protests have continued since then, at times growing larger into their own notable moments in history: the Iranian student protests in 1999 (Kuye Daneshgah), the 2009 Green Movement protests, the Dey protests in 2017, the Bloody November protests in 2019, and the Women Life Freedom protests in 2022. And there have been countless protests, every single day, in between.
سال ۹۶ یک پروژهی خیابان انقلاب داشتیم که سدشکن شد!
— Ellie Omidvari (@ElhamOmidvari) November 4, 2024
این پروژه ها هنوز ادامه دارند...
#دختر_علوم_تحقیقات#ویدا_موحد #آهو_دریایی pic.twitter.com/b88wptFVpM
It is valid to be wary of U.S. intervention anywhere—certainly, the United States does not have a glittering track record, and Trump is only adding to the lowlights of American foreign policy—but to write off what is happening as a U.S. (or Israeli) masterplan does a disservice to the people of Iran, who have been doing everything they can for decades to fight their oppressors. They are not pawns in some geopolitical game. And perhaps an uncomfortable truth for some is that they need our help.
In 2009, when millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest a stolen election, they called on then-President Obama for his help. “Ya ba oona, ya ba ma,” they chanted in the streets, a pun on Obama’s name that translated to: “You’re either with them, or you’re with us.” Their calls went unheeded. Whatever happens this time around, all I know is this: The Iranian people deserve to be free, and they will be soon; whether the American left wants to play a meaningful role in their liberation or continue to defame them is their choice to make. But Iranians have long memories.