4,000 Dead and Global Silence: Why the ‘Red-Green’ Coalition Abandoned Iran

Iran is bleeding, and the world is looking away. In less than a month of nationwide unrest, more than 4,000 people have been killed by the Islamic Republic, according to human rights monitors. The overwhelming majority were peaceful demonstrators. Dozens were children. Major cities have become open crime scenes, their streets stained with the cost of defiance. Yet as the regime wages an internal war against its own population, much of the Western “human rights” establishment has chosen silence.

That silence is not an oversight. It is ideological.

For months, Western activists have paralyzed capitals, universities, and public squares with an obsessive focus on Gaza. Entire movements have been mobilized, careers built, and institutions captured in the name of “justice.” But when millions of Iranians rise up against the world’s most aggressive theocracy — the regime that bankrolls militias from Yemen to Lebanon, and exports violence far beyond its borders — the protest class vanishes. No mass demonstrations. No urgent statements. No moral panic.

This selective outrage exposes the real operating logic of what has come to be known as the “Red-Green” coalition: the convergence of radical leftism and political Islam. This alliance is not rooted in human rights or liberation, but in opposition — to Western liberal democracy, national sovereignty, and Israel. Within this worldview, the clerical regime in Tehran is not a tyranny to be dismantled, but a useful “anti-imperial” actor. Iranians demanding basic freedoms therefore disrupt the narrative. Their deaths are inconvenient.

While Western activists avert their gaze, the Islamic Republic is facing its most serious internal crisis since its founding. The wall of fear that sustained the regime for decades has collapsed.

Economically, the system is imploding in real time. The national currency has disintegrated, wiping out savings and destroying what remains of the middle and merchant classes. The Grand Bazaar — once a pillar of regime stability and a traditional pressure valve — is no longer insulated from revolt. When shopkeepers lose everything, ideology no longer matters.

The slogans echoing across Iran tell the story with brutal clarity. “No Lebanon, no Gaza — our lives for Iran” is not just a chant; it is a rejection of the regime’s core project. For years, Tehran has poured resources into foreign militias while telling its own people to endure poverty for the sake of “resistance.” That lie has collapsed. Iranians now openly name the regime’s priorities as betrayal.

The response from much of the Western left has been a masterclass in moral collapse. The same activists who demand liberation from a democratic state remain silent as Iranian security forces execute wounded protesters in hospitals, torture detainees, and gun down teenagers in the streets. This is not a failure of information. The evidence is abundant. The silence is deliberate.

This is how “organized impunity” works: atrocities are ignored when committed by regimes that position themselves against the West. Accountability is reserved exclusively for democracies. Tyranny is excused so long as it speaks the language of “anti-colonialism.”

The consequences are tangible and dangerous. European institutions continue to delay the most basic moral act: designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization. The IRGC is not a conventional military force. It is the regime’s enforcement arm, responsible for internal repression, foreign terror, and the blood now flooding Iranian streets. Endless debate in the face of mass murder is not diplomacy. It is complicity.

The Iranian people do not need Western mediation, dialogue, or technocratic management of their revolution. They need clarity — moral, political, and strategic. The defeat of the clerical regime would be the single most significant blow to radical Islamism in a generation. It would dismantle the central hub of regional destabilization and end a system built on exported antisemitism and permanent war.

Those who claim to champion justice but refuse to stand with Iran’s protesters have already made their choice. They have aligned themselves with power over principle, ideology over life.

History will remember this moment. The Iranian people have already won the cognitive war. They understand that the regime is an occupying force, alien to their future and hostile to their dignity. What remains is the physical struggle.

Peace in the Middle East will not emerge from conferences, slogans, or moral posturing. It will come when the Islamic Republic collapses under the weight of its crimes — and when the world can no longer pretend it did not know what was happening as Iran fought for its freedom.

Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx