What Is the Left For? (Judean Rose) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, March 04, 2026

What Is the Left For? (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein. Trigger warning for descriptions of violence.

The West’s political left can’t seem to decide what it stands for. Is it for gay rights and “love is love,” or is it for Hamas torturing gays? When leftist activists chant “from the river to the sea,” does this mean they want the entirety of the territory to be ruled by a government that suspends gays by their hands from the ceiling for hours?

It cannot be that this really is the left’s preferred option when the other one is Israel—the only country in the region where gays have full rights and protections by law. But never say this out loud, lest you be accused of “pinkwashing,” a term coined to describe those who would exonerate Israel from all crimes because the Israeli government is “nice” to gays. In fact, having a handy-dandy term like “pinkwashing” is what allows anti-Israel activists to look away from the cruel treatment gays receive at the hands of Hamas even as the LGBTQ crowd continues to demonize the Jewish State.

By the same token, Democrats and leftist activists are horrified by Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, and by the decimation of the fanatic, repressive Iranian regime—even as Iranians take to the streets to celebrate, singing “Bibi Joon” (Bibi Dear) and doing Trump’s YMCA dance.

And it’s not just the men. Iranian women, too, are celebrating their freedom, gifted to them at great cost by Israel and the United States. They openly dance in the streets, burn their hijabs, and mark the end of a tyrannical regime and its ruler, going so far as to light posters of Khamenei on fire with lit cigarettes—the cigarette a symbol of the freedom they had finally gained to do as they wished.

Why, then, do leftist activists and Democrats not celebrate with the people in the streets of Tehran? Why don’t they take pride in the part their country played in granting them freedom from tyranny?

You would think that the socialists, at least, would be for the average Iranian Joe on the street. But no—New York City’s controversial socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, condemned the war and said that the “military strikes on Iran—carried out by the United States and Israel—mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians.”

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit…
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) February 28, 2026

In actuality, the war of aggression was that of the Iranian regime against its own people.

In other words, Islamist movements like Hamas and the Islamic Republic adhere to a religious code that criminalizes the very people Western activists claim to defend. Which begs the question: if your political identity is built around protecting sexual minorities, why are you marching for a movement that hangs them? If your political identity is all about empowering women, why do you support a regime that rules through repression? Under Khamenei, women were compelled by law to wear the hijab. Anyone who disagreed with the regime—men or women—disappeared into prisons. Protesters were shot in the streets. And worse.

The world saw this repression play out in our own time when Mahsa Amini died in custody after being arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s dress code. Her death ignited nationwide protests. Iranian women burned their hijabs. Crowds filled the streets shouting “Death to the Dictator.”

Yet when pressure mounts against the regime—when Israel and the United States confront Iran with military might—the motley mix of Western progressive groups suddenly mobilizes in defense of the regime’s sovereignty. Coalitions of activist organizations march under banners declaring “Hands Off Iran.”

What is it they mean to say here? Hands off a regime that arrests women who show their hair? Hands off a tyrannical regime that executes dissidents and crushes the very protesters Western activists claim to support?

Why do they turn away from the Iranians who have risked their lives for decades protesting against the regime and telling the world, out loud, that they want freedom? Shouldn’t this matter to any feeling human being? Why does the left look away?

Why did Barack Obama refuse to help the Iranian protesters in 2009? They were begging for the most basic human rights. Yet Obama turned away from them, afraid to make waves. He just let them twist in the wind.

As for the days leading up to this war? Protesters were slaughtered in the tens of thousands—some estimate as many as 30,000 or more. Do the survivors not deserve the same support given to Ukraine by the very same people who now denounce the offing of Khamenei?

Apparently not—at least not according to aficionados of Western progressive groups, who suddenly mobilize in support of Khamenei when the US and Israel take action against him. Or the media, which featured loving obituaries like the one in the Washington Post that spoke of Khamenei’s “bushy white beard and easy smile,” and described him as cutting a “more avuncular figure in public” than his predecessor, Khomeini. They portrayed Khamenei as human. He liked Persian poetry and Les Misérables.

It made me think of Love Story: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me?”

What will the protesters' banners say one year from now? Who will be deemed favorable or unfavorable in their eyes? Who really decides what causes are acceptable?

Is everything that Trump does bad—even when it involves freeing the Iranian people to take charge of their own destiny?

Is everything the Jewish State of Israel does bad? Even when it comes to preventing Islamic fanatics from offing the Great and Little Satans? This is difficult to understand.

Are they for a peaceful world, safe from nuclear war? Or do they prefer being nuked to appearing grateful to Bibi for his efforts to save them—and the entire free world?

Women’s rights and LGBTQ rights “matter,” unless those who persecute women and gays happen to be associated with a cause that is intersectional with the political left. Then they are abandoned

Sometimes I wonder what an onlooker—someone neutral, perhaps from an alternate world—would say about these seeming hypocrisies. They might see them as immature, even childish.

For myself, I see the left as so many lemmings jumping off a cliff. They espouse whatever cause is popular at the moment because all the cool kids are doing it. But of course they don’t actually believe in anything. Their beliefs are predicated on the moment, neither meaningful, moral, nor firm.

You can sense this truth about their character the minute they parrot their peers. They’d rather be with the in-crowd than have their own thoughts—something that can be achieved only by dint of thinking—a tedious, and inconvenient task. There’s no value in it unless you don’t want to have friends and prefer to be shunned by the class you hope you belong to.