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.
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.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
Buy