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Samizdata quote of the day – hypocrisy about Iranian “So, where are the chants of ‘From The Gulf to the Caspian Sea, Iran will be free'”?
– Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much of today’s Left (and the barmier forms of it on the Right): If you are on the “right” side of a particular argument (say that you are against Israel’s existence, or at least ambivalent about it), then it creates moral “space” to be indulgent towards regimes that are against Israel, etc. We see this over and over.
(Daily Telegraph link behind paywall.)
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Non-paywalled version here.
In 2018, Save the Children said that 85,000 children had starved to death in Yemen, as a consequence of the civil war started by the Houthi. The total must be higher today.
I have never seen any of the lefties or Muslims who bleat endlessly about Israel mention this.
Mr Heath, and Johnathan Pearce, are correct – the Western left do not want the people of Iran to have freedom.
But I do not think it is “hypocrisy” – the left are the enemies of individual freedom, Rousseau himself (the founder of the left – long before Karl Marx was born) held that power should be with an elite figure, the “Law Giver” – who would despise “the will of all” (what ordinary people wanted) and would impose the “General Will” – which was NOT “the will of all”, but rather what ordinary people SHOULD want – rather than what they do want.
The people who control, for example, the education systems in most Western nations have the same position.
They hate and despise Western freedom – which they call “Capitalism” and wish to exterminate it, and exterminate its supporters.
They also see such regimes as the Islamic Republic of Iran as allies in their war against the West.
As I have said on another thread on a Johnathan Pearce post – it is important (very important) to make a distinction between political opponents and ENEMIES.
A political opponent wants the same objective as you do – but believes that different policies are the best way to get there.
A political ENEMY is someone who wants to destroy your society, utterly destroy it. You can not negotiate with someone like Mayor Mamdani, or State Attorney General Keith Ellison – you can not negotiate with them, because their objective is to destroy you.
It is the same with the regime in Iran.
I fear that President Trump does not understand that – but we shall see.
As for Israel – the “protests” of the left started before the dead bodies of October 7th were even cold.
They started before Israel had done anything.
It is a great mistake to think that the international left give a damn about the Muslims in Gaza – the left just want to destroy Western societies (to reduce them to ashes and dried blood) they see Israel as a Western society – so they wish to exterminate it.
It really is that simple.
Paul, do the people, you describe, not realise, they sawing off the branch they are sitting on? People of such stupidity should be easy to overcome?
The left are oddly old fashioned. There glorification of Islam has more than a hint of “The Noble Savage”. The quest for reperations looks a lot to me like a rebranding of “The White Man’s Burden”. And the Green left are Ludites.
David Roberts – the left are too blinded with hate, hatred of Western civilization, to understand the, valid, point you make.
NickM – privately the left despise Islam, but they think Muslims are stupid and they can “use” them.
The left are mistaken – profoundly mistaken, as David Roberts had pointed out.
Philip Scott Thomas – thank you.
People of such stupidity should be easy to overcome?
Well, depends on what you’re willing to do. If you fight them politically, assuming they act in good faith politically, you’re doomed. If you allow them power, you are doomed.
The best thing to do would be to eviscerate them in elections. Short of that, ignore them, boycott any organization that gives them a platform.
And if they assault you during a peaceful protest, put them down…and I do not mean give them a good tongue lashing! [For those in Portland, I also do NOT mean kill them, as much as you might want to].
So what does it say of the ‘right’ that they don’t overcome such apparently stupid people?
GregWA and Martin.
It is not just foreign policy – it is also domestic policy.
People in Congress are boasting (actually boasting) that they are reversing the DOGE cuts (the cuts the media pretended did not happen or were bad) – and it is not just people like Senator Schumer (despicable though he is) – without Republicans such as “Leader Thune”, and his demented “Filibuster Rule”, the Democrats could not do what they do. The Republican leadership in Congress is a “right” that is not the right at all.
Congress, by its very structure, is unable to control government spending – it does not even want to do so, and it is impossible (impossible) to “work with” Congress.
Once intellectually corrupt judges decided to “interpret” into existence a “general welfare spending power” (rather than “the common defense and general welfare” being the PURPOSE of the specific spending powers) the eventual bankruptcy of the United States was set in stone.
Yes there are good people in Congress (Senator Ron Johnson springs to mind – as a manufacturer, the only one in either the Senate or the House, he does not have to go begging for money from spending interests) – but they will always be outnumbered by SHITS.
SHITS of both political parties.
Even going into Congress with good intentions achieves nothing – as the institutional pressures, the way the system is structured, lead to shit-ness.
This is why it is absurd, utterly absurd, to talk of “working with Congress to control government spending” – the system can not control government spending.
The system itself is no good.
Paul, the term “hypocrite” is accurate because it’s hard to wave the banner of outrage about the loss of life and to be silent about what’s going on in Iran.
It’s true that there’s a broader consistency : but it’s also worth pointing to the cognitive somersaults involved, hence Allister Heath’s comment.
Agreed. These people couldn’t care less about the specifics.
Johnathan Pearce – I see, sorry for misunderstanding.
Yes the left do pretend to care about loss of life – although they clearly do not care. They love the pain and death of “Reactionaries” and they are quite happy to use their “tools” (or those they falsely believe are their tools – such as the Muslims) to achieve death and destruction – regardless of the casualties the “tools” take in the process.
But all this may not have always been so – the left may once have believed the the things they say, for example I was recently laughing at an essay (which I have not looked at for years) by Oscar Wilde – in which he claims that the end of private property would mean the end of poverty.
In a way it would – as the end of private property would lead to mass starvation and the dead do not suffer poverty, but Oscar Wilde did NOT mean that. He really seems to have believed that getting rid of private property would create some sort of wonderful new society.
Back then the left may really have believed all this – these days I think they are motivated by HATE rather than any positive vision of some sort of wonderful new society.
I am relatively certain that if resistance to trump was of the same magnitude he would do the same.
ROFLMAO – ” … there are good people in Congress (Senator Ron Johnson springs to mind …”
“Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews …” It’s against Zionist Jews. As long as a Jew is willing to live in Dhimmitude there’s no problem.
“willful knowledge” – I wonder who you are.
I don’t take every single thing she says at face value, but she does make some interesting points. More specifically to the point of the OP, she says that the current protests started a couple of years ago, but have been ignored by the international “community” because all focus was on Gaza. To me, it follows that we only know about these protests in Iran because the war in Gaza is “over”.