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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.