Progressives seem oddly quiet about the murderous ayatollahs
I was nine years old when the Iran- Iraq war commenced and perhaps 13 when I watched a news report about what became known as the child martyrs of the Ayatollah. I wasn’t very political back then but when you hear that kids of your age have been indoctrinated to walk, and sometimes run, into machinegun fire to clear a path for the adult solders coming up behind, you tend to sit up and take notice. Perhaps 20,000 children died in this way, some as young as nine.
Evil is a loaded term, but I hope we can use it to describe the regime in Tehran, which hasn’t changed in any material respect in the intervening decades. Over recent weeks we have heard reports of what some have called “unprecedented” atrocities sanctioned by the ayatollahs, but they are far from unprecedented. This is business as usual for a regime that funds terrorist proxies, whose children start the school day reciting genocidal slogans and which has raped and tortured dissidents for years.
You might think that if anything would unify right and left in this benighted world, it would be contempt for this regime; not the Iranian people but the fanatics who rule over them. But I have been struck, like many, by what we might call the double standards of some (and we should emphasise “some”) progressives. They marched against the Gaza war, erected tent cities on campus and offered various condemnations but have been — how can I put this? — somewhat less vocal in protesting against the deaths of perhaps 30,000 Iranians.
That is not to say the left is intrinsically “bad”. I keep reading binary condemnations of progressives, by way of contrast with the supposedly “enlightened” right. It seems, from a historical perspective, more than a little unfair. The left has often stood up to injustice abroad, as well as at home, while many conservatives looked the other way. It was progressives at the forefront of the campaign against apartheid and atrocities in Vietnam, not to mention leading the campaign for gay rights and improved race relations. I feel grateful to them.
Over recent decades, though, and particularly with the rise of social media, an ever more vocal strand of progressivism has pulled free of its moorings, losing what once gave leftwing politics its appeal (at least to many of us). It isn’t just the double standards already alluded to: sensitivity to any crime supposedly committed by Jews or the West but near indifference when they are committed by anyone else. It is also, and it is difficult to say this politely, the way a kind of racism has infected the way they see the world.
I saw this when I went to Trafalgar Square to talk to the Palestine Action protesters. For the avoidance of doubt, I happen to agree with many of their criticisms of the prosecution of the Gaza war, one that hasn’t just killed thousands of Palestinians but sullied the reputation of Israel. But when I asked about other areas of the world where innocent people are dying in large numbers — the Congo, Yemen, South Sudan — they didn’t seem to know or much care. One said, “Stop distracting attention from Gaza!” when I asked about the 500,000 who died in the Tigray war.
Why? In a rational world should we not care about the deaths of all innocents? For if it is just when Jews or the West engage in conflict that people take notice, it offers an invisibility cloak to others carrying out atrocities. Tribal conflict. Ethnic conflict. Iranians killing Iranians. All are implicitly downgraded, minimised, tolerated.
Many also tolerate forced marriage and female genital mutilation
A progressive might retort that the West has more leverage with the Israeli government than the Iranian or Congolese, so that is why we protest against the one and not the other, but I hope you’ll perceive the flakiness of that response. After all, we see the same invisibility cloak thrown over certain types of crime in our own back yard.
Progressives who would scream blue murder if a white person showed sexism or racism (even the unconscious type indicated by, say, a raised eyebrow) have been willing to tolerate, even condone, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and honour beatings.
Isn’t that a kind of racism; one that condemns the often brown victims of terrible crimes to suffer in silence, since their persecution is not evil but merely a “cultural practice”? Doesn’t it help to explain the paradox whereby leftleaning feminists who fight the merest whiff of sexism in the workplace defend the burqa, perhaps the most potent symbol of modern misogyny? Doesn’t it also explain the impunity granted to Pakistani rape gangs by ideologically captured local authorities and police? This is not progressivism, at least as I once understood it. It is not why, as a teenager, I joined the Labour Party of Bevin, Attlee and Blair. Rather, it is why I left the party when it became ever more influenced by what we might call the hyperprogressive tendency. Call me oldfashioned but I think we should oppose bigotry and violence in all its forms, whatever the colour of the perpetrators, or the victims, and wherever it happens in the world, whether in Iran or, to shift the picture, the West Bank.
Indeed, do we not detect the mirror image of the left’s blind spot on atrocities in Iran in the way elements of the right have sought to airbrush the horrific escalation of settler violence in recent months, egged on by fascistic elements in the Israeli government? If anything should unite the right-minded — the sensible middle ground — is it is surely this.
That is why when I look at Zarah Sultana, Jeremy Corbyn and Zack Polanski (who is pretty much running the Gorton & Denton by-election on a Gaza platform) I do not perceive opponents of Tommy Robinson, Bezalel Smotrich and Tucker Carlson (whose virulent chauvinism is ever more stomach-churning); I see soulmates. They embody, to my mind, conceptually interchangeable forms of bigotry. Each camp is bewitched by the distorting tribalism of the digital world; each manifests the warning of the Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich: ideology doesn’t just bind; it blinds.
Indeed, I wonder if it may be time to drop the labels of left and right (which seem these days to distort more than they inform) and return to what once characterised a large chunk of political debate. Rationality. Evidence. Judging issues, at home and abroad, not through an ideological lens but on merit. For then we will see that making wise judgments is not about right and left but something far more important. The difference between right and wrong.
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