Dear Friend of the Oppressed,
You’ve spent two years telling us who deserves your solidarity. Now thousands of Iranians are dying in the streets, and you’ve gone quiet.
In recent weeks, the people of Iran have risen up against a fascist theocracy, demanding the same freedoms you enjoy and take for granted. When I say fascist, I don’t mean in the sense you apply it to people worrying about uncontrolled immigration. I mean actual fascism, where dissent is crushed through the slaughter of unarmed civilians, most of them under 30.
Thousands have poured into the streets to face down a regime that has strangled the people of Iran for 47 years – the same regime, incidentally, that armed and funded the “resistance” you spent the last two years championing.
Despite internet shutdowns, footage has managed to escape. Look around online and you’ll eventually see clips of young women burning hijabs and crowds chanting “death to the dictator”. The Revolutionary Guards have responded with bullets, using machine guns mounted on pickup trucks to mow people down. Reports suggest thousands dead, possibly as many as 20,000. Possibly more.
Where are you?
You belong to a noisy crowd that’s marched through city streets and boiled over with moral fury since October 2023. You’ve been unavoidable, shutting down campuses, blocking traffic, and lecturing the rest of us about “genocide”. For two years you’ve waved flags, chanted slogans, and wept publicly for children you never met in a war you never bothered to understand.
Then Iran happens, and you say nothing.
Teenage girls in Tehran are beaten and shot for wanting to choose their own clothes and live without male permission. Where are your protest marches through London or New York? Why no encampments or candlelit vigils?
Just silence.
Iran doesn’t fit. For two years and more, you’ve lived inside a simple narrative, one pushed relentlessly in every lecture room and student union – the one about oppressed versus oppressor. Brown people versus white colonial power. You’ve been taught to treat Islam as an identity category rather than a belief system. In your mind, criticising clerical fascism in Tehran gets interpreted as attacking Muslims themselves – just another form of racism.
It’s a politically fashionable view of the world and socially rewarding. It’s also false.
Someone else pays the price.
Nika Shakarami was sixteen when she joined the protests in Tehran on September 20, 2022. Videos show her standing on an overturned bin, setting fire to her headscarf.
Hours later, eyewitnesses saw plainclothes security officers chase Nika through the streets. One witness filmed her ducking behind cars while riot police on motorcycles closed in. Another told CNN she saw officers bundle her into a car. “I wanted to save her, but I couldn’t”.
Nika’s phone went dead just before midnight. For nine days, her family searched police stations, jails, and hospitals.
When the IRGC document was leaked in April 2024, the truth of what had happened could finally be reconstructed.
She’d been forced into an unmarked freezer van with three security officers. On the way to prison, one of the officers molested her. Despite being handcuffed, she fought back. The men beat her with batons. When the team leader opened the rear door, she was dead. A senior officer instructed him to “dump her on the street”.
On September 30, her family was finally allowed to identify her body. The death certificate said “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object” – injuries the regime claimed were the result of her jumping from a building.
The leaked IRGC document names the men who killed her. It describes the sexual assault and admits “three batons and three Tasers were all used. It is not clear which one of the blows was the fatal one”. None of the men was punished.
You never said her name. It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of her.
Nika is just one story among many. How many Nikas were assaulted and murdered in the latest uprisings by the “morality police”? We’ll never know.
Iran’s theocrats murder their own people, but they’re also anti-American and Islamic. Above all, they hate Israel.
So you stay quiet.
Iran’s struggle is an unspeakable tragedy for its young people. The brave souls bleeding out in Tehran are your age. They want what you were handed at birth – the freedom to choose their way of life and live without fear. The difference is they’re willing to die for it, while you won’t even risk social discomfort. You’re terrified of not fitting in, so you work harder to say the approved things and think the correct thoughts.
But they’re not really your thoughts, are they?
Nika Shakarami was sixteen when she burned her hijab and died for it. She’s one name among thousands you’ll never say. Not because you don’t know their struggle for freedom, but because acknowledging it would cost you something.
That’s what your activism is worth.
You might also like:
Thanks for reading. If you share my fury at the silence from activists, celebrities, and institutions, pass this on.
I've known a few Iranians over the years – good people, cultured and humorous, now despairing of what's become of their country. They'll prevail eventually, but at a terrible cost.
Well said Frederick.
I feel the same way as you. When there is real tyranny and genocide happening the “moral left” are silent. The truth is that the left do not care. They have no morals and no beliefs, they are just indoctrinated useful idiots for the Islamic regime that wish to flood our country with migrants with nothing to offer but hatred and violence, raping and murdering our girls and women whilst our establishment covers it up all in the name of diversity and of it being our strength. I have had many Persian friends over the years who are intelligent, cultured, educated and kind and generous people. They have had to flee their country and the tyrannical regime or else lose their lives. In doing so they have often left all that they owned and loved behind them. These people are the kind of migrants no one is unhappy to welcome. They have much to offer and they do indeed give back. I do not want to hear another word about Gaza and the evil terrorists that hail from there. Thank God for Israel or the Middle East would be a God forsaken place entirely. I pray daily for the people of Iran to overthrow the regime and dispose of the despots. They deserve to live in peace and without fear on their land.