On December 28th, 2025, after decades of religious tensions, human rights violations, and economic hardship, a series of protests broke out across Iran.
Workers organised strikes across the country, sellers shut down markets and stores, citizens marched through the streets, and the Iranian regime responded by locking down communications, announcing a nationwide curfew, and authorising live fire against unarmed civilians.
As of this writing, Iranian authorities report that the regime has killed ~3117 people. But research from the Human Rights Activists News Agency suggests the number is over twice that. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, believes the death toll could be over 20,000 when the dust settles. And while Donald Trump claims that the killing has stopped, reports from within Iran suggest that the killing is very much ongoing.
Yet you might have noticed that, unlike Israel’s recent adventures in civilian massacres, there have been no hundred-thousand or even million-strong marches on behalf of the Iranian people. No calls to exclude Iran from the Eurovision Song Contest or to divest from Iranian companies.
Despite being a strident critic of Israel’s government over the past two years, this is the first time I’ve even mentioned the plight of the Iranian people in an article.
So what’s going on here? What could explain this hypocrisy, this shameless double standard? Well, let’s remind ourselves what the standard is, shall we?
On October 7th, 2023, after generations of military occupation, extra-judicial kidnappings, and the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children in the West Bank, Hamas militants launched a horrific attack on Israel.
They killed over 1,200 Israelis, ~23% of whom were women and children, they took another 251 civilians hostage, and Israel responded with a genocidal campaign that destroyed ~92% of civilian homes, killed several of their own hostages, and ended, predictably, with Hamas neither removed from power nor disarmed.
In the first month, Israel killed 10,328 Palestinians (that’s three times as many as Iran killed in the same period), ~70% of whom were women and children.
As of this writing, Israel has officially killed ~71,824 people, a figure that Israeli officials spent two years trying to discredit before quietly admitting it was accurate all along. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, believes that when the bodies are retrieved from the rubble, the final death toll could be several times higher. And while Donald Trump claims the war is over, the more than 520 Palestinians killed since the “ceasefire” started suggest that the genocide is very much ongoing.
Yet you might have noticed that, unlike Iran’s massacre, not a single politician has lied to provide political cover or proudly declared that their stated intention when entering Congress was becoming “the leading defender of [Iran] in the United States Senate.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader hasn’t been invited to speak before Congress while he’s wanted for war crimes, and United States senators aren’t jockeying for the title of most enthusiastic standing ovation.
I confidently predict that the US government won’t be using its VETO to block UN resolutions condemning Iran and calling for an end to the killing, nor will it be spending a single penny of taxpayer money to provide the weaponry that these fanatics are using to kill civilians.
And I’m certain that if the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Iran wrote a report detailing the corporations that were making billions of dollars by facilitating Iran’s massacres, Marco Rubio won’t impose sanctions on her and her family, the first time the US has sanctioned a UN-affiliated official in the history of the UN.
You might also have noticed that not a single student has faced jail or deportation for writing op-eds criticising Iran’s regime. Nobody is stripping professors of tenure for anti-Iran social media posts. News organisations aren’t shying away from reporting the atrocities the regime is committing.
And lastly, terms like “Islamic extremist” or “jihadist” won’t be miscategorised as hate speech and used as a pretext to get you banned from social media. I suspect that not a single comment here will try to downplay the casualty figures or argue that the Iranian civilians shouldn’t have FA’d if they didn’t want to FO.
I’ve lost count of the number of times, as I wrote about Israel’s genocide, that I was asked why I wasn’t equally animated by some other atrocity.
“Why aren’t you writing about the genocide in Sudan?” “Why aren’t you equally outraged by China’s human rights abuses against the Uighurs?” “What about the massacres taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?”
And overlooking the Freudian implications of equating these atrocities with Israel’s “war,” the answer is that we already have something approaching sanity and moral consistency and a shared reality when it comes to these war crimes.
On these issues, we can all agree on the fundamental principles of proportionality and restraint, especially for those in power. We can admit that the Iranian regime’s brutal oppression made the Iranian people’s hatred inevitable, and that this latest slaughter will only deepen that hatred. We aren’t pretending that opposing the murderous actions and policies of the Iranian government is the same thing as hating Iranians or Muslims in general.
If we could achieve this level of clarity more consistently, there’d be no need to write essays or impose boycotts or march through the streets.
Sadly, a surprising number of people can’t meet that standard.
On February 2nd, 2002, five months after the worst terrorist attack in American history, Noam Chomsky sat down with Hard Talk’s Tim Sebastian to respond to the accusation that he was drawing a moral equivalence between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”:
Chomsky: If we’re rational, we will recognise that the United States, Britain, France, and I can go down a long list, have a terrible record of atrocities. And that does not justify violent acts against them.
Sebastian: But you seem to see this moral equivalence…
Chomsky: There’s no moral equivalence […] there’s no moral equivalence between the [attack on] the World Trade Centre and the destruction of Nicaragua or of El Salvador, of Guatemala. The latter were far worse, by any criterion […]
Sebastian: But why, when the US is considering what to do about this, do you always go back to past crimes? […] Are you kicking the US when it’s down?
Chomsky: No. I’m asking that we accept the definition of “hypocrite” given in the Gospels; [someone who] refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others […]
I think we should try to rise to the level of minimal moral integrity […] then we can discuss these issues seriously […] Minimal moral integrity requires that if we think something is wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.
I’ve never liked the term “pro-Palestinian.” Partly because it frames a century of killing and injustice as a “pick-your-team” binary, but mostly because it completely misses the heart of the issue.
The “pro-Palestinian” position isn’t about Palestinians, any more than the anti-slavery position is about black people or the anti-Nazi position is about Jews. It’s about the belief that we should not be hypocrites, that we should rise to the level of minimal moral integrity when we discuss these issues.
Because anybody who understands that the Iranian regime should acknowledge its mistreatment of its people instead of murdering them, understands the “pro-Palestinian” position.
Anybody who wouldn’t meekly accept the theft of their home and their land, not to mention the brutalisation and murderof their families, relates to the “pro-Palestinian” position.
And anybody who believes that all people, male and female, black and white, Jew and Christian and Muslim and atheist, are equally deserving of life, liberty, and happiness, believes in the “pro-Palestinian” position.
The question is, when do we finally hold everyone to that standard?
Very excellent points you made here> I fear we won't see an answer to your last question anytime soon.