For years now, Gaza has been at the centre of political discourse. Everything seemed to revolve around the Palestinian issue.
We have faced protest after protest. Thousands pouring into the streets. From New York to Copenhagen, the same chants—from the river to the sea—rang out from passionate voices.
Social media flooded with constant, overwhelming condemnation of Israel for having the audacity to fight against a terrorist organisation—one that was still holding hostages it had kidnapped, mind you. Students at universities like Columbia barricaded buildings and intimidated Jewish students. Even countries like Finland weren’t spared from this manic fervour to “free Palestine”.
The conflict accumulated enough political weight that pressure—and at times threats—directed at politicians began to move them. The demand to label Israel’s military actions a “genocide” became enormous, and it remains so.
Mainstream media fed the flames with alacrity.
Articles upon articles. Interviews. News segments. Personal opinions.
The BBC, CNN, Yle, NBC, the New York Times—Gaza became inescapable. And throughout the war, some of the world’s largest news organisations made high-profile errors while reporting stories that portrayed Israel in the worst possible light.
From October 7th, 2023, I watched this grotesque narrative slowly lift its monstrously gigantic head. Its every breath seemed to shake the world.
People I had thought to be rational, intelligent individuals lost their minds over the Palestinian issue. It was as though someone flipped a switch and, all at once, Palestinians became the most oppressed, hungry and destitute people on the face of the Earth.
And Gaza? Apparently this was now the worst war ever fought. The deadliest. The most destructive. The greatest humanitarian catastrophe mankind had ever witnessed. At least, that was the impression you could easily come away with from the sheer scale of the hysteria surrounding it.
Other wars existed, of course. Other people were starving, being displaced or slaughtered in numbers that dwarfed what we were watching in Gaza.
But none of them seemed to matter quite like this one did.
And that is where things went deeper.
The conflict became symbolic of something much larger.
Palestinians stopped being treated as people with agency—people capable of making good decisions and bad ones, capable of being victims and perpetrators, capable of choosing leaders, embracing ideas and bearing some responsibility for the societies they create.
Instead, in the eyes of this movement, they became the epitome of the oppressed.
Israel became the epitome of the oppressor.
So when people poured into the streets, sometimes violently, they were no longer simply protesting a war in a region many of them could barely point to on a map. Gaza had been elevated into a moral test: one that could certify your righteousness or condemn you as evil.
Pure evil.
I know that sounds insane. It is. But if you paid attention to what was happening, it became difficult not to see it.
Having said that, if you didn’t look too deeply, you could be forgiven for thinking these were simply passionate people who cared about “freedom” for those they perceived to be oppressed. If you were really out of the loop, you might even admire them: people standing up for those who supposedly cannot stand up for themselves.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what we have been watching.
Because when another genuinely oppressed people rose up against their oppressors, something strange happened.
The passion disappeared.
The Test Came in Iran
On December 28th, 2025, protests erupted in Iran and quickly spread across the country.
The Iranian people were rising against the Islamic regime—a regime that routinely imprisons, tortures and executes its own citizens, and which has spent nearly half a century imposing its Islamist ideology upon a population of almost 90 million people.
The stories of oppression are well documented.
Imprisonment. Torture. Intimidation. Sexual violence. Executions.
All features of life under a regime that has choked one of the world’s great civilisations with its ideology.
Money that should have gone towards building Iran was instead poured into exporting terrorism and instability abroad. Hamas. Hezbollah. The Houthis. Militias in Iraq. Billions were spent constructing what the regime itself envisioned as a “ring of fire” around Israel, while ordinary Iranians lived with the consequences at home.
Then Iranians began pouring into the streets.
The videos were stunning.
Demonstrations spread across the country. Young people. Older people. Men. Women. Merchants. Students. Ordinary Iranians risking everything while chanting against the regime.
Many openly called for Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Crown Prince of Iran.
That was significant because this was no longer merely a protest over one particular law or economic grievance. The demonstrations had evolved into something far more fundamental.
They wanted the Islamic regime gone.
They wanted freedom.
The kind of freedom we in the Western world possess and so often take for granted.
And suddenly, many of the people who had spent the previous two years presenting themselves as the great defenders of oppressed humanity had remarkably little to say.
The people who had been inconsolably passionate about oppression when Gaza was involved could not summon anything approaching the same passion for Iranians risking their lives against an actual theocratic dictatorship.
Nor did Iran consume Western culture in anything resembling the way Gaza had.
There were no months of encampments across universities. No comparable wave of demonstrations paralysing Western cities. No celebrities falling over one another to signal their solidarity. No vast cultural movement insisting that silence was violence.
The contrast was impossible to ignore.
And then the regime began killing people.
Where Were the Humanitarians?
The Iranian authorities shut down the internet as the crackdown intensified, effectively pulling a curtain across the country while security forces opened fire on their own population.
Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed. Thousands were arrested. Videos and eyewitness accounts showed security forces firing live ammunition into crowds. Reports emerged of torture, disappearances and sexual violence.
The regime did everything in its power to hide what was happening. It cut the country off from the outside world, restricted information and made independent verification extraordinarily difficult. Meanwhile, accounts coming from inside Iran have consistently described a massacre on a staggering scale, with estimates running into the tens of thousands and some placing the number above 40,000.
What we know already is horrific enough.
Thousands upon thousands of Iranians were killed for demanding freedom. And there is every reason to believe the final number, if it is ever fully known, could be vastly higher than the figures outsiders have so far been able to verify.
Here you had virtually every ingredient the Western protest movement claimed to care about: an oppressed population confronting a brutal state, peaceful demonstrators demanding fundamental rights, women resisting an Islamist system that has controlled their bodies and lives for decades, and young people willing to risk everything for a future outside the Islamic Republic.
People were being shot for demanding freedoms that those marching through New York, London and Helsinki already possessed.
And yet the silence from much of the pro-Palestine movement was deafening.
Why?
When you point towards other wars in the Middle East or Africa that have produced enormous death tolls, the response is often that doing so is “whataboutism”.
But Iran presents a harder problem.
Because this isn’t simply about comparing body counts.
Iran fits almost perfectly within the moral framework these activists claim to hold.
Here was an oppressed population confronting people who were quite literally oppressing them.
In fact, solidarity with the Iranian protesters should have been considerably easier.
There was no October 7th hanging over this movement. No massacre of families. No kidnapped children. No rape and torture of civilians that had to be explained away as “resistance”.
The Iranian protesters had not crossed a border and butchered hundreds of people.
They walked into their own streets and demanded freedom.
This was a genuine grassroots uprising of a brutalised people against the state brutalising them.
And still: nothing approaching the same moral outrage.
No comparable protests. No comparable social-media frenzy. No comparable obsession.
And when many of these voices finally did speak about Iran, some appeared more animated by America or Israel attacking the Islamic regime than by the Islamic regime massacring Iranians.
Others dismissed reports of the killings, questioned whether the uprising was genuine or claimed the protesters were somehow agents of Mossad.
The same political culture that has often treated numbers coming from Hamas-controlled Gaza as authoritative suddenly discovered extraordinary scepticism when Iranians themselves described what was happening inside their country.
Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us.
Many of the same ideological circles spent months disputing or minimising evidence of sexual violence committed during October 7th.
But the hypocrisy itself is not actually the most important part.
The hypocrisy reveals something deeper.
This Was Never Just About Compassion
Peel back enough layers of the modern “pro-Palestine” movement and I don’t believe compassion is what you eventually find.
You find an ideology.
An ideology with a very specific understanding of the world: the West is oppressive, Israel is an extension of Western oppression, and anyone perceived to be fighting either of them is therefore placed somewhere on the side of liberation.
That framework produces extraordinary moral absurdities.
Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist. It has tortured and executed Palestinians. Yet many people who claim to care deeply about Palestinians barely mention Hamas’s oppression of them. Some actively make excuses for it.
Why?
Because within this worldview, certain groups have been assigned the role of “oppressed”.
And the oppressed cannot easily become oppressors, no matter how brutally they behave.
Iran exposes the same contradiction from another direction.
The Islamic regime funds Hamas. It funds Hezbollah. It has spent decades presenting itself as part of the “resistance” against Israel and the West.
So suddenly the moral categories become uncomfortable.
The Iranian people are oppressed.
But their oppressor is anti-American.
Their oppressor is anti-Israel.
Their oppressor funds the very organisations Western radicals have spent years romanticising as “resistance”.
Who, then, are they supposed to side with?
Iran exposes the contradiction at the heart of this worldview. And when reality contradicts the ideology, too many simply choose the ideology.
This is why the silence matters.
It tells us something.
If your compassion disappears the moment an oppressed person wants Western-style freedom, rejects Islamism, waves the Lion and Sun flag, supports Reza Pahlavi or welcomes help from Israel and America, then perhaps oppression was never really the organising principle of your worldview.
Perhaps something else was.
Wolves Dressed Like Sheep
When malice dresses itself as compassion, it can travel surprisingly far.
It can enter universities, newspapers, cultural institutions and eventually the halls of political power.
That is what should concern us.
The ideology we are watching spread throughout the Western world does not exist in isolation. It draws from different traditions—revolutionary Marxism, anti-Westernism, Islamism and post-colonial politics—and creates strange alliances between groups that would otherwise have very little in common.
What binds them together is not a coherent vision of human freedom.
It is the enemy they share: the West, Israel, and liberal civilisation itself.
And so our moral compass gradually turns upside down.
The West—a civilisation that developed institutions capable of criticising, reforming and improving itself—is treated as uniquely evil.
Meanwhile Hamas can be transformed into “freedom fighters”. A theocratic dictatorship can massacre thousands of Iranians and still struggle to generate a fraction of the rage directed at Israel. Terrorism becomes resistance. Fanaticism becomes liberation. And people demanding the freedoms we already enjoy become inconvenient.
That is not compassion.
It is ideology wearing compassion as a costume.
And we cannot afford to be passive about it.
We need to keep our eyes open and recognise what is happening in front of us.
Because the wolves have learned to dress like sheep.