No Jews, No News

A brutal crackdown in Iran is largely going ignored by the self-appointed “humanitarians” of the West — but if Jews were involved, outrage would be instantaneous.

When Jews aren’t in the news, the self-appointed “humanitarians” of the West are nowhere to be found. (photo: Samantha Hare/Unsplash)

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In the last two weeks, hundreds of Iranians have been killed for the crime of protesting their own government.

Anyone who knows anything about anything understands that we are not talking about a government that has made its society among the happiest, healthiest, or most productive in the world.

We are talking about one of the most inhumane autocracies on the planet — an Islamist regime that governs through fear, criminalizes dissent, censors speech, jails journalists and activists, runs sham courts, extracts forced confessions, executes at one of the highest per-capita rates in the world, brutalizes women through state-enforced morality laws, persecutes ethnic and religious minorities, criminalizes LGBTQ existence, indoctrinates children, collapses its own economy through corruption and mismanagement, surveils and intimidates its citizens at home and abroad, shuts down the internet to hide its crimes, and exports chaos by funding militias, terror organizations, and proxy wars that have set the Middle East on fire.

Since late December, activists report that at least 490 protesters have been killed across Iran. More than 10,600 people have been detained. Hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed, with bodies piling up and families desperately searching for missing loved ones. One report describes a 5-year-old shot to death in his mother’s arms. Children, bystanders, and ordinary civilians have been killed. To ensure the world would not witness these crimes, the regime shut down the internet and cut phone lines, severing Iranians from the outside world at the very moment they most needed to be seen.

And yet, there have been no mass demonstrations in Western capitals. No student encampments. No emergency United Nations sessions. No viral hashtags. No breathless TV news panels. No celebrities posting solidarity symbols or tearful monologues. No movements explaining why this violence is uniquely urgent. No “Gays for Iran” or “Queers Against the Islamic Republic.” No feminist collectives marching for women beaten, jailed, and killed for refusing compulsory veiling.
No decolonial theorists rushing to contextualize why shooting your own population is somehow “resistance.”

Four words explain the reasons why: No Jews, No News.

This phrase is not a conspiracy theory; it is an empirical observation. When Jews, and especially Israel, are part of a story, much of the world roars into action. When Jews are absent, even mass death can pass almost unnoticed.

The asymmetry is striking. A rumor of a child killed in Gaza or the West Bank — typically later corrected, typically never verified — seems to bring the world to a halt. Streets fill with protesters. Media outlets run wall-to-wall coverage. Hashtags trend globally within hours. A child killed by his own government in Iran, shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? No demonstrations. No outrage. No sustained coverage.

This is not how human rights advocacy should work, but it is how the modern outrage economy functions. What passes for humanitarianism today is often theater: costless outrage performed in public, rewarded with moral validation, and abandoned the moment complexity intrudes. Causes are chosen not by the scale of suffering, but by narrative convenience. Villains must be familiar, symbolic, and safe to condemn. Victims must fit pre-approved identity frameworks. Sadly, Iran’s protests offer no such simplicity.

Iran is especially inconvenient. The oppressor is not Western or “white.” The ideology driving the violence is Islamist, not colonial. The victims are not easily racialized into fashionable categories. And the brutality cannot be blamed on Jews. Iran breaks the activist worldview, and so it is quietly ignored.

This selective blindness is not unique to Iran. Yemen has endured years of devastation under Houthi rule with minimal sustained outrage. Bashar al-Assad slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrians and remains a footnote. China’s repression of Uyghurs flares briefly and disappears. Sudan and Nigeria burn largely in silence. These are not marginal conflicts; they are humanitarian catastrophes. Yet without Jews at the center, they fail to catch the mainstream public’s attention.

Part of this silence is hypocrisy. Part of it is cowardice. Israel is easy to attack. Iran is not. Jews argue back; the Islamic Republic arrests, tortures, and kills. Moral courage is tested by risk, and much of the West prefers targets that pose none.

This dynamic matters far beyond media coverage, because Iran is not just another repressive regime. The Middle East has long been organized around two competing logics: pragmatism and ideology.

Pragmatic alignment is transactional. It rests on negotiable interests such as security cooperation, intelligence sharing, economic integration, technological exchange, and opposition to common threats. Stability is the main metric. This camp increasingly includes Arab states that have learned, often painfully, the cost of Islamism. Today, it is these Arab governments educating the West about the dangers of radical ideology. Just this weekend, the United Arab Emirates announced that it has curtailed subsidies for Emirati students attending UK universities, citing fears they will become radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood. The irony is pungent.

Opposing this stands an ideological bloc centered on Iran, encompassing Hezbollah, Hamas, Assad’s Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. This network does not depend on prosperity or governance. It depends on grievance, mobilization, and permanent confrontation — above all, with Israel and the United States. Resistance is identity. Struggle is virtue. Persistence is proof of moral standing. Economics, civilians, and stability are acceptable costs.

And, of course, brutality is not coincidental to this worldview; it is a prerequisite.

October 7th was its clearest recent expression. The Hamas-led massacre and kidnappings were not militarily rational; they were ideologically necessary. Violence was used to veto normalization, derail Saudi-Israeli convergence, and remind the region that integration could still be blocked with blood. It worked. Saudi Arabia no longer treats entry into the Abraham Accords as urgent. Pragmatic Middle East politics lost momentum.

Since then, the ideological bloc has absorbed significant blows. Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has fallen. Israel has degraded Hezbollah. Hamas has suffered massive (though incomplete) defeat in Gaza. Yet the system remains operational because its core remains intact: Iran.

A collapse of the Iranian regime would not merely change Iran; it would dissolve the ideological bloc as a coordinated system. Local militias might persist, but the funding, training, doctrine, and strategic direction would fracture. That is why Iran’s protests matter so deeply — and why their suppression matters even more.

And yet, because Israel is not directly involved, so much of the world looks away.

Iranians in the UK are so furious at the BBC’s near-total blackout of the protests that they have demonstrated outside its headquarters, waving Iranian flags and chanting, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” They understand what much of the West pretends not to see: Silence is not neutrality, it is complicity.

The bitter irony is almost comical. Jews are accused of controlling the media, yet when Jews are absent, the media goes quiet. Jews are accused of manipulating global attention, yet the only conflicts that reliably dominate attention are those involving Jews. Jews are accused of moral exceptionalism, yet Jewish suffering (and Jewish alleged wrongdoing) are treated as uniquely world-historic. It is as if the world wishes its darkest fantasies about Jews were true, not because they are, but because without Jews there would be far less to scream about.

Iran is burning. Its people are dying. Its regime is violently suppressing dissent in a society with arguably the most valid reasons to protest. And the self-appointed “humanitarians” of the West are nowhere to be found. Indeed, much of the Left has not merely lost its compass, but inverted it — sliding into an illiberal, coercive politics that now poses a deeper danger than the forces it claims to resist.

A significant segment of Western activism operates within what has long been called the Red–Green alliance: a convergence between segments of the Left and Islamist movements, united less by shared values than by shared enemies. Liberal ideals (free speech, women’s rights, secular governance) are quietly subordinated to a politics of opposition to the West, capitalism, “settler-colonialism” and, most certainly, Israel.

In this framework, regimes like Iran are not judged by how they treat their own people, but by whom they oppose. Their repression becomes inconvenient, their victims politically useless. Condemning Iran would fracture the narrative, force a reckoning with Islamist power, and expose the contradiction of aligning with a theocracy that executes dissidents, imprisons women, and criminalizes homosexuality. So the abuses are minimized, ignored, or rationalized — not because the facts are unclear, but because true humanitarianism would require breaking ideological ranks.

Ironically, this is how the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s started: as a broad, populist uprising against the Shah’s authoritarianism, corruption, and reliance on Western powers. Students, intellectuals, workers, secular activists, and leftist groups mobilized in streets and universities, calling for justice, equality, and political freedom. Many Iranians hoped for meaningful reform.

The clerics, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were initially just one faction among many, but they had a decisive advantage: organization, discipline, and a coherent ideological vision. While secular and leftist groups debated, fractured, or underestimated the mullahs, Khomeini’s followers acted decisively, framing themselves as the guardians of the revolution’s moral and spiritual legitimacy. They used religious rhetoric to appeal to the masses, presenting themselves as the only force capable of protecting the nation from Western influence and moral decay.

Through a combination of mass mobilization, propaganda, and strategic intimidation, the clerics consolidated power. They co-opted revolutionary councils, sidelined or imprisoned secular leaders, and eliminated rival factions, often violently. Revolutionary courts were established, dissenters were publicly punished, and the rhetoric of divine authority turned into a mechanism of political control. What had started as a diverse, multi-ideological uprising became a theocratic system in which the clergy monopolized power under the guise of protecting the revolution’s values.

In short, the mullahs hijacked the revolution by exploiting the very energy that had fueled it. They converted popular anger into ideological discipline, co-opted the narrative of freedom and justice, and transformed a movement for reform into one of rigid religious authoritarianism — a regime far more intrusive, far more violent, and far more permanent than the one it replaced.

And yet, this tragic story is not confined to Tehran. It is currently taking place in London, New York City, Paris, and other Western cities. But it goes largely ignored because so many people can only see injustice when Jews are involved.

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