Something is moving in Iran.
Beneath the repressive surface of the ayatollahs’ regime, movements of popular rebellion are once again emerging with force. These are no longer isolated episodes, but persistent signs of a deep fracture between society and power.

Women, young people, students, workers: a growing part of the Iranian people openly challenges a political-theocratic system that has been stifling personal freedoms, civil rights and individual aspirations for over forty years.

And yet, this struggle – which should speak directly to the heart of those who call themselves ‘progressive’ – fails to warm the spirits of a certain Western radical left, the same left that has been tearing its clothes off for the Palestinian cause in recent months with demonstrations, slogans and continuous mobilisations.

The paradox is obvious. In Iran, one fights against a regime that imposes the veil, represses homosexuality, censors culture, controls bodies and consciences .
They are fighting for a freedom of customs that is not forced ‘westernisation’, but historical memory: Iran, before the Khomeinist revolution of 1979, was a Middle Eastern country, yes, but secular, open, crossed by an imperfect but real modernity.
Today, a large part of the population is simply asking to live again, not to imitate the West, but to regain a normality that has been taken away from them.

Yet, this revolt does not become a flag, does not ignite squares, does not generate mass hashtags. Why?

The answer lies in a form of atavistic and anachronistic anti-Westernism that survives in sectors of the radical left; an ideological reflex that leads to judging conflicts not according to the values at stake – freedom, rights, self-determination – but according to who is perceived as the ‘enemy of the West’. In this distorted logic, the Iranian regime, although repressive and violent, ends up being tolerated, if not indirectly justified, because it opposes the United States, Israel, and the Western liberal order.

The comparison with the Palestinian issue makes this contradiction even more evident. Apart from the humanitarian tragedy and the real suffering of the civilian population, it is a fact that a significant part of the Palestinian people is supportive of – or at least not hostile to – Hamas, an organisation that embodies a profoundly illiberal, theocratic and violent worldview. One need only think of Hamas’s attitude towards homosexuals, women, and internal dissent. Yet this very cause is often supported without distinction, as if any criticism amounted to betrayal.

In Iran, on the contrary, the people take to the streets against an oppressive religious power, demanding individual freedoms, civil rights, secularity of the state. If there is a hierarchy of struggles for emancipation, the Iranian one should be, for a coherent left, at least as worthy of solidarity. Instead, what happens is the opposite: great attention is paid to civil rights ‘at home’, rightly claimed as non-negotiable, and sudden amnesia when those same values are trampled upon by regimes that are in the camp of geopolitical anti-Westernism.

It is a double standard that undermines the very credibility of progressive discourse. Rights are either universal or they become ideological tools. One cannot defend freedom of morals in Milan or Paris and turn away when Iranian women are imprisoned or killed for an uncovered lock of hair. One cannot claim inclusion and equality and then relativise homophobia or sexism when they come from ‘other’ contexts that are hostile to the West.

A final note on the geopolitical level. International support for the Iranian uprisings is desirable, but must be extremely cautious. History teaches us that military interventionism, especially when led by administrations with a strong aggressive impulse – like Donald Trump’s – risks producing the opposite effect: turning a domestic uprising into a ‘national resistance’ against foreign interference, fuelling a new and lasting anti-Western sentiment.

Helping the Iranian people does not mean bombing Tehran. It means intelligence operations, diplomatic pressure, targeted economic support, regime isolation and strategic support to domestic forces of change.

A true regime change not imposed from outside, but built from within. Without destruction, without rubble. Because only in this way can the new Iran be born not as a creature of foreign powers, but as an authentic expression of the will of its people.