I stand today with a heavy heart and a burning sense of indignation. For weeks, my social media feeds and the news cycles have been dominated by the harrowing images of blood on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad. I have watched videos of teenage girls being beaten by “morality” police, elderly men weeping over the lifeless bodies of their grandsons, and young men, full of life and hope, swinging from cranes in public executions designed to terrorize a nation into submission.
Yet, as I look around at the activists, the celebrities, and the self-proclaimed “human rights defenders” who spent the last year screaming “genocide” regarding the conflict in Palestine, I see a void. I hear a deafening, hypocritical silence.
To understand the depth of the current tragedy, I must look back at what Iran once was and how it became the prison it is today. Before the 1979 Revolution, Iran was a nation undergoing rapid modernization under the Pahlavi dynasty. While the Shah’s rule was certainly not without its own political repressions and internal flaws, it was a period of burgeoning secularism, women’s rights, and global integration.
In 1979, a diverse coalition of Marxists, liberals, and Islamists overthrew the monarchy. They were promised “freedom” and “democracy.” Instead, they were betrayed. The radical clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini hijacked the movement, purging their allies and erecting a theocratic cage. For 47 years, the Iranian people have lived under a regime that views a woman’s hair as a national security threat and dissent as a capital offense.
Today’s uprising, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and reinvigorated by the recent, even more brutal crackdowns of late 2025 and early 2026, is not just about a hijab. It is a total rejection of the Islamic Republic. I see a generation that has realized the regime cannot be reformed; it must be removed.
In the midst of this chaos, I hear a name being chanted in the streets: Reza Pahlavi. The Crown Prince, who has lived in exile for nearly half a century, has emerged as a symbol of a lost “Golden Age.”
Critics might call it nostalgia, but I see it as a desperate reach for stability and secularism. Iranians are calling for Pahlavi because they want a return to a “Normal Iran.” They want a leader who advocates for territorial integrity, the separation of religion and state, and individual liberties. They see in him a bridge to a future where Iran is no longer a pariah state sponsoring terror, but a nation that feeds its own children instead of funding foreign wars.
What disturbs me most is the selective empathy of the West’s “moral” vanguard. I want to ask the activists who occupied university campuses and blocked highways for Palestine: Where is your outrage now?
I am calling out the names of those who were at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle but have chosen to look away from the Iranian massacre. Where are the voices of Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo? Where are the fiery speeches from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the influential posts from Shaun King?
When children are killed by Israeli airstrikes, you call it a genocide. But when the Iranian regime shoots a 16-year-old like Taha Safari in the head, or when at least 12,000 protesters are estimated to have been slaughtered in just the last few weeks of this new crackdown, you stay silent.
Is it because the oppressor isn’t Western-aligned? Is it because the victims don’t fit into a neat “anti-imperialist” narrative? To me, this silence suggests that your “human rights” advocacy is not based on the sanctity of life, but on the identity of the killer. If the killer is an enemy of the West, you give them a pass. That isn’t activism; it’s complicity.
I refuse to accept this hierarchy of suffering. A child killed in Gaza is a tragedy; a child executed in Tehran is a tragedy. A woman stripped of her rights in Kabul or Tehran is just as much a victim of “oppression” as a woman displaced in a war zone.
The Iranian regime is currently conducting a systematic massacre of its own people, the elderly, the young, the men, and the women. They are raiding hospitals to kidnap the wounded and threatening families to prevent them from mourning their dead.
I am using my voice today to say: Enough. If you claim to care about humanity, you cannot be a part-time advocate. You cannot scream for Palestine and whisper for Iran. The blood on the streets of Tehran is just as red, and the cries of the Iranian mothers are just as piercing.
The Iranian people are not asking for Western boots on the ground. They are asking for the world to stop giving their oppressors a “pass” in the name of geopolitics. They are asking for the same moral fervor you give to every other fashionable cause. It is time to stop the silence.
Comrade Godwin Anyebe is a Journalist and a Rights Activist.
