The so-called progressive political and media elites have cynically normalized the assassination of Iran’s leader, dressing up regime change as a moral necessity while denying Iranians the right to self-determination. In doing so, they expose a racist double standard that humanizes Israeli victims, dehumanizes Iranian lives, and buries the very principles of freedom, dignity and international law they claim to defend.
Just imagine the uproar if Iran had killed more than 150 Israeli schoolgirls.
The ritual is immutable:
1) condemn the Iranian “regime” and more or less explicitly welcome the “death” (above all, never say “assassination”) of Ali Khamenei;
2) having thus provided justification for the US-Israeli war of aggression — the supreme crime according to the Nuremberg Tribunal — and validated the grotesque and abject talking points of the criminals against humanity that Trump and Netanyahu are regarding the alleged “dictatorship of the mullahs,” proclaim, hand on heart, that one does not condone war and artificially dissociate the other victims of these strikes, while affirming solidarity with the Iranian people;
3) finally and above all, make no reference to the fact that this same people took to the streets by the millions to support their “regime” in January, and are doing so again today, despite the bombs; it is not the real aspirations of the Iranian people that matter — deeply rooted as they are in their own history, values, and spirituality, infusing every aspect of their life with the teachings of Twelver Shia Islam and a deep attachment to the Prophet and his progeny — but rather those that the “civilized West” determines for them, seeking to shape them in its own godless image. Colonial mentality obliges — the same mentality that led Jules Ferry to declare that “the superior races have the duty to civilize the inferior ones.”
It is absolutely sickening to see that more than two years of genocide in Gaza have done nothing to change the crass ignorance, steeped in racism and Islamophobia, of our so-called progressive Left, whose hyperbolic reaction of solidarity we witnessed when it came to the 40 Israeli babies “beheaded” — existing solely in the putrid imagination of propagandists. In France, even La France Insoumise (LFI, main leftist party headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon), which had managed to distance itself from the inept and complicit “neither-Maduro-nor-Trump” discourse on Venezuela, is now revelling in the war crime constituted by the assassination of a foreign leader, servilely described by Mélenchon as “the executioner of his people,” parroting US-Zionist propaganda and dismissing the millions of Iranians who hold him in reverence and regard him as their political and spiritual leader. Let us therefore listen to Mélenchon, the “Tribune of the plebs”:
This is the first time there has been a war with no good guys. This is the first time there has been a war with only people we don’t like, I mean governments we don’t like. The government of Iran inspires no sympathy in me: for my part, I have opposed it from the very beginning. When its leader Ali Khamenei dies, I am obliged to say that I feel no sadness.
Mélenchon then claims that just as Nazism was a form of supremacism, the governments of Trump, Netanyahu and Khamenei are each in their own way supremacist powers competing for domination — going so far as to suggest that Khamenei proclaims Iran’s “superiority within Islam and over the Middle East,” an absurd characterization that serves only to justify equating aggressors with the attacked. He concludes: “Neither Shah nor Mullahs.”
No sadness, then, for Khamenei, nor for his wife, nor for his daughter, nor for his son-in-law, nor for his 14-month-old granddaughter, murdered alongside him — except insofar as one adopts the Israeli logic whereby, in order to assassinate one person, dozens or even hundreds are killed with him, invoking “collateral damage,” or even consigning them to oblivion by denying their very existence.
No sadness either for international law, the purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, the fundamental norms governing relations between States, global peace and stability. Nor for the more than 100 million Iranians and Shiite Muslims throughout the world (including in France and in the other European and Western countries) who mourn the loss of their Guide — whose popularity is questioned only by the ignorant and the ideologues, as for his followers, he is more than the Pope is to Catholics — because they do not embrace the model of society promoted by Mélenchon, who opposes the Islamic Republic on principle, even were it massively supported by the Iranian people, simply because the very principle of a theocracy repels him.
Iran must be regime-changed, even if that means sending it back to the Stone Age, like Syria and Libya, destroying all its incredible accomplishments since 1979 in fields such as healthcare, education, and the sciences — achievements made despite crippling sanctions and persistent external pressures, just like Cuba, from dramatic improvements in life expectancy to the expansion of medical and higher education, rapid growth in research output and scientific innovation, and self-sufficiency in pharmaceutical and high-tech sectors. Iranian women are 70% of Iran’s STEM graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), but one must guess they are not “free” until they wear miniskirts. Such blindness and the outright denial of the right to political and cultural self-determination are outrageous.
Although Western tradition humanizes only Israeli victims, deemed alone worthy of compassion, let us defy convention and give a name and a face to the martyrs: above, Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani, 14 months old, Khamenei’s granddaughter, murdered with her family. No sadness, really? And below, several faces of the victims of the strike on a girls’ primary school — how abominable single-gender education must seem in your eyes — whose wearing of the veil, which Mélenchon once described as a “rag on the head,” may perhaps shock you.
All the students seen in this video, at Shajareh Tayyebeh School, were martyred
Mélenchon, whose condemnations and impassioned outbursts after October 7 are well remembered — when the Palestinian Resistance had merely exercised its right to struggle against occupation (and Israel responded with the Hannibal doctrine and genocide) — would he dare to say “I feel no sadness” if Trump or Netanyahu had been killed along with their wife, children, and grandchildren, without provocation, triggering a regional war that could quickly become World War III? Never in a million years. He would have condemned the very act of international terrorism constituted by the aggression and assassination of a foreign leader, evoked all its potentially cataclysmic ramifications, and explicitly mentioned the victims. But when it comes to Iran, none of this matters. Iranian and Israeli lives are not equal in the eyes of the “supremacists,” whether ethnic, political, or civilizational — are they, Mr. Mélenchon?
As for Mediapart, long regarded as one of France’s leading left-leaning media outlets, it no longer even bothers to conceal its Atlanticist and Zionist allegiances, openly embracing them. It congratulated Israel on the “tactical stroke of genius” represented by the mass terrorist beeper attack against Lebanon (later discreetly revising the description to a “strategic success” once it recognized that the original wording was apologetic), and is now explicitly turning the victim into the culprit, daring to claim that Iran had it coming because it refused to “capitulate on its foundations,” namely its defense capabilities (nuclear weapons being nothing more than a crude pretext), and refused to allow itself to be carved up (see the surreal article “Rather than Capitulate on Its Foundations, the Iranian Regime Prefers to Endure War,” torn to pieces by the comments of Mediapart subscribers themselves, who are increasingly turning their backs on this vile NATO bootlicking). France remains, without a doubt, the daughter of Jules Ferry the colonialist and Pétain the collaborationist.
If our grandees truly cared about international law, the rights of peoples, and global peace and security, the assassination of Khamenei would be unanimously condemned with horror and indignation, both in itself and for the cataclysmic consequences it could entail, from a global economic crisis to a third world war. If “human animals” possessed as much dignity as Western and Israeli lives in the eyes of our self-proclaimed “feminists,” the Iranian schoolgirls targeted by Israel would make every front page — and draw condemnations dwarfing those provoked by the fake story of 40 decapitated babies. Instead of ludicrous accusations of expansionism or imperialism toward Iran, we would be reminded at every second that Israel — the intergalactic champion of killing children and destroying schools and hospitals — dreams of turning the entire Middle East into Gaza, and wants to ensure Trump follows through on “Operation Epstein’s Fury” to the very end.
The great historical tradition of international solidarity, which once led French men and women to risk their lives and endure torture in support of the Algerian FLN, is no more. At best, one can expect the “progressives” and other self-styled “revolutionaries” to place aggressor and victim on the same footing. Far from those who claim neutrality in situations of injustice, and who, as Desmond Tutu said, merely play the game of the oppressor, we affirm our genuine internationalist solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the face of imperialist and Zionist aggressors, and affirm not only its right to defend itself, but its right to choose its model of society, including that of a “theocracy,” which is only a dirty word for fanatic secularists.
The post Failing Solidarity: How Cultural Prejudice Shapes Leftist Narratives on the War Against Iran appeared first on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Alain Marshal.