The regime that hangs protesters is now a Gen Z mascot - opinion

This did not happen by accident. Tehran has piggybacked on two years of anti-Israel sentiment and the collapse of moral vocabulary around Gaza. In too many circles, “anti-Israel” has become a solvent. It dissolves distinctions between democracy and theocracy, between wartime error and deliberate terror, and between sympathy for civilians and indulgence towards tyrants.

Once Israel is cast as the master villain, Iran can appear, absurdly, as part of a global resistance front. Its own victims – women beaten for showing their hair, teenagers hanged for protesting, minorities, dissidents, and students – vanish.

The propaganda itself is more sophisticated than many Western officials realize. Tehran and its sympathizers no longer rely solely on state television or clerical bombast. The new material is native to the Internet: snide, fast, visual, memetic, and cheap.

The Lego-style AI videos mocking Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and American military power compress an entire geopolitical narrative into a toy-like joke: America is stupid, Israel is evil, Iran is witty, wounded, and defiant. Young viewers need not read a manifesto when they can laugh, share, and absorb the alignment.

This propaganda is designed for an audience that no longer clearly distinguishes between news, satire, activism, and entertainment. The regime knows that the meme arrives before the correction, and emotion before the fact-check. By the time a fabrication is debunked, its political effect has often already taken hold.

The deeper vulnerability lies in Western youth itself. This generation was shaped by the financial crash, austerity, COVID disruption, unaffordable housing, climate dread, and institutional collapse. Many are angry, lonely, and insecure.

Many inhabit a culture where grievance is currency and victimhood supplies moral authority. Add Gramscian habits in parts of the academy and media, where conflict is flattened into oppressor and oppressed, and the result is a public primed to misunderstand Iran. The young are taught to ask who has less power. They are less often taught to ask who jails trade unionists, stones women, funds militias, tortures students, and hangs revolutionary children when they revolt.

Social media intensifies the damage. It rewards rage, mockery, compression, and tribal belonging. It punishes historical memory. A young person scrolling through a feed sees an Iranian child under rubble, a plastic Trump mini-figure in flames, a slogan about empire, then Gaza, then a campus activist describing Israel as the source of all regional evil. The sequence makes its own argument. It need not be coherent; it only needs emotional continuity.

This is why Iran understands our young people better than our own politicians do. Western leaders still imagine that facts, press conferences, and official statements can compete with a moral cartoon. Tehran knows better. It supplies identity, transgression, and theatrical rebellion. It turns sympathy for a clerical police state into a lifestyle signal for those who believe they are standing against oppression.

The answer is not to sneer at the young. Contempt deepens the alienation that hostile propaganda feeds. The answer is truth, grounded in moral and cultural intelligence. Israel’s friends must speak about Iranian civilians with the same urgency as Israeli security. They must name the executed, disappeared, and imprisoned; expose digital methods without sounding like panicked scolds; and accept that solemn communiqués cannot beat memes, animation, irony, and speed.

Above all, the West must distinguish a people from their jailers. The Iranian people deserve solidarity. The Islamic Republic deserves exposure, pressure, and defeat. The tragedy is that too many young Westerners, convinced they are siding with the oppressed, are being trained to cheer the oppressors. Iran has won sympathy not because it has become less monstrous but because we have become easier to manipulate.■