In January 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out what may prove to be one of the largest episodes of state violence against its own population in modern history. Reports from within the Ministry of Health and independent monitors suggest that on the nights of January 8 and 9 alone, the death toll exceeded 30,000.
It was a methodical, ruthless slaughter of students, workers, and women whose only crime was a refusal to submit to theocratic cruelty. The regime plunged the country into digital darkness to shroud the carnage, yet the subsequent mass executions have been met in the Western public sphere with a curious, stifled silence.
Contrast this with the totalizing mobilization surrounding Gaza – a cause that has dominated Western activism, academia, and media ecosystems for over two decades. Rather than a mere shortage of facts, this staggering disparity represents an active ideological filter that renders certain atrocities invisible.
The Foucault ghost and the red-green alliance
The roots of this silence run deep into the bedrock of French Theory. When Michel Foucault traveled to Tehran in 1978, he famously romanticized the Islamic Revolution as a “political spirituality” that could challenge Western modernity. That intellectual legacy persists today.
Modern activists have inherited a neo-Marxist framework that has replaced the old class struggle with a rigid hierarchy of identity groups. In this moral cartography, social legitimacy is derived from one’s place in the “Oppression Olympics.” Because the Iranian regime frames itself as an opponent of the West – the source of all evil in the world – its crimes are “decoded” or contextualized away. To stand with the Iranian people would require activists to admit that an anti-Western regime can be a totalitarian engine of slaughter. For many, that admission is ideologically intolerable.
The transactional shield
While the Left is immobilized by ideology, the Right has been neutralized through transactional diplomacy. In mid-January 2026, as Washington weighed military strikes to halt the massacre, Qatar led a relentless lobbying campaign to stay the American hand. By framing military intervention as a “catastrophic” risk to global oil markets and the security of the Strait of Hormuz, Doha provided the Trump administration with a diplomatic off-ramp.
Qatar has perfected the art of “mediator as a shield.” By embedding its interests in Western defense and commerce – from $96 billion aircraft deals to hosting the critical Al Udeid Air Base – it has made regional “stability” more valuable to Western capitals than the lives of Iranian dissidents. The circle of silence is thus completed: the progressive Left abandons Iran to protect a post-colonial myth, while the nationalist Right abandons them to protect a regional security pact.
Mass slaughter under digital darkness
This abandonment is facilitated by Tehran’s sophisticated “digital terrorism.” The January crackdown was a masterclass in information warfare. By sabotaging network protocols rather than simply “unplugging” the internet, the regime fragmented a national uprising into isolated, manageable confrontations while suppressing documentation at the source. This systematic mass slaughter under digital darkness relies on the West’s short attention span; if there is no high-definition footage of the massacre, the Western conscience feels no obligation to respond.
The market of moral performance
We are witnessing a profound moral inversion. In contemporary activist circles, empathy has become a tool of selective absolution. Misogyny, state terror, and the execution of dissenters are excused or ignored if the perpetrator belongs to the right “anti-colonial” camp.
The fixation on Gaza provides a comfortable, pre-packaged script of a simple “oppressor-oppressed” binary. It allows for a form of moral grandstanding that requires no nuance and, crucially, no confrontation with Islamist power. Condemning Israel confers status while condemning the ayatollahs disrupts the “Global South” myth. We are witnessing the replacement of genuine compassion with a form of moral theater – one that prizes tribal signaling over the universal protection of human life.
The death of universalism
This collapse of moral standards is strategically disastrous. By filtering atrocities through the lens of identity – asking who committed the violence before deciding if it is wrong – the West has signaled to every autocrat in Tehran that repression is tolerable as long as it is wrapped in the right rhetorical packaging.
When the activist world looks away from tens of thousands of murdered Iranians, they prove that human life is secondary to narrative coherence. Either empathy is universal, or it is merely propaganda. Either civilians matter regardless of the regime that kills them, or human rights are simply a costume worn when the politics are convenient. We have replaced an ethics of responsibility – which looks at real-world consequences – with a performative ethics of conviction.
Iran’s dead are currently testing the West’s moral seriousness. So far, the result is damning.
The writer is a senior analyst specializing in antisemitism and radical ideologies. She is a former journalist at The Jerusalem Post’s French edition. For nearly a decade, she has led government projects at the intersection of AI and hate speech detection and is currently completing a PhD at Sorbonne University.