Iran

Shame on us!

Iran is a large country with a young population. The median age of the almost 90 million people in Iran is about 32 years. Most of the people have spent their whole lifetime under the conditions of a strictly islamistic totalitarian dictatorship that exists since Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power in 1979. This dictatorship persistently violates all sorts of human rights, arbitrarily executes people on minor charges, suppresses and discriminates women all over their lifetime, supports terrorism against Jews worldwide and declares the destruction of Israel as its major aim. In sum: the worst you can imagine for any observer in the world with a liberal outlook and humanitarian morals.

Quite often in the past, there have been demonstrations against the regime, which were all brutally suppressed. In the last few days, however, a new quality of these unrests has been reached – with vast protest marches taking place in many cities of the country – from the biggest ones like Tehran, Mashhad and Isfahan down to small ones like Abadan. There are rumours that, in some cities, the regime has lost control over demonstrations so that the cities are in the hands of the protest movements.

Note that these are no more than rumours – mostly picked up from social media messages of which so many have reached a global audience that the regime has recently turned off the Internet to prevent news from spreading any further. Under these conditions, you would expect the western media giants to report intensively about the uprise, but nothing like that has so far happened. In Germany, where the author of these lines lives, the newspaper coverage of the events in Iran is remarkably sparse; and public radio and television have so far refrained from special reports that are otherwise common practice in case of major events abroad (like, e. g. most recently, the Gaza war).

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the public in the West is just not very interested in the uprising of the Iranian people. Shame on us! After all, there may now be a real opportunity for a genuine change to the better in Iran if only the pressure on the regime rises further. As a consequence of the geopolitical changes and shifts in the course of the years 2024 and 2025 – the demise of Assad in Syria, the plight of Iran-sponsored Hamas and Hezbollah, the attack of Israel on Iran’s nuclear capacities supported by the United states, the Iranian regime is seriously weakened – and may not be able to stand the new dimension of pressure from below. A regime change may be on the horizon, and given the past record of the Mullah government over more than 40 years, it is hard to imagine that it would not be to the better.

For the first time in decades, there may a real chance to get rid of one of most oppressive and powerful forces of Islamism in the world. It is time for the West to wake up to this opportunity. More than that: it is a moral duty to do, if the global fight for freedom is to be taken seriously.