While the world’s cameras swivel obediently from one geopolitical spectacle to the next, the blood on Iran’s streets has barely dried and already it has been forgotten. Donald Trump’s fixation on Greenland, his self-appointed “Board of Peace” for Gaza, and his pledge to end the war in Ukraine have consumed the international media cycle. Meanwhile, in Iran, thousands of unarmed protesters have been slaughtered, tens of thousands dragged into prisons, and many now face imminent execution after sham trials that would shame the darkest dictatorships of the 20th century. Yet there are no rolling headlines, no mass demonstrations, no anguished moral outrage.

Where did all the protesters go? Where were the vast crowds who filled the streets of European capitals in ostentatious displays of solidarity with Palestine? Where were the megaphones, the placards, the slogans denouncing state violence? Where were the student occupations, the trade union marches, the social media warriors who insist that silence equals complicity? Were Iranian lives simply not worth the inconvenience?

The Iranian uprising was not a marginal disturbance. It was nationwide, sustained, and met with extraordinary brutality. Young men and women, schoolchildren, students and workers were gunned down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij. Families were warned not to mourn publicly. Hospitals became hunting grounds for security forces seeking the wounded. Yet the reaction from much of the Western activist class has been a deafening silence.

The hypocrisy is staggering. It reveals an uncomfortable truth. For many self-proclaimed human rights campaigners, outrage is selective. It is activated not by suffering itself, but by ideology. Iran does not fit neatly into the fashionable binary of........

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