There is a deafening silence on the Left about Iran. Now, in the third week of a popular uprising against tyranny, not a peep of support has been heard from the likes of Greta Thunberg, Zohran Mamdani, the Columbia faculty lounge, or the Harvard student body.

Why is this? The protesters’ reasonable claim for support is overwhelmingly clear. Iran’s 92 million people are sick, literally to death, of repression by a regime that has murdered, arrested, beaten, and imprisoned them for 47 years. The bravest have taken to their city streets, mostly unarmed, to demand freedom.

The ayatollahs have responded, as they always do, with more murder, arrests, imprisonments, and beatings. At least 2,000 citizens have been gunned down so far, and perhaps as many as 12,000, with the toll rising each night after official daytime pro-government rallies are finished and genuine, not astroturf, demonstrations begin with the gathering darkness. After more killing, the mullahs distribute videos of corpses in body bags as a threatening message to their own people. Human rights organizations send out the same videos to show the rest of the world what outrages the regime is perpetrating.  

So where are left-wingers whose pose is normally to be the moral conscience of the developed world and who rarely miss a chance to boast that they are on the side of the little guy? In the past year, these supposed champions of democracy have said nothing so often as they have claimed they stand strong against autocracy. Yet an oppressed people is demanding an end to autocracy with obvious justice, and left-wingers have not even chirruped in solidarity. 

Those few who have spoken at all mostly side with the oppressors. Columbia Prof. Hamid Dabashi defamed the Iranian uprising as an “Israeli instigated revolt.” This echoes the line or argument of those in power in Tehran, where the army, for example, said it would “safeguard national interests, strategic infrastructure, and public property” — it was presumably referring to buildings, including a mosque, that had been burned by the protesters, and would “thwart enemy........

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