The Pro-Gaza Left Is Oh So Quiet on Iran
Originally published in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter on January 14, 2026.
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I can’t help but notice that the “Free Palestine” crowd seems to have zero interest in freeing Iran.
In recent days the tyrannical Iranian regime has shut down the internet and phone service in the country, conducted mass arrests and massacred thousands—if not many thousands—of protesters.
Yet American college campuses, so recently the site of passionate encampments in support of the Palestinian people, are eerily quiet about what’s happening in Iran. The congressional microcaucus known as the Squad, so quick to decry the suffering of women and children in Gaza, are oddly mum about the suffering of women and children in Iran. And Greta Thunberg’s flotilla of humanity has yet to set sail for the Persian Gulf.
What’s happening in Iran is a human rights nightmare. The United Nations Human Rights Council is supposed to care about such things. It’s right there in the name. The Human Rights Council in recent years has been a merry-go-round of “genocide” accusations against Israel. Yet it has issued zero resolutions and held no inquiries about Iran. Most tellingly, there is no global demand for humanitarian aid for the Iranian protesters, or even a cease-fire, from the people and institutions who don’t hesitate to weigh in on Israel and Gaza.
At this week’s Golden Globes ceremony in Los Angeles, not one of the Hollywood celebrities found a moment to shout out the Iranian nation in its time of suffering. Filmmaker Judd Apatow stole a moment in the spotlight to call the American president a dictator. Actor Mark Ruffalo spent his red-carpet time accusing the Trump administration of terrorizing its own people. Neither had a word of support for innocent Iranians being gunned down for protesting an actual dictatorship.
The Iranian people are fighting to end a 46-year reign of murder, oppression and brutal submission of women. The media is downplaying the protests or ignoring them outright. Why?
The best answer I’ve heard comes from Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, an attorney with the Institute for Justice in Washington. Ms. Dehbozorgi, who spent her childhood in Iran, says the media isn’t covering the atrocities in Iran because doing so would “require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white.”
The millions risking their lives to gather in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and countless other Iranian cities don’t fit neatly into these categories, she says: “They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.”
It’s almost as if the Free Palestine movement has nothing to do with freedom, human rights or the welfare of innocents at all.
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Mr. Ondrasik is a musician and songwriter who performs under the name Five for Fighting.