On September 13, 2022, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman named Mahsa Jina Amini stepped off the Tehran metro with her brother. She was arrested by the Guidance Patrol — the Islamic Republic’s morality police — for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. Three days later, on September 16, she was dead. Eyewitnesses who had been detained alongside her reported she was beaten in the van. Leaked medical scans confirmed she had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Iran’s authorities said she had a heart attack.

What followed was the largest popular uprising in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Within days, protests had spread to all thirty-one provinces. Women tore off their headscarves and burned them in the streets. High school students walked out of class. University campuses convulsed with demonstrations. The slogan Zan, Zendegi, Azadi — “Woman, Life, Freedom,” drawn from the Kurdish women’s liberation movement — became the organizing cry of a movement that was, in the assessment of most observers, the most significant feminist uprising anywhere in the world in decades.

The IRGC and its paramilitary Basij militia responded with live ammunition, metal pellets, and mass arrests. By the time the protests wound down in spring 2023, human rights organizations had documented the deaths of at least 551 protesters, including 68 children. Thousands were blinded, beaten, tortured in detention, or sexually assaulted. Eight protesters were executed following show trials. Tens of thousands were arrested. Iran’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, herself imprisoned, described the crackdown from her cell.

These are not contested facts. They are documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and the Iran Human Rights organization. The perpetrators are named: the IRGC, the Basij, the apparatus of state violence under the direct command of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The question this post asks is simple: where was the Western anti-Zionist left?

I. The Asymmetry

The question is not merely rhetorical. It has a measurable, documented answer.

After October 7, 2023 — thirteen months after Mahsa Amini’s death — the Western progressive activist infrastructure mobilized with extraordinary speed and scale. University encampments appeared at Columbia, UCLA, Harvard, Oxford, and dozens of other institutions within days. Hundreds of thousands marched in London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. Organizations including the DSA, CodePink, the ANSWER Coalition, the Stop the War Coalition, Students for Justice in Palestine, and allied groups organized, funded, and sustained a protest movement of unprecedented breadth within the Western left.

The mobilization was in response to Israeli military operations in Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attack. The concern for Palestinian civilian casualties was genuine and the scale of those casualties was, and is, severe. That concern requires no delegitimizing.

What requires examination is the asymmetry. In the twelve months between Mahsa Amini’s death in September 2022 and October 7, 2023, the same organizations that would soon fill streets across the Western world in solidarity with Gaza were, in the main, not filling streets for the Iranian women who were being shot, blinded, hanged, and tortured by the IRGC and Basij. There were no encampments at Columbia for Nika Shakarami, the sixteen-year-old found dead after disappearing at a Tehran protest, her body showing signs of rape. There was no sustained DSA campaign for Sarina Esmailzadeh, the sixteen-year-old beaten to death by security forces. There were no coordinated international days of action when Iran publicly hanged Majidreza Rahnavard from a crane in December 2022 for participating in a protest.

The disproportion is stark enough that it demands an explanation. The Iranian women being killed were women. The movement they were part of — “Woman, Life, Freedom” — was explicitly feminist, rooted in the Kurdish women’s liberation tradition, demanding bodily autonomy against state enforcement of religious dress codes. These are causes the Western progressive left professes to hold as foundational. And the movement was being violently suppressed by the IRGC and Basij — the very organizations the same Western left has, in other contexts, treated as part of the “Axis of Resistance.”

II. The Selective Universalism

The pattern of selective response to women’s rights depending on the identity of the oppressor is not new. It is a recurring feature of the campist left’s politics, and it has a specific intellectual genealogy.

In the autumn of 1978, as the Shah’s regime was collapsing, the French philosopher Michel Foucault traveled to Iran as a special correspondent for two European publications. What he found there electrified him. He believed he was witnessing a new form of political consciousness — what he called “political spirituality” — that escaped the categories of Western rationalism and offered an authentic alternative to liberal modernity. He wrote admiringly of the Islamist movement, met with Khomeini’s associates, and framed the revolution as a genuine popular uprising deserving European intellectual solidarity.

Iranian feminists, both inside Iran and in exile, warned him. They could see where the revolution was heading. They understood that compulsory veiling was not a spiritual choice freely made but a program of state control over women’s bodies — a program that would become law within months of the revolution’s triumph.

Foucault dismissed their concerns. His response to feminist critics was to insist that Western observers should not judge non-Western revolutions by liberal standards. To criticize the Islamic Republic’s treatment of women, in his framing, was to impose foreign values on an authentically different political spirituality. In March 1979, just weeks after the revolution’s triumph, thousands of Iranian women poured into Tehran’s streets to protest compulsory veiling. They were met with beatings and threats. Foucault published no serious reckoning with the regime he had praised. He retreated into silence.

Simone de Beauvoir, by contrast, sent a message of solidarity to the Iranian women protesting compulsory veiling that same month. She understood — as the Iranian feminists who had warned Foucault understood — that women’s bodily autonomy is not a “Western value” that can be suspended when it is a non-Western government enforcing its violation. It is either universal or it is nothing.

The Foucauldian position — cultural relativism deployed to protect anti-Western political movements from feminist scrutiny — was not resolved by the history that followed. It was institutionalized. It became the template through which large sections of the Western progressive left have, ever since, processed the Islamic Republic’s treatment of women: as something requiring contextualization, something that cannot be centered without serving imperialist purposes, something that must be subordinated to the larger geopolitical stakes.

III. The Logic of the Silence

The silence around the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was not uniformly complete. Some left publications — notably Jacobin — argued explicitly that the international left should offer unwavering support to the Iranian protesters. This is worth acknowledging. The silence was not universal.

But the organizational left — the infrastructure of coalitions, committees, and protest-organizing bodies that had mobilized for Gaza and would mobilize again — did not move in any comparable way for Iran. The reasons for this are structural, and they are worth naming precisely.

The first reason is that expressing solidarity with Iranian women protesters is, within the campist framework, an inherently problematic act. The Iranian protesters were chanting “Death to Khamenei” and “Death to the dictator.” They were demanding the fall of the Islamic Republic. Their slogans and their politics were explicitly anti-regime — which means, in the campist framework, that they were objectively aligned with the forces calling for regime change, which the campist left has consistently framed as a Western imperialist project. Solidarity with the protesters would require solidarity with their politics, which would require condemning the IRGC, which would destabilize the entire “Axis of Resistance” framework on which the campist left’s Iran politics depends.

The second reason is the IRGC’s own role. The Basij and IRGC were the forces shooting, blinding, and hanging the protesters. Any serious engagement with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement required naming who was killing its participants. Naming the IRGC as a perpetrator of crimes against women — which it was, documented in granular detail by multiple human rights organizations — is incompatible with treating the IRGC as part of a legitimate resistance. The campist framework cannot hold both positions simultaneously, and so it resolves the tension by not discussing the one that disrupts it.

The third reason connects to the specific character of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan and movement. The slogan’s origins in the Kurdish women’s liberation movement, and its adoption by protesters across Iran’s Kurdish, Baluch, and other minority communities, connected women’s rights to minority rights and both to a rejection of the Islamic Republic’s entire governing structure. This was not a movement asking for incremental reform within the existing system. It was a movement explicitly calling for the system’s end. And while the Western left has no structural objection to revolutionary demands in other contexts, a revolution explicitly aimed at ending the “Axis of Resistance’s” headquarters is not a revolution the campist left can endorse.

IV. The Feminist Test

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement offered the Western feminist left — as distinct from the specifically anti-Zionist activist infrastructure — a genuine test of universalism.

The test was not entirely failed. There were Western feminists who explicitly supported the Iranian protesters. There were moments when the movement received serious coverage and serious solidarity. The Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize in 2023 to Narges Mohammadi, recognizing her as a representative of the movement’s values.

But the specifically progressive, intersectional feminist organizations that had been most vocal about women’s rights in other contexts — organizations that marched for reproductive rights, that mobilized against sexual violence, that centered bodily autonomy as a foundational political value — were largely absent from sustained engagement with an uprising in which women were dying specifically because the state was enforcing mandatory religious dress codes with lethal force.

The failure is not logically inexplicable. The framework of intersectional feminism as practiced by much of the American and British activist left is organized around a specific theory of oppression in which the primary axis runs between Western power and the global south, colonizer and colonized, settler and indigenous. Within this framework, Iran is positioned on the colonized side of the axis — a victim of Western imperialism and sanctions, a state resisting U.S. and Israeli hegemony. Iranian women who are fighting the Islamic Republic are, in this framework, fighting on the wrong side: their enemy is the anti-imperialist state, not the imperialist West.

This is a framework that produces, as a logical output, the silence. Iranian women demanding to take off their hijabs without being beaten to death are not legible as feminist subjects within a framework that has already assigned their government to the oppressed column. Their oppressor is the oppressed. The framework cannot process the data.

The same framework produces, in a different key, the indifference to antisemitism emanating from within the “resistance” camp. Jewish women are not legible as feminist subjects when their oppressors are designated anti-imperialists. Iranian women are not legible as feminist subjects when their oppressors are designated resisters. In both cases, the universalism the framework claims is revealed as selective — contingent on the identity of the oppressor rather than the nature of the oppression.

V. What Iranian Women Said About This

Iranian women activists were not silent about the Western left’s silence. They named it, repeatedly, and their testimony is part of the record.

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist and activist whose campaign against compulsory veiling had brought her international attention for years, was direct: Iranian women were fighting a feminist revolution, and the Western feminist left was largely watching from a distance. She pointed out the irony that the movement’s slogan — “Woman, Life, Freedom” — was drawn from the Kurdish liberation movement, a tradition the Western left generally honors, yet the movement itself did not receive the solidarity it deserved.

The “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” chant — which appeared at the 2009 Green Movement, the 2019 Bloody November protests, the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, and the 2025-2026 protests — was, among other things, a statement about this dynamic. Iranian protesters were explicitly rejecting the claim that their government’s proxy wars in Gaza and Lebanon were conducted on their behalf. They were rejecting the framing in which the IRGC’s regional operations represented Iranian national interest or popular will. They were insisting that their lives — the lives of Iranian women, workers, students, and dissidents — were being sacrificed for a geopolitical program they had never endorsed and from which they were actively dying.

The Western left, which in other contexts centers the voices of oppressed communities and foregrounds their testimony as authoritative, largely did not center these voices. The testimony of Iranian women who had lived under IRGC repression — who had watched friends die at the hands of the Basij, who had been imprisoned for cutting their hair in public, who had been tortured in detention — was not amplified by the organizational infrastructure of the Western progressive movement in any way comparable to the amplification given to Palestinian voices. The asymmetry was not invisible. Iranian activists noticed it, named it, and documented it.

VI. The Structural Connection

The selective solidarity around Mahsa Amini is not a stand-alone curiosity. It is a predictable output of the same ideological framework that produced the left’s defense of the IRGC, the adoption of the “Axis of Resistance” vocabulary, the eulogies for Soleimani, and the erasure of the AMIA bombing from progressive historical consciousness.

In each case, the mechanism is the same: a geopolitical framework determines in advance who counts as a victim and whose oppressor can be named. The IRGC sits on the protected side of the campist divide. Therefore IRGC-directed violence against Iranian women is not a feminist issue in the way that state violence against Palestinian women is a feminist issue. The women are equally dead. Their oppressor is different. And it is the oppressor’s identity — not the nature of the oppression — that determines whether the Western progressive movement mobilizes.

This selectivity has a specific historical relationship to antisemitism. The same framework that makes Iranian women’s suffering invisible makes Jewish feminist concerns invisible when the perpetrators are designated resisters. The pattern was visible on October 7, when Hamas’s mass sexual violence against Israeli women was minimized, denied, or contextualized into irrelevance by substantial portions of the progressive left. It was visible in the treatment of the AMIA bombing, in which 85 people — many of them Jewish women — were killed by an IRGC-directed operation that has been systematically excluded from progressive discussions of the “Axis of Resistance.”

The selectivity of the solidarity is not incidental. It is the mechanism through which the campist framework protects itself from the evidence that would disrupt it. Iranian women’s deaths are evidence that the IRGC is a murderous authoritarian organization that targets women. Jewish women’s deaths on October 7 are evidence that Hamas is an antisemitic terrorist organization that uses sexual violence as a weapon. Both categories of evidence destabilize the “Axis of Resistance” framework. Both categories of evidence are therefore not fully processed.

This is the ideological logic that links selective solidarity over Mahsa Amini to left-wing antisemitism. They are not separate phenomena. They are outputs of the same framework, operating with the same internal logic, producing the same structural result: the suffering of people whose oppressors are designated anti-imperialists is made invisible, and the movements demanding justice for them are denied the solidarity they are owed. The full history of how this framework developed — and how it has repeatedly sheltered anti-Jewish hostility within progressive politics — is documented in The History of Left-Wing Antisemitism, which traces the structural mechanisms from Marx through Soviet communism to the contemporary anti-Zionist left.

VII. The Women of the Movement

Mahsa Amini was twenty-two years old. Her Kurdish name, Jina, means “life” — which is why “Woman, Life, Freedom” carries the weight it does. She did not choose to be the symbol of a revolution. She was killed for a piece of cloth.

Nika Shakarami was sixteen. She disappeared during a Tehran protest and was found dead nine days later, her body showing signs of rape. Iranian authorities initially claimed she had died in an accident. Her family was pressured to stay silent.

Sarina Esmailzadeh was sixteen. Eyewitness accounts say she was beaten to death by security forces at a protest in Karaj. Iranian authorities said she had died by suicide.

Hadis Najafi was twenty. She was shot six times while attending a protest. Videos of her tying her hair back before being killed were shared millions of times around the world.

These are not abstractions. They are the people who were dying while the Western progressive organizational infrastructure that would, thirteen months later, erect encampments at Columbia University was largely not mobilizing in comparable ways for them. Their names are worth knowing. Their deaths are worth the same outrage that the campist left reserves for the victims of its designated enemies.

The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement asked something very simple of the Western left: to affirm that Iranian women’s lives matter, that their demand for bodily autonomy is a feminist demand, and that the organization killing them — the IRGC — is not a resistance force but an oppressor. The Western left, in the main, declined. The reasons for that declination are not mysterious. They are structural, they are documented, and they are part of the same history of selective solidarity and ideological self-protection that has, repeatedly, made left-wing antisemitism possible.

This post is part of an ongoing series documenting the history and contemporary forms of left-wing antisemitism. For the full ideological history — from Marx through Soviet communism to today’s anti-Zionist left — see The History of Left-Wing Antisemitism, available now on Amazon.