On January 3, 2020, a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad International Airport killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force. The strike, ordered by President Donald Trump, was immediately controversial — questions about its legality under international law, its wisdom as a strategic decision, and the adequacy of the congressional notification process were all legitimate and were raised across the political spectrum.

What was not legitimate, and what this post documents, was something different: the eulogy.

In the days and weeks that followed Soleimani’s death, significant portions of the Western progressive left did not simply argue that the strike was illegal, or unwise, or that it risked escalation. They mourned Soleimani. They described him in terms that could not be squared with any honest accounting of his record. They treated his killing as a loss — not just a strategic event with uncertain consequences, but an occasion for grief and tribute. And in doing so, they revealed, with unusual clarity, the extent to which the campist framework had erased from their moral vocabulary the people Soleimani had spent his career killing.

Those people included hundreds of American soldiers. They included thousands of Syrians, Yemenis, Iraqis, and Iranians. And they included, with documented specificity, Jews.

The record of the Western left’s response to Soleimani’s killing deserves to be preserved and read carefully. It is one of the clearest available case studies of how ideological frameworks produce moral blindness — and of the specific patterns through which left-wing antisemitism operates in practice.

I. Who Soleimani Was

Before examining the responses, the record requires a baseline.

Qassem Soleimani became commander of the IRGC Quds Force in 1998. The Quds Force — whose name means “Jerusalem Force,” advertising its foundational purpose — is the IRGC’s elite external operations unit, responsible for funding, training, directing, and in key moments leading the network of Iranian proxy groups across the Middle East. For more than two decades, Soleimani was the architect, the operational commander, and the public face of that network.

The U.S. Department of Defense documented that Iranian-backed militias operating under Soleimani’s command and direction — principally Kataib Hezbollah and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq — were responsible for the deaths of at least 608 American service members in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, roughly seventeen percent of all U.S. combat fatalities during that period. The weapons of choice were explosively formed penetrators — armor-piercing devices manufactured in Iran, smuggled across the border, and designed specifically to defeat the armored vehicles American troops were traveling in. The U.S. State Department had designated the Quds Force a terrorist organization in 2007.

Soleimani’s command also extended to operations against Jewish and Israeli targets globally. The Quds Force, working through Hezbollah, directed or assisted with the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires — killing 29 people — and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in the same city, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. The AMIA bombing remains the deadliest antisemitic attack outside Israel since the Holocaust. Argentine intelligence and judicial investigations named Soleimani in connection with the AMIA plot; Argentine authorities report that in 2008, Soleimani paid tribute at the tomb of Imad Moughnieh, the Hezbollah operative identified by prosecutors as the chief operational organizer of the AMIA attack. In April 2024, Argentina’s Court of Cassation formally ruled that the attack was a crime against humanity carried out by Hezbollah under the direction of the Iranian state.

Soleimani was also the primary architect of Iranian intervention in Syria, where IRGC forces and their proxies helped the Assad regime survive its civil war at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilian lives. He directed Iran’s support for the Houthi movement in Yemen, which has prosecuted a war that created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. He was responsible for proxy militia operations that killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He was personally sanctioned by the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union.

In Iran itself, Soleimani was loathed by many of the dissidents and protesters who had endured decades of IRGC repression. When news of his killing broke, some Iranians celebrated privately while public mourning was staged under state direction. Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad reported receiving thousands of messages from Iranians across multiple cities expressing relief. Many Iranian dissidents on social media described the man not as a hero but as the operational commander of a machine that had crushed their movements, imprisoned their friends, and in November 2019 — just weeks before his death — killed hundreds of their fellow citizens in a crackdown on protests.

This is who died on January 3, 2020.

II. The Eulogies

The responses from the Western progressive left were striking in their failure to engage with this record.

The Democratic Socialists of America released a statement entitled “Urgent Call for Action Against a U.S. War on Iran” that framed the killing as an act of American imperialism and militarism. The statement’s treatment of Soleimani was, effectively, that of a victim — a figure whose death was part of a campaign of American aggression requiring urgent political response. The hundreds of American soldiers killed under his command, the 85 Jews killed in Buenos Aires under his direction, the Syrians and Yemenis whose deaths his operations made possible — none of this appeared in the DSA’s framing.

CodePink, which had previously organized delegations to Tehran and cultivated relationships with Iranian government-linked figures, mobilized alongside other organizations for a national day of action in more than thirty cities, ostensibly to protest a potential war with Iran. The organizational framing treated Soleimani as part of the context of American aggression — a casualty of empire — rather than as the commander of a designated terrorist organization responsible for mass killing.

Jeremy Corbyn, then the leader of the British Labour Party, described the killing as “an extremely serious and dangerous escalation” and called on both Iran and the United States to show restraint — a framing that placed the two parties in a kind of moral equivalence while declining to characterize what Soleimani had actually done. Corbyn had, years earlier, described it as his “honor and pleasure” to host representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah in Parliament.

In the United States, Democratic presidential candidates — under obvious pressure to differentiate themselves from Trump’s decision — largely focused on the procedural question of congressional authorization and the strategic risk of escalation. Some of these responses were reasonable, as far as they went. But the framing of several was notable for what was absent: a reckoning with Soleimani’s actual record. Elizabeth Warren called him “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans” — the most honest public assessment from a major political figure — while also calling the strike “reckless.” Bernie Sanders called it an “assassination” and warned of a “disastrous war.” What distinguished the activist left from the mainstream Democratic politicians, however, was not merely tone but the substantive content: where mainstream figures at least named what Soleimani had done, the activist infrastructure generally did not.

The Islamic Centre of England in London hosted a vigil for Soleimani. An Iraqi-American sheikh in Dearborn, Michigan, eulogized him as someone who had “brought hope to the marginalized.” Memorial gatherings were held in mosques in Berlin and Hamburg. These were not marginal events. They were organized, documented, and in some cases held on the premises of organizations with charitable status.

III. What the Eulogies Did Not Mention

The eulogies shared a common structure: they acknowledged, if at all, the context of Soleimani’s killing — American foreign policy, the risk of war, the illegality of the strike — while systematically omitting the content of his career.

The 608 American soldiers whose deaths the Department of Defense attributed to his proxy operations were not mentioned. The 85 people killed in Buenos Aires were not mentioned. The Syrians killed as IRGC forces helped Assad survive with barrel bombs and chemical weapons were not mentioned. The Iranian protesters killed in November 2019 — in a crackdown that the IRGC orchestrated — were not mentioned.

The specific question of antisemitism was entirely absent. In January 2020, just days after Soleimani’s death, it would have been reasonable to expect that progressive organizations with any serious commitment to opposing antisemitism would note that the man being mourned had been personally linked to the planning of the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. That connection was not obscure. It was available in court documents, in press reporting, in the public record of Argentine judicial proceedings that had been ongoing for more than two decades.

The silence was not ignorance. It was structural. The campist framework that governed the activist left’s response to Soleimani had already determined that the IRGC’s proxy network was the “resistance” and that opposition to U.S. foreign policy was the primary moral obligation. Within that framework, raising Soleimani’s antisemitic operations was not analysis; it was a form of collaboration with the imperial agenda. The eulogies were not about Soleimani the person. They were about the geopolitical framework. Soleimani was simply the occasion for affirming it.

IV. The Contrast with Osama bin Laden

The contrast with the Western left’s response to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 is instructive and was noticed at the time.

When U.S. forces killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on President Obama’s order, the response across the Democratic Party and much of the progressive left was celebration or at least unambiguous approval. There were debates about the legal basis for the operation, about drone warfare as a broader policy, about the implications for U.S.-Pakistan relations. But there was no vigil for bin Laden in London. There was no “national day of action” in thirty cities mourning his loss. No major progressive organization issued a statement treating his death primarily as an act of American aggression requiring solidarity with al-Qaeda.

Yet bin Laden and Soleimani occupied comparable positions in their respective organizations. Both were commanders of designated terrorist organizations. Both had been responsible for the deaths of large numbers of civilians and military personnel. The Pentagon attributed more than 600 American deaths to Soleimani’s proxy operations — a higher number, under the U.S. government’s own accounting, than the September 11 attacks.

The difference in the responses was not about the nature of the targets. It was about geopolitical alignment. Al-Qaeda had no claim to being an anti-imperialist organization in the campist sense; its ideology was pan-Islamist rather than anti-Western in the framework the left recognized. The IRGC, by contrast, had been classified — through the adoption of the “Axis of Resistance” framework and decades of anti-American positioning — as part of the resistance. That classification immunized Soleimani from the moral accounting that was readily available for bin Laden.

This is the campist framework operating with textbook consistency. The ideology of the person killed, the actual content of their operations, the actual people they killed — none of this determines the moral category. Geopolitical alignment does.

V. What Iranians Said

While Western progressives held vigils, Iranians who had lived under IRGC rule responded differently.

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian journalist and activist who had spent years documenting the IRGC’s repression of Iranian women, reported receiving thousands of messages from inside Iran expressing relief at Soleimani’s death. Many were from people who had been at the November 2019 protests — demonstrations that the IRGC had suppressed with live fire, killing hundreds of Iranian citizens. For these Iranians, Soleimani was not a national hero or a martyr of resistance. He was the man who had ordered their friends shot in the streets.

On social media, Iranians — risking significant personal consequences to speak openly — described Soleimani as a criminal, as the architect of economic misery through his proxy wars, as responsible for the deaths of thousands in Syria and Iraq whose suffering they were expected to accept as the price of Iran’s regional strategy. One user wrote that Soleimani had “gone to Iraq to tell the militia there to learn from Iran on how to suppress protesters” — a reference to the IRGC’s documented export of crowd-control tactics to Iraqi militia groups during Iraq’s simultaneous protest wave.

The divergence between the Western left’s mourning and the Iranian dissidents’ relief was stark and should have been disorienting. The people with the most direct knowledge of what Soleimani had done — who had experienced his organization’s methods from the inside, who had buried friends killed in IRGC crackdowns — were not mourning. The people mourning were thousands of miles away, operating through a framework that had made their direct knowledge inadmissible.

VI. The Pattern Recognized

The response to Soleimani’s killing was not an isolated event. It was a moment of unusual clarity in which the campist framework revealed its full structure.

The framework works, in essence, by substituting geopolitical analysis for moral analysis. Rather than asking “what did this person do, and to whom?” it asks “which side was this person on, relative to the primary enemy?” If the answer is “opposed to U.S. imperialism,” the person is placed in the protected category, and their crimes are either omitted, contextualized beyond recognition, or converted into legitimate acts of resistance.

This is structurally identical to the mechanism through which left-wing antisemitism has historically operated. As documented across the longer arc of this history — from Marx’s identification of Jewish money with capitalism, through the Soviet Union’s treatment of Zionism as a form of bourgeois nationalism requiring suppression, to the contemporary conversion of IRGC antisemitism into anti-imperialism — the pattern is consistent: anti-Jewish hostility is placed in a protected category by a larger political framework, and those who insist on naming it are accused of serving the enemy’s interests.

In the case of Soleimani, the antisemitic content of his operations — the AMIA bombing, the global targeting of Jewish and Israeli institutions by Quds Force and Hezbollah networks, the role of explicit antisemitism in the IRGC’s ideology — was made invisible by the campist lens before it could be examined. The eulogies were not lies, exactly. They simply did not contain the material that would have made them honest. And the material they excluded was, with notable consistency, the material that connected Soleimani most directly to the targeting of Jews.

This is how the history of left-wing antisemitism works in practice. It does not usually announce itself. It works through omission, through framing, through the construction of categories that determine in advance what can and cannot be morally relevant. The eulogies for Qassem Soleimani are one of the clearest recent illustrations of that mechanism — and they should be remembered as such. The full history of how these patterns developed and repeat across very different political contexts is traced in The History of Left-Wing Antisemitism, from Marx through Soviet communism to the contemporary anti-Zionist left.

VII. The Record, Preserved

History has a way of becoming inconvenient when it is preserved.

The eulogies for Soleimani were delivered publicly, in organizational statements, in political speeches, in vigils held in named buildings by named organizations. They are part of the record. The record of what Soleimani did is also preserved — in Pentagon documentation, in Argentine court rulings, in the testimony of Iranian dissidents, in the accounts of Syrian refugees, in the memorials of the 85 people killed at the AMIA building in Buenos Aires and their families, who have been seeking justice for more than three decades.

Placing those two records side by side is not a partisan act. It is an act of historical honesty. The Western left mourned a man whose career was built on the killing of civilians, the suppression of dissent, the direction of proxy forces that made the Middle East’s worst humanitarian crises possible, and the operational planning of what Argentine courts have formally classified as a crime against humanity targeting Jews.

That mourning was not incidental to the left’s politics. It was produced by them. Understanding why requires understanding the ideological framework that made the eulogies feel, to those who delivered them, not only permissible but necessary. That framework did not appear in January 2020. It was built over decades, through the same patterns that have repeatedly, in different contexts, provided shelter for anti-Jewish hostility within progressive movements.

Those patterns are worth understanding. The eulogies for Soleimani are one place to start.

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.