Erfan Soltani is a 26-year-old Iranian, handsome enough to be a movie star. As of this writing, he is likely drawing his final breaths, after being arrested and sentenced to death by the regime for taking part in protests. Soltani, a courageous protest fighter, has become a symbol of the Iranian people's bravery and a stain on a decaying Western society that abandoned him and his friends to the mercy of an evil regime, while continuing to harass Israel with obsession and hypocrisy.
Roughly two and a half years of war in Gaza, launched at the initiative of the Gazans, have led to around 60,000 deaths, a large proportion of them proven terrorists. By comparison, in a single week in Iran some 12,000 protesters were slaughtered and more than 10,000 arrested. These figures are estimates only. Under the Iranian regime's internet blackout and the moral blackout of Western media and leaders, a massacre is unfolding.
There are no staged images of starving children or empty pots, no photos of emaciated children who have supposedly been ill for years. In Iran, people are truly being butchered in the streets. The few testimonies that have pierced the blackout tell heart-rending stories of people mowed down by machine guns or snipers. The limited images that emerge, showing masses of bodies wrapped in black plastic, tell a story that should have jolted the West out of its lethargy and fear.
Western media have awakened late, in line with fashion. Without social networks, especially Elon Musk's X, the voices of desperate Iranians would have been swallowed. CNN, the BBC, Sky and others know how to launch intensive coverage when they want to. They know how to market hunger in Gaza or paint Israel in the colors of genocide. They know how to frame, lie and distort reality, turning good into evil and evil into good.
Lindsey Hilsum, international editor at Britain's Channel 4 News, offered a glimpse into the Western media's hypocritical worldview. Responding to criticism on X, she wrote: "Foreign journalists cannot get into Iran, and we are working only with social media videos that we can verify… Iran is not silenced, it is just objectively difficult to report on."
That argument might have held water if the same were true of Gaza, where journalists have also been barred from entering. Yet news organizations there led a relentless anti-Israel smear campaign, using every scrap of propaganda produced by Hamas, the terrorist organization, and its helpers.
Aside from the US and Israel, the true champions of freedom and human rights, the world effectively does not exist. UN Secretary-General António Guterres only remembered Iran this week, issuing a statement in which he "urges the authorities to exercise maximum restraint and refrain from unnecessary or disproportionate use of force." How polite and diplomatic of him.
Compare that to Guterres' and the UN's obsessive preoccupation with Israel. On January 8, as Iranians were being slaughtered in the streets, he sent Israel a threatening letter warning it would be brought before the International Court of Justice if it did not repeal laws against UNRWA. The legislation sponsored by MK Simcha Rothman and MK Yulia Malinovsky succeeded in stirring something in the "little antisemite" that rivers of blood and tears in Tehran could not.
Where are Western campuses? Where is academia, the self-proclaimed standard-bearer of human rights, which erupted over the just war in Gaza? Where are the campus activists? Why are they not standing with the few Iranian exiles trying to raise the cry of their brothers and sisters? Where are the mass protests on the streets of London? Where is Greta Thunberg's "freedom flotilla" and her friends? Where are the movie stars who just this week strutted down red carpets at the Golden Globes without mentioning what is happening in Iran? Where is UN Women, which has not even tweeted in support of the women being trampled in Iran? Where are the emergency debates at the Security Council and the leaders of Europe?
Those who threatened Israel, fighting for its life against bloodthirsty terrorist organizations, with arms embargoes now make do with limp speeches or tweets. Israel and Donald Trump's America are the hope, the torchbearers of freedom and rights. In the face of towering Western hypocrisy, one can only hope we will know how to extend a correct and courageous hand to the crushed protesters in Iran and bring a message to the free world.
