UK Edition
It’s quite some distance from Brighton train station to Tehran, but perhaps not far enough. On Monday one extremist, who had attended the protest at the Sussex terminus to support the Iranian regime and Palestine Action, said the war in Gaza was the “third holocaust” and that all Zionists “should f---ing die”. She was too idiotic to recognise the hypocrisy.
As in Tehran, where there is a clock that counts down to the destruction of Israel, Brighton’s protesters were not making a clear distinction between those who believe in the state of Israel and those who don’t. If you’re casually throwing around the word ‘holocaust’, you’re calling for the death of all Jews, not just Zionists. These various ignoramuses were so high on their supply of righteousness they were actually parading posters of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The hashtag groupies of #IstandwithIran are flailing moral vacuums. Did they stand with Iran in 2009 when the Green Movement, sometimes known as the Persian Spring (in which a mass protest movement sprang up), declared the presidential election fraudulent? Executions had increased three-fold under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These human rights violations mostly involved juvenile offenders and gay people.
Did they stand with Iran during the 2019 fuel protests? Where were they in 2022 when a new protest movement took to the streets called Woman, Life, Freedom, after a young woman called Mahsa Amini was beaten to death by the morality police for the crime of showing her hair? Many brave young men and women have been murdered since then because the Iranian regime is a heartless theocracy.
Those in the Iranian diaspora, brilliant, educated, sophisticated people, will tell you what this regime is like.
Still, ignorance is clearly bliss, which is why we get the likes of the ludicrous India Willoughby announcing on X: “I could live in Iran. Better trans rights than the UK and US. We do nearly all of the bad things they do. Israel is currently wiping out a whole people – aided and abetted by Labour, who are shamefully trying to cover their arse. War crime. I don’t feel safe with Netanyahu or Trump having nuclear weapons. I don’t believe anything that Israel, US or UK say. Why should I? Because I’m English and should trust the BBC?”.
India is a trans rights activist. Her previous tweet (“Never thought I’d say this, but #TeamIran”) kicked off a row with JK Rowling, who responded by saying “India, a fan of a woman-hating, gay-hating, authoritarian regime? Colour me astonished.” Rowling offered to pay her fare to Iran.
If you don’t know much about India Willoughby, then lucky you, because she exists to attack women like me. India was Jonathan until she transitioned in 2016. She was a local TV news reader, has a son and has appeared on Loose Women and Celebrity Big Brother. This person’s connection to reality is indeed loose as she says things like:
“I’m 100 per cent a biological woman and female. The fact the GC [gender-critical] movement can’t handle this simple fact isn’t my problem. Jealous.”
Whatevs. The one thing Willoughby is not is a biological woman. If she believes she would flourish in Iran she should talk to trans people there. Iran has the second highest number of “gender re-assignment” surgeries in the world, second only to Thailand. But this is not done out of some notion of some “live and let live” mentality. Quite the opposite.
Homosexuality is punishable by death, often public hangings. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, transsexuals were categorised alongside homosexuals as illegal (and faced lashings or execution) but in 1986 a fatwa was declared saying that sex-reassignment surgery was acceptable. It claimed that being trans is a mental illness curable only by medical intervention. In practice this surgery is often poor and botched and many trans people work as prostitutes and are generally ostracised. As for gender nonconformity, forget it. In 2015 there was a crackdown on “devil worshipping” and “homosexual” hairstyles and tattoos.
The regime bans the internet; there is no freedom of speech. This is a theocratic dictatorship that has occupied Syria, that has wrecked the countries of its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas. The current regime cannot fall quick enough but this is not what the clueless idiots on our streets are protesting about.
They are siding with Iran because they hate Israel. Now, it is possible to want the destruction of Gaza to stop, to want aid to go in and to want to know what even a vague peace plan might look like. That is my position, but I am alarmed that where we once spoke of a two-state solution now there is only one. The obliteration of Israel means the obliteration of half the world’s Jewry.
How anyone who thinks this claims to be on the moral high ground is beyond comprehension. Open your eyes to what Iran is. Not a single one of these protesters would last a day there. Their hatred is as vile as their stupidity.
For all their “radicalism” these people who parade posters of the Ayatollah exhibit the ultimate colonialism. They know best and the rights they take for granted are not available to everyone. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sick.
The hatred from woke activists backing Iran is as vile as their stupidity
Those who casually accuse Israel of a ‘holocaust’, while backing the tyrannical Iranian regime, wouldn’t last a day in Tehran