Mahsa Amini, Islamism, and the Moral Incoherence of the Western Left

Western Left/Progressives never fail to convey the lack of substance behind their manufactured beliefs.

On the 13th of September 2022, a young woman in Tehran was confronted by members of a specialist unit within the Iranian police force, known as the Gasht-e Ershad, colloquially referred to as the “morality police”. The brief of this unit is quite simple; the enforcement of Islamist moral principles in the public domain, which it disproportionately directs against women, specifically their choice of dress. According to the doctrine of the Islamic regime, the “crime” of this young woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a Kurdish Iranian visiting Tehran with her family, was to have not sufficiently veiled her hair with her headscarf. With a little too many strands on show for the liking of the “morality police”, Amini was taken into custody, and beaten into a coma from which she never recovered. She died three days later. Iran convulsed with the most widespread and sustained civil unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women staring down the regime with bare heads, their headscarves in bonfires along with pictures of the Supreme Leader. The machinery of the repressive theocracy wasted no time, bullets, or rope, in responding. Almost 18-months of arrests, shootings, hangings and beatings, have followed.

In late October 2022, I wrote an essay on the state apparatus of the Islamic Republic, and the shallowness of the performative outrage of Western Leftists¹ in response to the events unfolding in Iran (read the full essay here). The central theme of the essay was that the Pavlovian responses that characterise the reactions of Western Leftists to whatever the latest CurrentThing™ is, without regard for or interest in understanding anything about the issues at play, render their “protest” hollow. More than hollow, because detaching their performance from any meaningful engagement with the issues demeans the very issue itself and all its seriousness and suffering. If you’re interested in the concept of the “parallel state” of the Islamic Republic and why it is “too rigid to bend and too ruthless to break”, I'd encourage you to read the full essay. But for present purposes, the following quote should give you a synopsis of the critique:

“I’m dumbfounded by the sheer incuriousness of Western liberals for any understanding of the state apparatus of the Islamic Republic, the political alignments, or really anything of substance pertaining to this moment, in favour of the usual slogan-based empty rhetoric. But then again, after the past few years of social upheavals, this is also unsurprising; Western liberals are defined by a seeming commitment to ignorance and aloofness in their emptiness. For most Western progressives, it is the performance that is itself the outcome. There is a conspicuous absence of any principles, replaced as they have been by a series of ideological mantras about the world...”

Something had happened, somewhere, and the word “oppression” applied. The details were superfluous. The reasons, irrelevant. Contemporary Western Leftists are a movement that perceives themselves as on the RightSideofHistory™, as history’s actors, comprised of a generation reared by algorithms only to react rather than to think. Their postmodern educations mean they can only understand the world through a series of “isms” and social justice jargon, from “White supremacy” to “indigenous”; “settler-colonialist” is the current trendy term. Every issue can only be comprehended through this parochial reducing valve, which relegates any genuine inquiry and understanding to an afterthought. The inanity of the “isms” and jargon means they can be recycled from one CurrentThing™ to the next, superimposing Western Leftist shibboleths onto any issue, no matter where it is occurring and by, to, or between whoever it is occurring. Just say the things and perform the things, but whatever it is, just be seen to react: automatically, mechanically, and unequivocally. Mahsa Amini’s death was understood by Western Leftists only through the prism of buzzwords and slogans, never as anything more substantive.

Yet underneath this performative superficiality lies something far more malevolent, and the response of the Western Left since October 7th has laid this malevolence bare. The incidents are too numerous for this to be waved off as “a few bad apples”; this is part of the cultural fabric of the Western Left (read this essay for more on this issue and the history of Western Leftists justifying Islamist extremism and terrorism). More to the present point, the responses in recent months have revealed that the reactions of Western Leftists to Mahsa Amini’s murder was something beyond superficial performance; the vacuity provided a veil for the sinister realities behind her death. Never once did they stop to ask why such State-sanctioned violence in Iran is happening, who is perpetrating such oppression, and for what purposes and justifications. They didn’t ask those questions because they couldn’t hear the answer, and they couldn’t hear the answer because it is inconsistent with their worldview.

Because what exactly were Western Leftists protesting in response to Mahsa Amini’s death, if not Islamist ideology? Was she not killed for a punitive and arbitrary “moral” code imposed on women? Was she not killed for the material reality of her sex-based status as a woman under Islamist doctrine? Was she not killed by state actors, by a specific police unit existing solely for the enforcement of that Islamist doctrine? Was this enforcement not at the behest of a theocratic Islamist regime, the self-styled “Islamic Republic”? Did this regime not exist because of the “Islamic Revolution”?

No, Western Leftists did not “stand with the women of Iran”, or any Iranians, at all, because you can’t “stand with” anything if you have no idea what you stand against. And now they are marching amidst banners and slogans extolling the proxies through which the Islamic Republic extends its destabilising influence and odious ideologies. The moral confusion of the Western Left is spectacular. The very same voices who a mere 18 months ago were hashtagging #womenlifefreedom and proclaiming how they “stand with the women of Iran”, have spent the past five months excusing, equivocating, or openly supporting Islamist fundamentalist groups, from Hamas to Hezbollah and, recently, the Houthis. All of which are proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its empire of rubble. This goes beyond banal hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies some knowledge, a certain pretence of recognising the discordance between actions and beliefs. The incoherence of this particular juxtaposition is different, because there isn’t even a cursory recognition of reality here, just a dangerous combination of cultural nihilism and narcissistic indifference to the implications of their rhetoric.

What renders the juxtaposition between the Mahsa Amini tragedy and the subsequent spree of executions by the Islamic Republic, and the current fawning over Hamas and the Houthis, so contemptible is that if there was any shred of principle to the Western Left they would never countenance the conflation. Western Leftists define themselves by their open support of a progressive social agenda which reifies the expression of identity of the varying groups represented by the acronym, LGBTQ. Islamism despises anyone who falls within this definition. Amnesty International has recently reported that the Houthis’ Islamist kangaroo courts sentenced ~40 people to be either executed, publicly flogged, or imprisoned. The methods of execution are hideously, but predictably, 9th Century Islamist: stoned to death and, in two reported cases, crucifixion. Yet during the past few weeks of protests, nominally in solidarity with the Palestinians, the streets of London have reverberated with the chant:

“Houthis, Houthis make us proud, turn another ship around.”

Proud, of what? Proud that gay Yemenis are being stoned to death and crucified? Quite a grotesque inversion of what “Pride” means to the gay community. Such deep moral incoherence appears to be of little concern to Western Leftists, who will offer up two pseudo-justifications: the Palestinians and “Islamophobia”. In relation to the Palestinians, any Leftist with a shred of principle would go out of their way to separate their support for the legitimate concerns of the Palestinians from the repugnant ideologies of Islamism, because the latter is irreconcilable with the principles of egalitarianism and universalism in individual rights and dignity upon which protesting on behalf of the Palestinians is supposedly based. And anyone who believes “freedom” for the Palestinians is arriving on the back of the Four Horsemen of the Islamic Apocalypse (Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) is living in an alternate reality characterised by Western safety and comfortable detachment. The luxury of radical-chic beliefs.

Even assuming someone is the most vehement opponent of Israel’s policies and a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause, this still doesn’t justify excusing or equivocating on who Hamas are and what they stand for. Because what use protesting for a people’s freedom if they are incapable of realising their freedoms? Being able to retain that clarity and distinction reflects a view defined by principles and substance. This clarity and distinction between the legitimate aspirations for a Palestinian state and total condemnation of Islamist fundamentalism is a position that the remaining shreds of the Israeli Left have maintained post-October 7th to the shame of their Western counterparts. Using the Palestinians as an excuse to equivocate and justify Hamas, the Houthis, or any Islamist fundamentalist movement with all the inherent repression and backwardness they represent, merely betrays the lack of principles and substance underpinning much of the contemporary Western Left.

And then there is the “Islamophobia” myth. Anti-Muslim discrimination and hate should be as repugnant to any right-thinking individual as any form of irrational discrimination against any particular group for their creed, colour, or other arbitrary characteristic. But anti-Muslim discrimination and hatred fall under that banner: racism. Criticising Islamism as a socio-cultural-political ideology is not “phobic” of Muslims, because ideas and ideologies are not individuals or even their community. This would be akin to accusing opposition to Bolshevism as “Russophobic”, an absurd proposition. And there is no equivalent term for any other religion, which should be sufficient cause for pause to think about why, and to whose benefits, the term is deployed. Levelling criticism at Catholic priests for the epidemic of sexually abusing children doesn’t return a charge of “Catholophobia”. Levelling criticism as Modi’s noxious Hindu nationalism and the persecution of India’s Muslims doesn’t return a charge of “Hindiphobia”. Failing to realise Islamism for the socio-cultural-political ideology that it is reflects nothing but the naïve “progressivism” of Western Leftists. A core pillar of our open tolerant societies is that they have evolved precisely because of a culture where ideas and ideologies were always open to scrutiny, from Church to State.

The Chinese have a word for such a person: “baizuo”, which translates to “white left”, viewed as arrogant Westerners who act as saviours for their own sense of moral superiority, including their pretence to tolerate backward Islamist values under some misguided notion of “progress”. The beneficiaries of the charge of “Islamophobia” have always been the Islamist movements that invented the term (often attributed to Iranian religious reactionaries). As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner highlighted, the term exists for no other reason than to render the socio-cultural-political ideology of Islamism inviolable to examination and critique. This ideology has as its ultimate goal the remaking of society in its image and governance according to its principles. Any critique of the ideology of Islamism readily reveals its incompatibility with any norms of an open, tolerant society. This is why the charge of “Islamophobia” best serves Islamists in the West, where they can be sure that the desire of Leftists to be seen as “inclusive” will have them turn a blind eye to the misogyny, sexist inequalities, homophobia, religious repression, and repression of freedom of expression, inherent in the socio-cultural-political ideology of Islamism. The mutual alliance of crafty clerics and Western Useful Idiots desperate to adopt another “phobe” to sound progressive gives substance to the charge that “Islamophobia” is a word “used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”²

The incongruence with Amini reveals itself again: Women, Life, and Freedom cannot be divorced from the ideologies that repress women, violate their rights to a life of dignity, and strip their freedoms and those of anyone who lives outside the narrow scope of Islamist doctrines. And yet Western Leftists, who conveniently forget their “listen to oppressed voices” mantra, shout down Iranian activists who dare draw the straight line between Tehran and the proliferation of Islamist fundamentalism throughout the Middle East. These same Leftists, whose compass of principle is so distorted that they cannot seem to grasp that the society they want, one with zero limits or boundaries on individual self-expression whether related to sexual orientation, gender, or otherwise, is precisely what Islamism abhors about our societies and openly seek to destroy about the West. Western Leftists believe that “anti-imperialist” hatred of the West provides a common cause between themselves and Islamist movements, conveniently forgetting that the only society in which you are free to live in any multitudes of identity expression is in the West. It takes a breathtaking lack of self-awareness not to realise on which side their bread is buttered. It is equally breathtaking that Western Leftists fall for the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of Islamist movements, given that they are rooted in imperial designs, from the conquering Caliphate of the 8-14th Centuries to the contemporary quest for the imposition of Islamist doctrines.

The inability to discern the incongruence between nominally standing for freedom and “liberation”, particularly for the non-Western countries as the Western Left does, and the use of Islamism to legitimise fundamentally unfree societies, seems to be little more than wilful ignorance. It is easy to discern the relationship between Islamism and freedom by reference to the world’s 52 Muslim-majority countries, only four of which are above the global average in personal freedoms. However, those that are above the global average, such as Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina, are close to the Western world average, which begs a question as to what may explain the distinction with countries like Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the United Arab Emirates. The answer is not the system of government, which ranges from the semi-presidential republics of Egypt and Algeria to the theocracies of Iran and Saudi Arabia. The distinction is the degree to which the state is defined by secularism or religion; Muslim-majority countries with greater levels of personal freedoms are those with secular legal systems and limited imposition of Islamic law. Those states with the lowest levels of personal freedom are those that operate religiously repressive states grounded in the imposition of Islamist doctrines. This is not a happenstance of history. One cannot stand for freedom and liberation and equivocate on the reason why it is deprived to people under such regimes. Name it for what it is.

Western Leftists might consider how all of this would be operationalised for the Palestinians, who they apparently desire to be “free”. An article published on the UK Islamist website, 5 Pillars, in late December of last year called not for a one-state, two-state, or any-state solution, but the reimposition of the Caliphate. To quote:

“Firstly…Any solution to the crisis must be derived from within this framework and anchored to the primary sources of Islamic law. Secondly, Muslims must acknowledge that based on its asl (origins), the system of democracy is an anathema to Islam… Thirdly, Islamic jurisprudence obliges Muslims to restore any occupied territory once under the Shari’ah to its original status. These territories are classified as Muslim land until the Day of Judgement and it is traditionally the duty of the executive head of an Islamic State (Khalifah) to dispatch those with sufficient capability to liberate the region from occupation and reinstate Islamic law and order, which is essential for the dispensation of individual and collective justice.”

Individual and collective justice? Mahsa Amini was murdered under the banner of Islamic “law and order”; every Iranian murdered by the Islamic Republic in the past 18-months is a testament to how “collective justice” is viewed under Islamism. What has contributed to the corruption of the moral compass of the Western Left is the mistaken belief that Islamism represents the oppressed and therefore any action, no matter how reprehensible, must be excused. Yet any Western Leftist who thinks the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians for self-determination are best served by adopting luxury radical-chic beliefs on the repressive ideologies of Islamism is merely a Useful Idiot for their oppression.

I hope the Houthis make them proud; evidently, Mahsa Amini didn’t.

1. For the sake of uniformity throughout the essay, the term “Leftist” here is used. This is intended to be broad, including the more American denominator of “liberal”, and the Progressive end of the Left-of-centre spectrum. Most of the contemporary noise on the Left emanates from Progressives, but this term also only constitutes ~6-13% of voters depending on what side of the pond we’re talking about. And because of the longer history of some of the issues herein on the Western Left, I’ve opted to use the term “Leftist” to refer broadly to the movement. Of course, this will leave open a predictable response that some Leftists do indeed oppose the Islamic Republic for what it is and stand with the Palestinians without justifying or excusing Hamas. This is no doubt the case, but movements by their definition are not a place for individual expression and nuance, and movements are defined by the noises they make in public. Hence, do not get too caught up in the terminology; it is broad enough to capture the Zeitgeist, while we can acknowledge that it is not representative of everyone who locates themselves on the Left, myself included.

2. This quote was erroneously attributed to Christopher Hitchins but apparently is correctly attributable to some dude on Twitter named Andrew Cummins.