Who The Left Stands With

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, January 09, 2026

 

The Western left’s silence and inaction in response to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Iran confirms what some of us have long known. Progressive activists are not pro-human-rights, pro-minority-rights, pro–women’s rights, pro-freedom, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, pro-peace or anti-war, and they are definitely not pro-democracy.

 

What they are is anti-American and anti-Semitic. That’s it. Which means the only things they are for are America’s enemies and the world’s Jew-haters.

 

Some have asked: Where are the American demonstrations showing support for the courageous Iranians trying to bring down the theocratic regime that’s oppressed them for generations? The answer: They don’t exist, or at least not in numbers significant enough to have come to anyone’s attention.

 

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t protests happening in the U.S. right now. For example, last night, while Iranians were standing up to the mullahs, a crowd of keffiyeh-clad thugs swarmed a synagogue and Jewish school in Queens waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” Set aside—if you can—that they were there to intimidate Jews. They were also declaring themselves on the side of the Iranian regime. Hamas, as we all know, is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization. That’s where their sympathies lie.

 

And that’s been the case for more than two years. Anti-Israel protesters in the U.S. and Europe have regularly waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which was, up until recently, almost an Iranian statelet in Lebanon. And sometimes they’ve brandished the Iranian flag itself. So long as you hate Jews and the U.S., you’ve got friends on the Western left.

 

There are other protests underway in New York City, too. While Venezuelans rejoice en masse over the U.S.’s extraction of the Communist dictator Nicolás Maduro, American leftist groups, such as the China-linked People’s Forum and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, headed to Times Square and the Brooklyn detention center where Maduro is being held. Their message? “We want justice, you say how? Release Maduro right now.”

 

So what we’re talking about here isn’t really “silence and inaction,” as I put it above. It’s far more sinister than that. It’s activism devoted exclusively to supporting the oppressors of the downtrodden. The Islamic Republic oppresses Iranians, Hamas oppresses Palestinians, and Maduro oppressed Venezuelans. And the left loves them all.

 

You know who’s pro-human-rights? The Iranians risking their lives to reclaim their country at this very moment. Who’s pro-freedom? The State of Israel, which has been at war with a coalition of murderous theocrats for years. And guess who’s anti-authoritarian? The Trump administration, which decapitated the Maduro regime, hobbled Iran, and threatened the mullahs with further action should they order a killing spree.

 

Here's the good news. As things stand, the leftists are losing and the forces of liberation are on the march. Whiny Western protests don’t change the world to the extent that people like to believe. But the kind of committed uprising we now see in Iran is a different story. And military action, undertaken judiciously by democracies made up of free peoples, is simultaneously shaping the world into a better place. All the progressives’ heroes are trembling. It’s been too long since we’ve seen it. The year is off to a fine start.