This week, as I sat listening to a survivor’s account on Holocaust Memorial Day, we were reminded why remembrance matters. The Shoah did not begin with gas chambers. It began with language – with the normalisation of hate, with discrimination tolerated, and lies repeated until violence became permissible. Six million Jews were murdered. The world tells itself it learned the lesson. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Today, antisemitism is once again rising across the West. Since October 7, it has become louder, more explicit, and more socially acceptable in spaces that claim moral authority. What is most troubling is not only its presence, but the failure to recognise its familiar pattern. Hatred is once again being dressed up as justice. Ideology is once again overriding humanity.
While sitting in the auditorium listening to horrific stories of what happened to Jews in the past, it struck me that we are also living in a present moment of mass violence.
Since December 28, the Iranian people have risen in nationwide protests against one of the most brutal regimes of the modern era, which was also the mastermind behind October 7. For 47 years, they have lived under a system sustained by terror – executions, torture, enforced silence, and the systematic erasure of human dignity. What we are witnessing now is not spontaneous unrest; it is the accumulated courage of generations who have decided that fear is no longer an option.
Inside Iran today, there is scarcely a family untouched by loss. If they have not lost a loved one themselves, they know someone who has – a neighbour, a colleague, a classmate. Conservative estimates suggest more than 55,000 killed and over 300,000 severely injured. These are not abstract figures. They are the cost of demanding life, liberty, and dignity.
The regime’s response has been ruthless and methodical: live ammunition used against unarmed civilians, mass arrests, enforced disappearances, and entire neighbourhoods treated as enemy territory. There is no ideological ambiguity. This is a nation standing unmistakably against tyranny.
That clarity has exposed something deeply uncomfortable beyond Iran’s borders: the collapse of international conscience. Where are the voices that claim to champion human rights? Where is the mainstream media? Where is the sustained coverage, the weekly marches, the celebrity advocacy we have seen for other causes? Many who mobilised loudly elsewhere are now silent. Their silence is not neutrality; it is abdication.
This message is not for those who knowingly weaponise outrage. It is for the naïve – those who followed movements without asking questions, persuaded they were defending humanity when, in reality, they were amplifying narratives rooted in hostility toward Israel and Jews. In too many cases, the Palestinian cause became a vessel for something far older and darker.
The bitter irony is unavoidable: the same Islamist extremists who incite hatred against Jews abroad are slaughtering their own people at home. Iranian men, women, and children – Sunni and Shia, Sufi and secular, believers and atheists, teachers and students – are being killed daily by a regime that claims to rule in God’s name. This is not a religious conflict. It is a civilisational one: between those who defend human life and those who seek power through fear and dehumanisation.
The global rise of antisemitism cannot be treated as a separate issue. It is part of the same ideological architecture. Footage from Iran shows commanders telling troops they are being sent to kill “Zionists.” This language is deliberate. It conditions violence, strips victims of humanity, and links repression at home with hatred abroad.
In 2024, I was invited to address the Israeli Parliament. As a Muslim woman, I encountered not hostility but openness, dignity, and respect – including a prayer space for Muslims inside the Israeli parliament. That experience reinforced a truth many prefer to ignore: this is not Jews versus Muslims. It is freedom versus authoritarianism.
Still, this is not only a story of despair. Courage exists – in Iran and beyond. Journalists, activists, lawyers, politicians, and ordinary citizens are speaking out, often at great personal cost. They deserve recognition, not abandonment.
Now comes the test for democratic governments – particularly the United Kingdom.
Words are no longer sufficient. The UK must move from statements to strategy. That means formally proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, expanding targeted sanctions against regime officials and their enablers, closing legal and financial safe havens, and supporting international accountability mechanisms for crimes against humanity. It also means confronting antisemitism decisively, recognising it as an early warning system for wider authoritarian violence.
The world is no longer divided between left and right, or East and West. It is divided between just and unjust. There is no middle ground. The Iranian revolution is not only reshaping Iran – it is exposing leaders, institutions, media, and movements that speak endlessly of values yet retreat when those values demand courage.
As the Persian poet Saadi wrote: “If you are indifferent to the suffering of others, you do not deserve to be called human.”
Iranians are bleeding in full view of the world. Governments must now decide whether they will stand with the victims of tyranny – or be remembered for their silence.
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