In an interview about identity politics, American literary scholar Robert Boyers once described virtue signalling as nothing more than “performative outrage” rather than genuine moral courage.
Nothing could be truer as it relates to Europe’s collective blind spot for the depraved and menacing Iranian regime. While Europeans have too often been quick to the streets to voice their righteous indignation on everything from the Gaza conflict to the election of Donald Trump, the continent has remained comparatively muted on Iran. Sadly, nowhere has this hypocrisy been truer than in Ireland – north and south.
Too often, politicians and activists, whether in the Irish Republic or Northern Ireland, default to a script so reflexively anti-American and anti-Israel, that they fail to see the Islamic Republic in its true light: a repressive, misogynistic and antisemitic theocracy that brutalises its own people and destabilises an entire region. Women and girls, LGBT people, and minorities in Iran are subjected to unimaginable discrimination and violence, arguably amounting to crimes against humanity.
Women are detained, raped and brutalised for simply showing their hair and gay people are flogged or sentenced to death for just being who they are. That is the regime too many in Ireland still fail to see clearly.
On the streets of Belfast and Dublin, all too often an alternate moral hierarchy operates. In recent weeks in Belfast, anti-regime Iranians faced aggressive Irish protesters deriding US and Israeli strikes. In Dublin, a separate protest of Iranians backing the strikes was confronted with equal hostility, counter-protestors going as far as defending the brutality of the regime while waving its flag and holding photos glorifying the deceased Ayatollah Khamenei.
The point is not that every critic of military action is an apologist for Tehran. It is that many outspoken activists and protestors in Ireland fail to afford solidarity and even basic respect to the Iranian diaspora. Their thinking is clouded by a simplistic and often erroneous narrative they hold of the Iran war and wider Middle East conflict.
Sinn Féin right across the island embodies this problem. Its leader Mary Lou McDonald was quick to call on the Taoiseach to condemn US-Israeli strikes “without qualification” and to declare them unlawful, as did Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill. While that may be a legitimate political position to take, it is also a reflection of the instinctive framing of the Irish political-left, outrage at the actions of Americans and Israelis, with empathy far less forthcoming when the targets are Iranian patriots, Iranian women, Iranian gays or anti-regime exiles who do not neatly fit into their tribal political mantra.
It is of course their right to champion whatever causes they deem worthy, like that of the Palestinians, but the true sincerity of their words and deeds should be brought into question when they routinely minimise or ignore entirely the suffering inflicted by one of the Middle East’s most barbaric regimes, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This failure is not confined to the left. A broad climate of deep hostility against Israel led Jerusalem to close its embassy in Dublin at the beginning of last year. Yet a diplomatic timidity and blind spot prevails from Government Buildings as it relates to the clear barbarism of the Iranian regime. The asymmetry is evident.
Unfortunately, there is also a historically distinct Irish aspect to this blindness. Ireland likes to imagine itself as instinctively anti-fascist, instinctively anti-racist, instinctively on the side of the oppressed, and much of this is well deserved. But not all of it. The historical record is less comfortable. In the 1930s, Ireland did not escape fascistic and antisemitic elements, with paranoid right-wing thinking prevalent and small Jewish communities regularly harassed and subject to antisemitic conspiracy theories. The point is not to insist that the Ireland of today should be engulfed by guilt of its past, but to remember that antisemitism can don local colours too, and that self-righteous moralising is too often used as a smokescreen for prejudice.
It is why pro-Ayatollah placards and regime flags on the streets of Belfast and Dublin should deeply concern us. Anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric frequently presents itself as “anti-imperialism” and cloaked in the veil of human rights language. Too many can immediately recognise a Palestinian keffiyeh, but will turn a blind eye to the Lion and Sun flags of exiled Iranians. That is not internationalism. It is ideological narcissism.
Matthew Robinson is the Director of the Euro-Gulf Information Centre think-tank and the former Chairman of the Conservative Party in Northern Ireland
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.