If your oppressors are murderous theocrats but your supporters include the ‘wrong’ people – that is Zionists – many on the left may cancel your cry for freedom
January 12, 2026 12:56
I promise you that I didn’t ask ChatGPT to create Misan Harriman. He is very real – and is the chair of the South Bank Centre, no less.
I swear that I didn’t ask Gemini to come up with the video that he posted on Sunday on social media – a walking monologue filmed in artsy black and white that is the embodiment of the cognitive dissonance underlying progressive attitudes to Iran.
And I really, really don’t mean to mock his sincerely held views. (Oh alright then, that’s not true. I really, really do mean to mock them. I mean to dismiss them and him. I mean, in fact, to do all I can to expose him and his allies as the arrogant, contemptible, egotistical fools that they are.)
One of the most widely commented on aspects of the Western reaction to the protests in Iran has been the silence of so many of the usual suspects – those virtue-parading, self-proclaimed progressive celeb, arts and media types who have been so vociferous over the past couple of years in lambasting Israel over Gaza, and who seem to hate the West far more than they do those nations and organisations which want to destroy the West. As ever, JKR Rowling put her finger on it: “If you claim to support human rights yet can’t bring yourself to show solidarity with those fighting for their liberty in Iran, you’ve revealed yourself. You don’t give a damn about people being oppressed and brutalised so long as it’s being done by the enemies of your enemies.”
That attitude is typified by one of the independent Muslim MPs, Adnan Hussain, who responded to Rowling by getting straight to what is, for him and those who think like him, the real point: “Forgive us for being reluctant to join a crowd that commits/cheers on/supports genocide as it now itches for regime change in the same region. Something tells us it's not human rights or freedom that motivates their sudden moral awakening.”
It is, you see, about Israel. Certainly, the very last word that could be applied to Hussain and his ilk is progressive. Hussain was elected on a sectarian ticket as a Muslim appealing to other Muslims, but in that he exemplifies the so-called Red-Green alliance of Islamism and left/progressivism, for which the Iranian regime is the lodestar – "Shiite socialism”, as the French newspaper Liberation once called it.
The glue which binds this alliance together is hatred of the West – which also means, of course, hatred of Israel. Everything bad that happens in the world – and yes, to these people the collapse of the Iranian regime is bad – is tied up with Israel.
Which brings us to Misan Harriman. Do have a look at his video. It is, in its way, perfect – as an exemplar of the warping of Western liberalism.
Harriman begins by telling us that he has had “so many messages from my friends from Iran”. Unfortunately, these messages are “really quite alarming”. Because – quelle horreur! – “many of the folks that are DMing me videos and talking points to post have incredibly pro-Zionist leanings from their own social media pages.” How dare they, these Iranian Zio-stooges. Don’t they realise how wrong they are? “The idea that a state that is committing what I've just said” – you really don’t need me to tell what he said about “that entity”, as he calls Israel, so very on progressive brand – “is your Liberator is something that I will never accept to be true or good for the people of Iran.”
Those stupid, foolish Iranians think they know better what is true or good for themselves than the chair of the South Bank Centre. The idiots. How dare they ignore him.
What also shows how wrong: the protests are is that the wrong people support them. One social media account with over 50,000 followers cites “a worrying list of people supporting the Iranian ‘revolution’” including Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, JK Rowling, Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage. “It’s not an area I know much about” - you don’t say! - “but this list gives me cause for suspicion”. As one respondent put it: “You are seriously saying that you have “cause for suspicion” of the bravest liberation struggle seen in decades because JK Rowling supports it?”
That is Western progressivism in a nutshell. Even the idea of freedom from a murderous theocratic tyranny is subservient to who is or is not politically acceptable in the West, and the idea that in the end it’s about the Jews (oops, the Zionists). I’d like to think that one day these people will wake up and realise that there is nothing progressive about supporting a theocratic tyranny. But they – and, I am afraid, the West more generally – are too far gone as they take advantage of Western freedom to spit on the astonishing courage of Iranians desperate for their own.
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