The regime’s fall would reshape the world. Yet for Britain’s national broadcaster, the Guardian and their ideological fellow travellers, there is little to see
January 2, 2026 14:59
Imagine that we are back in November 1989. There have been weeks of protests in East Germany and then on November 4 the huge Alexanderplatz demonstration takes place, with nearly a million people demanding the end of the communist government. Within days the protests have moved to the Berlin Wall – and the authorities effectively admit defeat by refusing to fire on the crowds. The Berlin Wall is breached – followed later by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself.
Then imagine that you turn to the BBC for coverage of these epochal events in East Germany. You watch the TV news bulletins but there is no mention of anything. You listen to the radio but only at the fag end of the news is there a sentence mentioning that there have been protests, with no details. You look at the BBC website (I know, I know – this is imaginary) and there is not a word until you have scrolled down through 20 other stories.
It’s unimaginable, isn’t it? The BBC was in its element covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it rightly understood that it was one of the most important stories of the century.
As I write, there are mass demonstrations taking place in Iran. It is possible, of course, that these will follow the same path as those in 2009, in 2017-2018, in 2019 and in 2022 and will fail, defeated by a lack of coordination and planning and the ferocious response of the regime. But it is possible that this time it will be different, not least because this time the US has made clear it backs the protestors. As President Trump posted earlier today: “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
If the Iranian regime collapses it would not only transform the Middle East almost overnight, it would have a huge impact on the entire world, not least because the world’s leading sponsor of terror would have been removed (don’t forget it targets British citizens in the UK). And the economic impact would be huge. There would, for example, be no need for the sanctions which restrict Iran’s oil exports, leading to higher prices for the rest of us.
But according to the BBC, none of this matters. Iranian protests aren’t worth mentioning. If you relied on the BBC’s news broadcasts for your news in recent days you would have been entirely unaware that anything was happening in Iran. Only if you scrolled down the BBC news site would you, eventually, have reached a small story. You would have learned far more by following the social media posts of Iranian comedian Omid Djalili than the news organisation which we are all compelled by law to fund.
Not that the BBC is alone in this. Rather, it typifies a mindset which has long regarded Iranian protestors and dissidents as somehow uncouth and unworthy of serious analysis. This mindset prides itself on being cosmopolitan and global in its outlook but views Johnny Foreigner with disdain. Whichever version of Johnny Foreigner happens to be in charge in a given country is the one we have to deal with, but really they are all so very uncivilised – especially those who protest on the streets. How very undignified.
The Guardian has long been the house journal of this attitude to foreigners. As a left newspaper, it presents itself as the very model of progressivism and equality, but as a left newspaper in reality its outlook is driven by what George W Bush described in a very different context as the soft bigotry of low expectations. Democracy, liberty and prosperity are far too sophisticated for the likes of brown-skinned Arabs in this worldview (don’t expect the Guardianistas to grasp the concept of Persians and Arabs not being the same). Similarly, we should expect no more of Palestinians than rape and murder as their version of politics, just as we sneer at Iranians who want to free themselves from Islamic tyranny.
That’s why it was entirely on brand for the Guardian’s coverage of Iran in recent days to be focused on an article it published by the regime’s foreign minister on how “Israel’s recklessness is a threat to all”. Because – of course – the Jews are the worst of the lot. For the Guardian, there is no foreigner more uncouth, grasping and horribly untrustworthy than the Israeli – common ground with the Iranian foreign minister, who at least has the sophistication to grasp that.
As for the BBC: according to John Simpson, its world affairs editor, his employer has failed to cover the protests in Iran because it’s “Very difficult for news organisations to get correspondents in. The BBC is banned, and so are most others. It's a bit like Gaza.” Yes, that’s really what he wrote. The same BBC which despite not having correspondents in Gaza – the reason Simpson says it can’t cover Iran - has had a Gaza story as its headline almost every day for over two years, every one of which has portrayed Israel as engaged in some sort of blood-lust, and which has regurgitated Hamas’s lies as fact without a note of questioning.
This is the same John Simpson who posted last August that he was “deeply shocked by Israel’s deliberate killing of the Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif…” without making any mention of al-Sharif’s Hamas activities. And it’s the same John Simpson who posted this on his social media feed: “According to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs in Rhode Island, more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined” – a claim so obviously nonsense that a moment’s thought would expose it. Yad Vashem’s website, for example, shows that more than 1,400 Jewish journalists were murdered by the Nazis. So even the number of solely Jewish journalists killed then is more than five times the entire number of reporters supposedly killed in Gaza.
There has been some anger on social media about the silence of NGOs, most obviously Amnesty International. But Amnesty long ago stopped being an organisation focused on freedom and liberty and became instead one of the world’s most lavishly funded hard left campaigning groups. There are few clearer examples of the red-green alliance between the left and Islamists than Amnesty. The global left abandoned Iranians decades ago because challenging the regime meant challenging the alliance. Amnesty would no more stand with the Iranian protestors than it would stand with the victims of the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023.
What we are witnessing in Iran – if, that is, we are looking somewhere other than the BBC – has the potential to change the world, as well as to free Iranians and allow them and their wonderful country to return to civilisation. But for the BBC and a core element of the British establishment, there is no need for us to give a damn.
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