By Bepi Pezzulli, TCW
WHEN protest becomes fashionable, it stops being meaningful. The streets of Tehran offer the corrective: women tearing off compulsory hijabs at the risk of prison or worse, students chanting under the shadow of live ammunition, workers striking against a regime that tortures, jails, and executes its critics. This is dissent in its original form, unmediated and lethal. And yet the professional outrage class, normally incapable of restraint, has responded with a disciplined silence. Not a delay, not uncertainty, but a silence so precise it reads like doctrine. Figures who never miss a cue when Israel is involved – Roger Waters, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Eno, Gary Lineker, Macklemore – have suddenly misplaced their megaphones, as if courage, like outrage, now requires prior ideological authorisation.
That silence is not ignorance; it is selection. In the contemporary protest economy, dissent acquires moral value only when it is directed westward. It must indict liberal democracy, free markets, Zionism, or the legitimacy of the Atlantic world. Only then does it become ‘systemic’, worthy of NGO campaigns, celebrity endorsements and rolling media coverage. When protest is aimed at a theocratic dictatorship, the machinery stalls. There is no white colonial villain, no capitalist infrastructure to blockade, no liberal order to denounce, no Zionist enterprise to condemn. The narrative refuses to co-operate.
The NGO-media complex runs on a single governing story. Power is always Western, always capitalistic, always suspect. Resistance, therefore, must be anti-Western to count as resistance at all. Best of all, if it is anti-Zionist.
This explains why Iranian women demanding bodily autonomy are treated as a local curiosity, while Western activists demanding the dismantling of their own societies are elevated to moral visionaries. The former seek liberal freedoms; the latter perform their rejection. Only one sustains the model.
Israel sits at the centre of this distortion. It provides the indispensable hinge that allows Middle Eastern brutality to be reframed as a morality tale about Europe and America. So long as Zionism can be blamed, everything else becomes ‘context’. Hamas is softened into grievance, Hezbollah into resistance, Iran into a misunderstood regional actor. Actual victims are inconvenient because they point in the wrong direction.