On January 11 in Los Angeles, a driver plowed a U-Haul truck into a crowd of Iranian-American protesters rallying in solidarity with the uprising against the Islamic Republic and advocating for the return of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. The FBI is now investigating what witnesses described as a deliberate attack on hundreds of people.
Despite the fact that by most standards the attack should be classified as terrorism, the American mainstream media and broader left-of-center political society have largely ignored it. No statements about the importance of freedom of assembly, no lectures on democracy being under attack, nothing. Many Americans likely don’t even know it happened.
Compare this with Minnesota last week, when an ICE agent fatally shot a woman during an immigration enforcement operation. Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey were tripping over themselves to get in front of a camera, decrying the very presence of ICE in the city and depicting the struggle as one for the heart of our individual liberties. Frey captured national media attention when he declared the agency needed to “Get the f*** out of Minneapolis” following the incident.
Why did one attack produce immediate, coordinated outrage, when the other met with silence?
Perhaps it’s for the same reason Western feminists have gone completely silent on the uprising inside Iran itself — the largest protests in decades, with reports of hundreds to even thousands of civilians being murdered in cold blood as the regime desperately attempts to cling to power. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist who has spent years documenting the regime’s brutality, has been wondering aloud for years now whether she will find support here in the States: “Women are leading a revolution in Iran — when will Western feminists help?”
The answer to that question seems pretty clear: They’re not going to.
Groups like the National Organization for Women are the very same that can mobilize large numbers at the drop of a hat, but Iranian women being shot in the head demanding their own freedom, like 23-year-old Rubina Aminian, simply do not merit even a press release.
The reason for this is, of course, that Trump has openly backed the protesters and has long been at odds with the regime in Tehran, whereas the left has pushed for a more conciliatory approach through the likes of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal and praise for “moderates” in the regime who always turn out to be just about anything other than moderate. This means that supporting these women now feels uncomfortably close to supporting the president, which of course is a no-go for the left.
Before skeptics protest that readers are simply more concerned with domestic developments than international injustice, take a step back and consider how the same institutions were similarly frantic to condemn the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro: The Congressional Progressive Caucus’ deputy chair, Representative Ilhan Omar, immediately condemned it as an “illegal” act that amounted to that of an “invasion,” Code Pink declared it to be an act of war, and the Seattle Democratic Socialists of America demanded that the United States “release Maduro and Cilia Flores immediately.”
It wasn’t just statements, either; they took to the streets for him. Hundreds of protests, the majority of whom were non-Venezuelan themselves, gathered outside the courthouse in New York City, chanting “hands off Venezuela” and “free Maduro.” Similar rallies popped up in San Francisco, Portland, Detroit, and beyond, organized by groups that show all too clearly that tribal identity is at the core of their opposition. Their care for the so-called rules-based international order may run high when it suits them, but evaporates immediately otherwise — they had largely nothing to say when Maduro was repeatedly threatening to invade his neighbor in Guyana, for instance. The contrast could not be starker: American leftists marching for a dictator’s freedom in the name of democracy, while his victims overwhelmingly celebrated his arrest.
Left-wing media isn’t addressing each issue from a consistent, principled standpoint, but picking and choosing issues based on tribal association. The left has flocked to the issue of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis because it fits their current political narrative, which is to push back on domestic immigration enforcement by the Trump administration. When it doesn’t, though, media coverage and protesters’ interest simply evaporate. While the phrase “tribal politics” has been overused in recent years, we are clearly living in a world where this has become the defining feature of what motivates our political inclinations and outrage.
And until that changes, the left will have very little to say about protesters getting run down in Los Angeles or executed in Tehran. The next time they lecture the rest of us about defending democracy or standing with women, remember this week and ask yourself just how seriously you should take them.
Kyle Moran is a Senior Contributor with Young Voices, specializing in international affairs and national security. His research on the Middle East has been published in the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and his commentary has been featured widely in outlets ranging from RealClearPolitics to the Washington Examiner.
