While the world’s cameras swivel obediently from one geopolitical spectacle to the next, the blood on Iran’s streets has barely dried and already it has been forgotten. Donald Trump’s fixation on Greenland, his self-appointed “Board of Peace” for Gaza, and his pledge to end the war in Ukraine have consumed the international media cycle. Meanwhile, in Iran, thousands of unarmed protesters have been slaughtered, tens of thousands dragged into prisons, and many now face imminent execution after sham trials that would shame the darkest dictatorships of the 20th century. Yet there are no rolling headlines, no mass demonstrations, no anguished moral outrage.
Where did all the protesters go? Where were the vast crowds who filled the streets of European capitals in ostentatious displays of solidarity with Palestine? Where were the megaphones, the placards, the slogans denouncing state violence? Where were the student occupations, the trade union marches, the social media warriors who insist that silence equals complicity? Were Iranian lives simply not worth the inconvenience?
The Iranian uprising was not a marginal disturbance. It was nationwide, sustained, and met with extraordinary brutality. Young men and women, schoolchildren, students and workers were gunned down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij. Families were warned not to mourn publicly. Hospitals became hunting grounds for security forces seeking the wounded. Yet the reaction from much of the Western activist class has been a deafening silence.
The hypocrisy is staggering. It reveals an uncomfortable truth. For many self-proclaimed human rights campaigners, outrage is selective. It is activated not by suffering itself, but by ideology. Iran does not fit neatly into the fashionable binary of oppressor and oppressed. Its regime is anti-Western, anti-Israeli, and adept at cloaking itself in the language of “resistance”. That seems to earn it an unspoken indulgence, even as it hangs teenagers from cranes. Equally culpable is the cowardice of Western governments. Having spent years appeasing Tehran in the forlorn hope of reviving the nuclear deal, they now avert their eyes as the regime butchers its own people. Sanctions are whispered about, statements are carefully worded, but decisive action is conspicuously absent. There has been no downgrading of diplomatic relations, no IRGC proscription in the EU or the UK, and no serious push for international accountability.
Crucially, the regime’s orgy of violence has resolved nothing. Repression has not restored stability; it has merely postponed collapse. The Iranian rial has plunged to historic lows, wiping out savings and salaries. Inflation is rampant, basic foodstuffs are beyond the reach of millions, and an economy hollowed out by corruption, sanctions evasion and clerical cronyism is visibly broken. Workers go unpaid, pensioners are destitute, and even sections of the regime’s shrinking social base are buckling under the strain. A state that survives only by the gun while its people starve is not strong; it is terminally frail.
Then there is the farce of exile politics. At the height of the uprising, Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah, suddenly reappeared, presenting himself once again as Iran’s would-be saviour. He issued statements, gave interviews, posed for photographs and basked in the media spotlight. True to form, as in 2022, just as quickly as he surfaced, he vanished. When the cost of leadership became real, when organization, sacrifice and sustained engagement were required, he melted away.
This is a familiar pattern. Pahlavi is an opportunist without responsibility. He has no structure inside Iran, no disciplined movement, and no capacity to protect or mobilize the people risking their lives on the streets. His interventions serve only to distract, divide and demoralize. He belatedly urged Iranians to protest eleven days after they had already done so and dozens had been killed, before pathetically begging the United States to take military action. Which genuine leader pleads with a foreign power to bomb his own country so that he might inherit the throne? His claims that 50,000 IRGC and Intelligence Ministry agents had pledged allegiance to him via a QR code broadcast on a Farsi television station were exposed as fantasy. “Where were the 50,000 when protesters were mowed down by IRGC machine guns?” Iranians asked.
The Iranian people deserve better than absentee princes and performative sympathy. They have shown extraordinary courage. They have rejected both clerical tyranny and dynastic nostalgia. Their demand is clear. They want a secular, democratic republic based on the rule of law, gender equality and fundamental freedoms. This vision is neither vague nor utopian. It has been articulated for years by organized democratic opposition forces such as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), which has paid a terrible price in blood, imprisonment and exile.
The question now is whether the European Union and the United Kingdom will finally listen or continue to hide behind procedural excuses and diplomatic inertia. If Europe truly believes in universal human rights, it must act decisively. The IRGC must be designated a terrorist organisation without further delay. Iranian officials responsible for mass killings, torture and executions must face targeted sanctions, asset freezes and international arrest warrants. Diplomatic relations cannot continue on a business-as-usual basis with a regime that governs through mass murder.
Parliaments in London, Brussels and across Europe must stop outsourcing Iran policy to risk-averse diplomats who mistake appeasement for pragmatism. Every delay emboldens the executioners and signals to Tehran that European outrage has an expiry date. The Iranian people have already paid in blood. They should not also pay for Western cowardice.
The bodies buried in unmarked graves, the prisoners awaiting the gallows, the mothers forbidden to grieve, they will not forget who stood with them and who looked away. Nor should we. The Iranian uprising may have slipped from the headlines, but it has not ended. It has entered a darker and more dangerous phase, and it will erupt again. Whether it ultimately succeeds will depend not only on the bravery of Iranians, but on whether Europe and Britain finally choose principle over convenience.
Martin Luther King Jr. warned: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” That silence now hangs over Iran and it is a moral disgrace.
Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14), and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.