At the Golden Globes ceremony on Sunday, in a show crammed with ostentatious virtue signallers, not a single Hollywood star spoke out in support of anti-government protesters risking their lives in Iran.
Plenty of lapel pins were on display calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, even though an uneasy truce is already in place.
A-listers including Mark Ruffalo and Wanda Sykes wore badges urging everyone to ‘Be Good’, the slogan of opposition to President Donald Trump‘s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bully-boys after the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis last week.
But despite the murder of more than 600 protesters in the uprising against Tehran’s autocratic mullahs – and with many young women killed in cold blood – none of the grinning actors and actresses on the red carpet had a word to say about it.
What hypocrisy. What cowardice.
Their silence exposes how hollow their much-vaunted principles really are. That goes for everyone on the Left, and for the Labour Government most of all. There is a true feminist revolution going on in Iran right now, and the self-righteous brigade are struck dumb.
They are quick enough to condemn wolf-whistling, or the ‘male gaze’, and other perceived ‘micro-aggressions’. But when there is real, unrestrained aggression on a massive scale, suddenly they lose their voices.
I can’t help remembering how, at the 75th Golden Globes in 2018,
A woman sets fire to a photo of Iran’s Supreme Leader with her cigarette in a picture posted on social media. Her location is not known.
The images of women coolly destroying the image of the Ayatollah, a grave offence in Iran, have spread across social media and were imitated in London during protests at the weekend
The Handmaid’s Tale scooped two of the most prestigious categories – with the show winning best TV drama and its star, Elisabeth Moss, named best actress.
The series, based on the wonderful novel by Margaret Atwood, depicted an American dystopia where women were slaves, forced to submit to their owners’ sexual demands and made to wear robes that covered them from head to foot.
The Left interpreted this as an attack on American Right-wing Christian fundamentalism and celebrated its success. Yet Atwood was inspired to write the novel by the oppression of women, not in the US but in Iran. Copies of the book now circulate there in secret, and some brave protesters have even worn the red robes of the handmaids, as a symbolic statement.
You might think that the actors and actresses whose careers were supercharged by The Handmaid’s Tale would be at the forefront of demonstrations against the Islamic Republic in London or Los Angeles, highlighting the connection between the fictional series and the struggle for freedom in the real world. I have yet to hear a peep from any of them.
If the problem was simply that celebrities are shallow and self-serving, nobody would be very surprised. But the root causes of their silence are much more insidious.
Hardline Left-wingers are intent on sabotaging the Iranian freedom movement, because they are in thrall to Islamism.
They refuse to see the Ayatollah and his brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps for what they are – gangsters in religious robes.
No actor at an awards night wants to risk speaking out against them, for fear of being accused of Islamophobia. The irony is
that Islamophobia is a word that was first weaponised by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his cronies in the 1970s, before they seized control of Iran and imposed fundamentalist Sharia law.
They use it to make their ‘religious’ beliefs, however radical or chauvinistic, impervious to criticism. Any word spoken against them is analogous to racism.
This makes it easy for their supporters to deflect attacks. For instance, the Guardian columnist and former BBC presenter Sangita Myska used social media this week to denounce those cheering on the Iranian women. ‘It’s cynical posturing to cover for the fact that you (and others) have abandoned the women and girls of Palestine/Gaza during an ongoing genocide,’ she wrote. ‘It’s a facet of privileged-white feminism.’
Student Robina Aminian, 23, was brutally killed with a bullet to the back of the head by regime heavies during protests in Iran
In an image from protests in 2022 over the heath of a young woman, a young woman risks her life by standing on a car with her head uncovered
Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, reposted her words and added an emoji of a dart hitting a bullseye.
This is where they feel comfortable, flaunting their support for Palestinians. It’s far more uncomfortable for them that millions of women in Iran are rejecting the oppression of male Islamic rule.
For decades, Iran has been the paymaster of Hamas and Hezbollah, the terrorist organisations that control the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and who are responsible for some of the suffering of so many of their own people.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenue have been poured into arming and training their forces. That funding will end if the 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei and his thugs are replaced with a democratic government in Tehran.
Iran has been the staunchest opponent of Israel, and is also an ally of Russia. That’s one reason why the hard-Left refuses to condemn the regime, however many protesters it kills, however many women are beaten up, thrown into jail and raped for daring to wear their hair uncovered.
Anyone who truly wants to see peace in Gaza and across the Middle East will rejoice when the Islamic Republic tumbles in Iran. Remove their proxy warmongering and real negotiations will have a chance of success.
But that will also remove the excuse Left-wingers exploit to disguise their own prejudice against Jewish people.
With an internet blackout imposed in recent days, Iran became more isolated than ever. That makes it even more important for everyone with an audience on social media to speak up and raise awareness of the struggle for freedom and women’s rights there.
Most people in the West know little of what is going on. If just a few celebrities had taken the opportunity presented by the Golden Globes to back the protests, they could have done real good. Silence enables the regime to continue its brutal suppression, without fear of repercussions.
They have little to fear from Keir Starmer, certainly. He is terrified of upsetting the Islamic elements in his party, and many of his MPs live in fear of being denounced by Muslim leaders in their own constituencies, where their parliamentary majorities are at risk.
Meanwhile, in cities across Iran, young idealists are being shot or beaten to death – such as 23-year-old Robina Aminian, who was killed with a bullet to the back of the head as she set off from college to join a demonstration in Tehran.
Her uncle told reporters: ‘She was a strong girl, a courageous girl. She fought for what she knew was right. She was thirsty for freedom, thirsty for women’s rights.’
How can anyone who calls themselves a feminist fail to support Robina and women like her with all their heart? They deserve to be free of Sharia law and the curse of the hijab. They deserve to live their lives as free women.
I am inspired by these women. Though the scenes captured in footage smuggled out of the country are frightening and sickening, it is so moving to see the courage and bravery of people who refuse to be cowed any longer.
Their slogan, chanted on the streets in defiance of the guns of the Revolutionary Guards, is ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’. I have those words tattooed on my arm – they mean, ‘Women, Life, Freedom’.
We should all be shouting them. All those who call themselves feminists but stay silent are cowards and hypocrites.
Khadija Khan is Politics and Culture Editor at A Further Inquiry magazine, and co-host of the A Further Inquiry podcast.