OPINION:
The silence of anti-Israel activists over the massacre of thousands of Iranians by their own government is deafening.
The Iranian regime has killed more than 16,500 people in its crackdown against protesters, according to a British report released Sunday, but possibly as many as 20,000, according to CBS News. Yet there has noticeably been no outcry on university campuses or in major Western cities such as Toronto, New York and Paris. There have been no calls to boycott the Iranian economy, no campaigns against cultural institutions and no demands to suspend academic relations.
No tears were shed for the murders of Javad Ganji (a 39-year-old Iranian filmmaker shot during protests) or Rebin Moradi (a 17-year-old soccer talent shot in the back at close range), and no outrage was voiced against the planned execution of Erfan Soltani (a 26-year-old protester denied due process).
The silence is not accidental. It shows a troubling pattern in which the international community exercises selective outrage against Israel while not holding any other country to the same standards.
Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad, known for her activism against the Iranian regime, criticized United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for “not speaking out publicly against the massacre in Iran.” After nearly two weeks, the U.N. Security Council finally convened Thursday, not to condemn the mass executions and public hangings but at the request of the Iranian regime itself, which blamed the protests on the influence of the United States and Israel.
By contrast, a day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist rampage — the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — the U.N. Security Council convened for “emergency closed consultations” focused not on the butchered and kidnapped Israeli victims but on the Israeli government. The international body’s monthly report cited a telephone call with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and French President Emmanuel Macron in which Mr. Abbas said the escalation was the result of the “denial of the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to self-determination” and “the ongoing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.”
In an Oct. 7 statement, Mr. Guterres said that “violence can’t provide a solution to the conflict and only through negotiation leading to a two-state solution can peace be achieved.”
This is a clear moral inversion.
Highly ironically, protesters against Israel like to compare Israel — a democratic country fighting a terrorist organization for its survival — to Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Iran — a terrorist state that exports terrorism and instability through its Hezbollah and Houthi proxies while calling for the destruction of a U.N. member state — is condemned just a fraction as frequently as Israel.
This, despite former British lawmaker Bill Rammell saying recently that the Iranian regime may have used “toxic chemical substances” against protesters, according to a report he has seen from “credible Iranian-Kurdish sources.”
This is precisely why the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism is important. Not because Israel is beyond criticism, but because the definition draws a clear moral line saying that holding Jews collectively responsible for what Israel’s critics accuse it of doing is antisemitism.
This principle is not controversial when applied elsewhere because the world has no difficulty separating the Iranian regime from its citizens, even as they face severe violence.
The growing refusal of political actors such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to recognize this definition exposes an unwillingness to acknowledge the way antisemitism appears today. It denies the right of Jews to be treated like any other people. The world knows how to distinguish between governments and citizens but simply chooses not to do so when the state in question is the Jewish state.
That refusal has a name: antisemitism.
• Bradley Martin is the executive director of the Near East Center for Strategic Studies. Liram Koblentz-Stenzler is the head of the global extremism and antisemitism desk at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and a visiting scholar at Brandeis University.
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