Between Iran Protests, Hamas Massacres: Picture Of Dorian Gray
Everything in the Middle East has changed and yet has somehow stayed the same. As internet services are slowly restored in Iran, the landscape of brutality directed at the population daring to protest poverty, corruption, and the bleakest of futures cannot be concealed nor can it be erased by forcing homage to the regime’s capacity to control by violence and fear. The carnage in Iran coming into view displays mountains of body bags with corpses beheaded and tortured. High ransoms are extorted from parents desperate to give their children a proper burial. There is no doubt many of the casualties are young, cut down simply for what they imagined freedom and peace could bring.
The glory of regime survival will be braided forever with the tragedy of its victims—36,000 or more murdered in two days—a tally of brutality amplified by an armada of terrorist militias from Iraq and Afghanistan and from a cavalry of countries whose leaders show a flair for equal fluency in expanding or diminishing peace.
How is it possible to view the slaughter in Iran without recalling the horrors unleashed by Hamas? Every picture of loss in Iran is strikingly familiar to the photos of the slain at the Nova festival. Slaughter across these lands follows a pattern, if not a ritual. But so does hope albeit never fully realized but never totally smothered.
Still, the responses to these massacres have been quite different. On October 7, Hamas opened fire, but Israel has been held responsible for the bloodshed in Gaza and for the evil the Jewish state has allegedly spread across the globe. The rampage in Iran has triggered the possibility of American attacks but has drawn muted criticism from world leaders and notable silence from organizations mandated to protect human rights.
What explains the condemnations of Israel and the silence on Iran? Let’s start with what cannot account for the disparate reactions. They are not a consequence of a careful analysis of history or of politics and nor do they emerge from a scrupulous examination of international law. Rather they arise from the current mode of organizing experience as an emotional arc built not on a coherent philosophy but rather on a link between feeling and belief.
In today’s world, ‘Anti-colonialism’ is the term defining the distribution of power generating the right vibes for the right kind of action. The exterior trappings of once serious philosophies drawn from meticulous inquiries have been reduced to slogans flattened into cosplay and puppetry.
After Hamas’ October 7 savagery, when campus demonstrators stopped shouting slogans, they dipped into first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth to assert that violence against colonialism is inevitable and for victims, their just desserts. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” proclaimed Franz Fanon, and “directed against the colonizer, it is purifying, redemptive, and world-creating. It cures colonialism which has rendered the oppressed incapable of moral agency and thus exempt from moral responsibility.”
Anti-colonialist rhetoric has become a sacred text for activists. It claims to offer moral guidance for remaking the world. Protests promote social justice by trying to dismantle the inequities produced by the colonial order wherever they can be found. Even the infrastructure once designed to reduce conflict can be legitimately harnessed to sustain forces of violence if directed to the anti-colonial cause.
Taking its moral cues from anti-colonialism, the rules based institutional infrastructure configured after World War II has been partly re-oriented into a system of institutions aiming at destroying what is defined as the neocolonialist imperium sustaining Israel. That a central UN agency—UNRWA–became intertwined with Hamas, its facilities operating as headquarters for the terrorists, its employees participating in the kidnappings and murders, is a fulfillment of ambitions long sought by advocates aiming to destroy the remnants of colonialism.
The campus engagement with social justice that presumably bestows sanctity on the violent actions of the oppressed stirs no passion or even signs of support for Iranians crying out for freedom. The Iranian regime is a much stronger weapon against the neo-colonialist order than the protesters desperate for American intervention. How many lives have to be sacrificed to further a cause? When does the wanton disregard for human life doom the endeavor?
If the worldview no longer attractive to progressives living in democracies–many perhaps jaded by the experiences of economic decline, political polarization, and spiraling identity politics—it is still mesmerizing for those who have come of age in authoritarian dictatorships. People raised in societies without freedom continue to believe in liberal values to bring them more choices over their lives and to unfold good into the world.
Interpreting politics through the magic of one or another cause projects an image of the world in such moral simplicity that is too good to be true. And it hides the destructive forces unleashed in trying to establish it. The message from both Iran and Israel is a reminder that ordinary people may, indeed, know something true about politics and life and about how to navigate to decency in a region strafed by hate. If so, it is certainly time to listen to them.
In this context, perhaps The Picture of Dorian Gray provides more guidance for navigating through the current turmoil. It is a narrative showing how dreams of perfection, if lashed to crimes and horrors, cannot be disguised or masked forever. There is every reason to believe Iranians, Israelis, and Palestinians are aware of this. They certainly deserve no less.
