Pride, Hypocrisy, and the Islamists Who Fear Love
It is June again, and with it comes Pride Month—flags hoisted, statements issued, brands temporarily reborn in rainbow hues. From Westminster to Waitrose, everyone is “celebrating diversity.” And yet, there is something disconcerting about the ease with which this ritual is performed in the West, especially by those who, in other contexts, remain oddly silent about one of the most egregious and violent threats to LGBTQ+ people worldwide.
I refer not to populist reactionaries. but Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic Republic of Iran—organisations and regimes whose positions on sexual freedom are not merely conservative but lethal. And I refer, too, to the bizarre moral gymnastics of Western activists and institutions who will wave Pride flags one day, and march under the banners of these very same theocrats the next.
Let us begin with facts. Under Hamas, which governs Gaza with an iron fist, homosexuality is illegal and punishable by imprisonment. LGBTQ+ Palestinians are routinely blackmailed, imprisoned, and in some cases, disappeared. Some flee to Israel, the only country in the region where they can live openly. Others suffer in silence, their very existence denied by a government whose operatives label queerness a “Zionist perversion.”
In Iran, the situation is even more grotesque. The Islamic Republic regularly executes men for same-sex relations. In many cases, trans individuals are coerced into state-approved surgeries to “correct” their identity—a barbaric practice passed off as compassionate reform. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ Iranians live under constant threat, not only from the regime but from their own families, often encouraged to mete out honour-based violence.
And what of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological progenitor of Hamas and the Islamist movement with the deepest roots across the Middle East and North Africa? In Egypt and elsewhere, Brotherhood-aligned politicians have called for laws criminalising homosexuality, accused LGBTQ+ people of corrupting society, and mobilised mobs against them in the name of defending Islam. The rhetoric is not ambiguous. It is eliminationist.
Yet here in Britain—during Pride Month, no less—we continue to witness an astonishing inversion of moral logic. Those who position themselves as champions of sexual freedom remain silent, or worse, offer rhetorical cover for these regimes and their apologists. LGBTQ+ groups join pro-Palestinian marches where Hamas slogans are chanted without rebuke. Student societies fly rainbow flags beside keffiyehs stitched with “Free Gaza” slogans, apparently unaware—or unconcerned—that under Hamas, those very flags would be burned.
This is not just hypocrisy. It is cowardice. It is the consequence of a politics that elevates the appearance of solidarity over the substance of it, that chooses fashionable causes over unfashionable truths.
And here lies the problem: sexual freedom is not universally defended. In fact, outside the liberal West, it is more often repressed, criminalised, and violently punished. But to say this—truthfully, plainly—is to risk offending certain cultural sensibilities. And so silence prevails.
In many corners of the British Left, anti-Westernism has become so doctrinal that the actual perpetrators of violence—if they are non-white, religious, or anti-Israel—are effectively exempt from scrutiny. The most persecuted minorities in the world today—be they women in Iran, Christians in Nigeria, or LGBTQ+ people across the Muslim world—are rendered invisible if their suffering complicates the preferred narrative.
But Pride, if it is to mean anything, must be consistent. The right to love, to be, to dissent, is not a Western luxury. It is a human right, and one that must be defended with as much urgency in Gaza and Tehran as it is in Soho or Shoreditch.
This does not mean denying Palestinian suffering, or dismissing concerns about Western foreign policy. But it does require moral clarity: Hamas is not a liberation movement. The Islamic Republic is not misunderstood. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a religious charity. They are ideologically committed to a world in which individual liberty—especially sexual liberty—has no place.
Israel, by contrast, is the one country in the region where LGBTQ+ rights are protected under law. Pride parades march openly in Tel Aviv. Same-sex couples marry, adopt, and serve in the military. Even Palestinian LGBTQ+ refugees flee to Israel for safety. That too should mean something.
And yet, during Pride Month, none of this is said. Or if it is said, it is whispered, qualified, or met with accusations of “pinkwashing.” As if the only Jewish state in the world defending gay rights is somehow a greater scandal than the Islamist regimes that criminalise them.
This Pride Month, we might do well to remember that those who burn the rainbow flag in Tehran are often the same ones who would burn books, jail feminists, and stone apostates. The fight for LGBTQ+ rights is not a cultural affectation. It is a front line in the broader defence of liberty itself.
If we abandon that front line—out of fear, or ideology, or misplaced solidarity—we abandon the very values that make Pride possible.
