WhatsappIt is the consequence of a long drift—one that has hollowed out the universal claims of human rights and replaced them with ideological loyalty tests.
There is a question that keeps resurfacing in social-media posts, opinion columns and casual political conversations, usually framed as a lament rather than an accusation: Where is the United Nations? Where is Amnesty International? Where are the human-rights organizations? Where are the feminists and social activists?
At first glance, the question sounds reasonable, even sincere. After all, if these institutions and movements exist to defend human dignity, oppose oppression and protect the vulnerable, then surely, this is precisely the moment when their voices should be loudest. And yet, for anyone who has been paying attention for the past two years, the silence is neither surprising nor confusing. It is, in fact, absolutely predictable.
What we are witnessing today is not a temporary failure of courage or bureaucratic delay in issuing statements. It is the consequence of a long moral drift—one that has hollowed out the universal claims of human rights and replaced them with ideological loyalty tests. The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, did not create this collapse; it exposed its most brutal form.
On that dark day, Jewish and Israeli men and women were raped, mutilated, murdered and abducted as part of an organized campaign of pornographic violence carried out by a death cult. These acts were not incidental; they weren’t spontaneous. Brutality was used deliberately, systematically and proudly as a weapon of war. For any movement that claims to center human rights and to believe women as a moral principle, this should have produced instant and unequivocal outrage.
Instead, what followed was hesitation, euphemism and denial. Some preferred to wait for “verification.” Others discovered a sudden passion for contextualization. Many simply remained silent. The slogan, “Believe Women,” so confidently repeated in other contexts, became suspiciously conditional. It turned out that belief depended not on the evidence but on the identity of the victim.
The problem, quite simply, was that the women were Jewish and Israeli. And within the ideological framework that now dominates much of activist feminism, those categories are incompatible with victimhood. Jewish women are not supposed to be powerless. Israeli women are not supposed to suffer. When they do, their suffering becomes inconvenient, disruptive and ideologically incompatible.
This same moral contortion is now playing out again in Iran.
For weeks, Iranian protesters have been engaged in one of the most courageous revolutions of our time. Night after night, women remove the compulsory veil imposed by a regime that governs through fear, humiliation and violence. They do so knowing full well the price they may pay: imprisonment, torture, sexual abuse, death. These people are not symbolic rebels, nor are they performing resistance. They are risking everything for the simple, radical idea that life in freedom is preferable to submission.
If contemporary feminism were even remotely aligned with its own stated values, Iranian women would stand at its moral center. And yet, once again, the response has been tepid at best and non-existent at worst. No marches, no outrage, no hashtags.
This absence is often explained with vague references to geopolitical complexity, as if the situation in Iran were somehow too complicated to condemn clearly. But complexity has never stopped these same actors from issuing sweeping judgments elsewhere. What stops them now is not nuance; it is allegiance.
Over the past years, large segments of the human-rights ecosystem have been ideologically captured by a worldview that divides the world into rigid categories of oppressor and oppressed, determined not by lived reality but by political mythology. In this twisted narrative, Islamist regimes are reframed as “anti-imperialist actors,” while liberal democracies (Israel in particular) are cast as the primary source of global injustice.
Once this inversion is accepted, reasoning becomes impossible, and language is bent to fit ideology. Definitions of genocide, apartheid and human-rights abuses are rewritten to target Israel, while regimes that openly execute women for removing a headscarf are treated with restraint, even sympathy.
Organizations like Amnesty International and bodies within the United Nations do not merely fail to confront this reality; they actively participate in obscuring it. By granting legitimacy, platforms and institutional cover to some of the world’s most repressive regimes, they transform the language of human rights into ideological laundering.
The activist base, meanwhile, finds itself trapped. Many have spent years building an identity rooted in opposition to Israel and solidarity with movements they believed to be “decolonial” and progressive. To recognize the truth about Iran, Hamas or the broader Islamist axis would require an uncomfortable reckoning: admitting that they have been defending the wrong side. And that is an unbearable cognitive dissonance.
And so, silence becomes a strategy.
The same voices that failed Jewish women on Oct. 7 are now failing Iranian women. It is why they failed Venezuelans crushed by its former president of 12 years, Nicolás Maduro; why they failed Syrians massacred by the 25-year-old regime of President Bashar Assad; and why they fail countless others whose suffering does not fit a fashionable narrative.
They insist they oppose oppression, while repeatedly aligning themselves with oppressors. They claim to speak for women, yet they disappear when feminism demands something more than gestures. Wearing a scarf, chanting slogans or vandalizing institutions is easier than standing with women who truly risk their lives.
And yet, history has a strange way of offering narrow windows of moral clarity. For those who remained silent when Jewish women were raped and murdered, the uprising of Iranian women represents such a window. It is not an opportunity to retroactively correct the past, but it is a chance to decide, here and now, what human rights actually mean.
Iranians are not asking for slogans. They are asking for solidarity grounded in reality, for voices willing to speak and for movements brave enough to choose reality over ideology. Whether today’s human-rights activists are capable of making that choice remains uncertain. But one thing is already clear: Silence is not neutral. It never was.
