Where Are the So-Called Human Rights Defenders for the People of Iran?
The Nauseating Double Standards of the Human Rights Industry
by Majid Rafizadeh • January 17, 2026 at 5:00 am
When it comes to Iran... where ordinary, unarmed people demanding freedom are being beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and gunned down in the streets by their own leaders, this high-minded moral chorus has all but disappeared.
The same institutions and voices that were so shrill and relentless when condemning Israel in the name of Palestinian rights are, when courageous Iranian lives are at stake, spectacularly non-existent. This double standard only exposes the bottomless hypocrisy at the heart of much contemporary human rights activism.
The Iranian people, after weeks of being massacred in the streets, are still waiting for that "locked and loaded" promise that Trump keeps making but never delivers. To them, once again, as during the term of President Barack Hussein Obama, it must look as if their deaths do not matter, and do not trigger the same "moral reflex" as other conflicts.
Is Trump really going to thwart the efforts of these unimaginably courageous people trying to rid themselves of a brutal despotism that has been attacking them for 47 years?
The silence tells them that the human rights of the global liberal and leftist establishment are not truly universal at all -- but conditional, applied extremely selectively based on being paid and transported by professional organizers, as well as on often fabricated anti-American and anti-Jewish geopolitical narratives.
Instead, what we see is -- nothing. A few indignant statements are released, carefully worded to be stripped of urgency. There are no mobilizations, no sense that what is happening in Iran represents a deadly emergency. This passivity contrasts with the manufactured energy poured into other causes. The moment outrage is selective, it is no longer moral; it is just political puffery.
Women who resist are harassed, tortured, raped in detention or even killed. In recent uprisings, women have openly defied the regime. They have removed their headscarves and called for freedom while daring to imagine a life without fear. Many are today paying with their lives for their courage while the loud, fearless, sanctimonious "defenders of human rights" just shop at the supermarket.
These protests are not just about Iran. They are about whether human rights are truly universal or just rhetorical twaddle deployed when one has nothing better to do.
The United Nations, prominent NGOs, liberal politicians, and left-leaning activist networks seemingly love to frame themselves as some kind of elevated moral conscience for the international system. They speak the language of "justice," "dignity," and "universal human rights," and insist -- sometimes with threats and violence -- that silence in the face of oppression is "complicity."
When it comes to Iran, however, where ordinary, unarmed people demanding freedom are being beaten, tortured, imprisoned, and gunned down in the streets by their own leaders, this high-minded moral chorus has all but disappeared.
If the slaughter has stopped, it is reportedly "only because residents are being held hostage in their homes by machine gun-wielding security forces that have flooded the streets."
