NPR: Iranian Protests a Rorschach Test for Geopolitics
The irony is thick enough to cut with a dull knife. Israeli officials, who regularly greenlight the brutalization of Palestinian protesters and journalists, suddenly find their voices championing 'Iranian freedom.' Meanwhile, Palestinians, living under occupation and facing systematic human rights abuses, recognize the potential for a U.S.-backed regime change to simply replace one oppressive
system with another, likely less friendly to their cause. After all, the playbook for destabilizing 'unfriendly' nations—Iraq, Libya, Syria—often involves cheering on internal dissent, only for the subsequent chaos to serve external agendas. This isn't about human rights; it's about strategic advantage, a distinction corporate media consistently fails to make. One might wonder where this selective
outrage was when U.S.-supported Saudi Arabia was cracking down on its own internal dissent, or when Egyptian protesters were being massacred post-coup. The silence from Washington and its media proxies then was deafening. But when it's a nation like Iran, long targeted for its defiance against western hegemony, suddenly the 'struggle for democracy' becomes paramount. It's almost as if the
'morality' of a protest is determined not by the justness of its cause, but by its utility to established geopolitical interests.