While you read this, someone is being led to execution in Iran. The regime averaged more than two executions per day in 2024, at least 975 people, the highest count in a decade. By mid-2025, another 612 were dead. International monitors debate whether the body count stopped at 901 or reached 975. Either number tells the same story.
The world knows. The world looks elsewhere.
Israel occupies the center of a global morality play. Iran works behind the curtain, doing what it has always done, with far less interruption. The world keeps making this choice. So do some of the loudest voices in American progressive politics.
Right now, Iranian authorities are hunting the protesters who filled the streets in late December 2025. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented the opening moves: unlawful force, mass arrests, and killings. Within days, outside trackers cited by the Associated Press reported death tolls climbing past 600 and detention centers filling. The crackdown scales fast when the regime feels threatened. It always does.
Right now, women and girls who joined the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests are living with what happened to them in custody. The UN's fact-finding mission documented the pattern. The US State Department's 2024 report describes it unambiguously: sexual abuse, rape, threats of rape. In today's Western society, sexual violence is a policy. It hardly makes an impression on the global outrage machine.
Right now, Iran criminalizes existence for LGBTQ citizens. Same-sex conduct brings severe corporal punishment, in some cases, execution. The state enforces this law.
Right now, some American lawmakers who spent 2023 and 2024 screaming "genocide" at Israel are remaining strategically quiet about Iran.
The distinction is definitive.
Sanders, The Squad hailed for 'moral clarity' on Gaza
During the Gaza conflict, Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Cori Bush were known for their unwavering moral clarity. They said that Israel was committing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes.
Within weeks following October 7, they put up ceasefire resolutions. They voted not to stand with Israel. They didn't go to lectures by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because they thought he was a war criminal.
Eventually, Sanders stood up on the Senate floor and said that Israel was committing genocide. He went into great detail about how Palestinian children were starving.
The framework was humanitarian: stop the killing, protect the civilians, and end the complicity.
Then came Iran's crackdown in late 2025.
By January 2026, estimates ranged from 600 to over 2,000 protesters killed. Thousands more arrested. Public executions resumed. The regime massacred its own people in the streets while the world debated the American constitutional process.
Bernie Sanders learned about Trump's attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities while he was at a rally in Tulsa. What was his immediate response? "It is so grossly unconstitutional."
He introduced the No War Against Iran Act, legislation designed to prevent American military action against Iran. He called the regime "corrupt and authoritarian" in a single prefatory sentence, then spent the rest of his energy warning against US involvement. On Gaza, he discussed humanitarian aid efforts. On Iran, he just analyzed the implications of the nuclear deal.
Rashida Tlaib, who accused then president Joe Biden of supporting genocide in Gaza and introduced resolutions recognizing the Nakba, responded to Trump's Iran strikes by calling them a "blatant violation of our Constitution." She claimed Trump was listening to "war criminal Netanyahu."
Her statement centered on American risk: "The American people do not want another forever war." The Iranian protester facing execution was absent from the frame.
Ilhan Omar stated plainly, "No one is attacking or has attacked Americans," arguing against justification for war with Iran. She focused her legislative energy on the War Powers Resolution to block unauthorized hostilities. The mass arrests and killings inside Iran received far less attention than the constitutional concerns about American overreach.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the strikes "grave violations of the Constitution" and "grounds for impeachment." She tweeted that the administration's actions were designed "to distract from Epstein and skyrocketing healthcare costs." American domestic theater adopted the Iranian uprising as a subplot.
The mechanism of objection shifted entirely. In Gaza, the framework was humanitarian. In Iran, the framework became constitutional. Opposition to the Gaza war was predicated on human cost. Opposition to action regarding Iran was predicated on the War Powers Resolution.
Watch what happened legislatively.
During the Gaza war, the Squad introduced H.Res. 786, the "Ceasefire Now" resolution, demanding an immediate end to violence and centering Palestinian loss. They pushed relentlessly to condition military aid to Israel, blocking arms sales of JDAMs and artillery shells. They argued US law prohibited aid to human rights violators.
During the Iran crisis, Sanders introduced the No War Against Iran Act, legislation that prohibited funds for military force without Congressional authorization. The bill argued that the greater danger was American interaction with Iran, not the regime's survival. When H.Res. 166 was introduced to support the Iranian people's desire for democracy and condemn the regime's terrorism, Squad sponsorship was conspicuously absent. The resolution attracted Republicans and moderate Democrats. The progressive bloc stayed away, apparently unwilling to align with anything that might be viewed as regime change advocacy.
There is an explanation for the divergence, but no justification.
Progressive foreign policy doctrine treats American military interventionism as the cardinal sin. When an adversary kills civilians, the progressive impulse is to warn against US involvement. When an ally kills civilians, the progressive impulse is to demand US disengagement. Iran under Trump presented a perceived risk of American-led regime change. Israel under Biden presented a reality of American-funded military operations.
The result looks like a double standard because it is one.
Sam Harris, an American neuroscientist and philosopher, captured the asymmetry precisely: "The Israelis simply are held to a different standard. And the condemnation leveled at them by the rest of the world is completely out of proportion to what they have actually done... They have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any other society has ever had to while defending itself against aggressors."
Iranian protesters chanted "No Gaza, No Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran" in the streets, explicitly rejecting their regime's funding of Hamas and Hezbollah at the expense of the Iranian economy.
The very groups some progressives defended in the context of Palestinian resistance became symbols of oppression to Iranians dying for freedom. The ideological friction was obvious. In order to fully support Iranian protesters, it was necessary to validate criticism of funding for Hamas and Hezbollah, a stance that is consistent with the American right and Israel. As a result, the support was muted.
The 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests following Mahsa Amini's death drew stronger progressive condemnation. Omar drew parallels between Iranian women fighting the morality police and American women fighting for abortion rights.
They supported resolutions condemning the morality police. The difference? In 2022, Biden was president and wasn't threatening ground invasion. Supporting protesters was a safe human rights scenario that didn't risk triggering a US war.
In 2026, under Trump, the calculus changed. Trump explicitly threatened military action in Iran, promising to "come to their [the Iranian protesters'] rescue." Progressives feared that echoing his rhetoric about the "brutal regime" would validate his interventionist plans. If they screamed, "Iran is killing civilians," Trump could reply, "Exactly, that's why I'm bombing them."
So to deny Trump the moral high ground for war, they minimized their criticism of the regime. The result was perceived silence regarding the atrocities themselves.
Somali-born Dutch and American writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali has documented this pattern among Western progressives: "Withholding criticism and ignoring differences are racism in its purest form. Yet these cultural experts fail to notice that, through their anxious avoidance of criticizing non-Western countries, they trap the people who represent these cultures in a state of backwardness."
The selective feminism is particularly alarming. French-Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, writing after October 7, noted the broader phenomenon: "The silence of the international organizations, the silence of the feminist organizations... is a moral stain."
That silence extends from Israeli victims of sexual violence to Iranian women brutalized in regime prisons. Ideological convenience is a common theme.
This policy is consistent with their worldview. It's also morally bankrupt when applied selectively.
An Israeli hero, Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in Soviet prisons, developed what he calls the "Town Square Test" for distinguishing free societies from fear societies: "Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? If he can, then that person is living in a free society. If not, it is a fear society."
Israel is a democracy with independent courts, a free press, and loud internal opposition that produces endless self-criticism. Israelis pass Sharansky's test every day. Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that kills dissenters, rapes prisoners, and criminalizes identity. Iranians who walk into the town square get shot. One gets subjected to daily international tribunals of rhetoric. The other gets constitutional objections to American overreach.
Harris observed the ethical simplicity some refuse to see: "The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them."
If your outrage depends on who's holding the gun rather than who's under it, you're not practicing human rights. You are involved in politics while claiming to support human rights.
As I write this column, the Islamic Republic executes. It cracks down. It threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. It dares the world to look away.
The world keeps accepting the dare. So do some of America's most vocal progressives.
And Israel continues to pay the bill.