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There are many extremely significant differences between the situations Iranians and Palestinians have been in. The only similarity you're looking at is the number of deaths, it seems. But Iranians and Palestinians have emphatically not been in even remotely comparable situations for the past half-century.
Not claiming a bias is necessarily absent or present. Just that there are many rather obvious explanations for the discrepancy you're noting besides that.
For people who actually actively think of both, that may be the case?
But "ignoring" presumes the comparison feeling potentially valid to them in the first place. It's not ignorance or even an inconsistency if the comparison would feel so apples-to-oranges that it doesn't even occur to them.
Maybe my view is distorted here, so here's a question to check that. Among the people you see complaining about how little attention is being paid to Iranians compared to Palestinians, (a) what fraction of them are themselves Iranian (excluding those with, say, loved ones in Israel), and (b) if you feel part (a) is small, then what is the largest group of people (and what percentage would you say it constitutes) that you would say you most often find making this comparison?
All I'm saying is: you addressed (b), but what about (a)?
That is, if you believe this comparison is merited, then surely Iranians would at least be making it themselves reasonably frequently? Now I don't know I'm living in a bubble, or if I'm just not keeping up with the news (I know for a fact there is a lot of news I'm missing, so I wouldn't put this past me by any means), but I simply don't see Iranians themselves going, e.g., "Why was there so much worldwide support for Palestinians but not for us?!"... is this something you do see?
If so, I'd love to hear more about it (links or even anecdotes would be great)... but if not, I'm suggesting that maybe the comparison just isn't apt, is all.
With regard to your question, my mistake I thought I implied an answer to (a). Of the people I see complaining about this, a very very small fraction are actually Persian. It's really just one person, and she's someone I met through my wife while living in LA. There's not that many Iranian ex-pats living in the US relative to ... people who are not Iranian ex-pats, I guess, so if the point you're making is "Iranians who do not live under the regime don't care about this criticism" it's certainly possible you are correct, as I have n = 1 evidence to the contrary. My commentary was more on the general case, though, and I'm not sure how meaningful it is to try to discern the exact percentage of "Iranians not living in Iran are upset the media isn't covering the regime murdering its own people". This would be par for the course, no? It's not like it would be a surprise. So, what does it matter if the percentage of Iranians complaining about this issue is high, or low?
> I'm not sure how meaningful it is to try to discern the exact percentage of "Iranians not living in Iran are upset the media isn't covering the regime murdering its own people". This would be par for the course, no?
I'm lost here, because that was not at all the percentage I was talking about -- and it didn't need to be even remotely exact, either. I was asking what percentage of Iranians (whether local or expat, although local would be even more relevant here) you see/hear about that compare the global reaction to their situation to the global reaction to Palestinians' situation.
This comparison bit is absolutely critical. It's one thing to be upset the media isn't covering some situation you feel deserves more coverage. It's a whole 'nother thing to be pointing toward the Palestinians as if whatever is happening regarding them has any bearing on another case. (And, let's be clear, it carries an implicit accusation of bias/hypocrisy/etc. in the media and/or public.)
> So, what does it matter if the percentage of Iranians complaining about this issue is high, or low?
Assuming "this issue" refers to what I meant and not what you described:
It matters a ton because my entire point is that for the argument to stand on its merits, Iranians themselves would have to agree with you. And yet I have not even heard of one single Iranian (and I assure you I know n > 1) who has even brought up Palestine in the discussion, let alone drawn a comparison between the two. Given the conflation above in your comment, it's not even clear to me whether your n = 1 data point was doing so either, but perhaps they were.
Again: this could be my bubble, but your experience seems to confirm what I'm saying too.
If hardly anyone in the population itself finds such a comparison apt enough to draw, then I'm sorry, that means it simply isn't. At that point, you have a perfectly sufficient explanation of why "all [one's] friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine have NEVER made one mention of supporting the Iranians protesting that regime": because they the situations aren't comparable to begin with, regardless of any biases one may allege.
What exactly do you want to happen here? In your view, am I taking the side of the Ayatollahs because bombing isn't enough and we should be nuking Tehran instead?
It's telling that perceived tacit support of an Iranian regime — which America is more hostile to perhaps more than any other nation on the planet — is more disturbing to you than the deaths of 20k+ children in Gaza.
And this is not a "why focus on this thing when there are other things" fake argument. These protests were engineered by people with the intention of intervening, and a lot of that engineering the involved manipulation of western media narratives and the creation of fake organizations to become sources of information. It's not coincidence or luck that you're focused on Iran; people were sitting around planning an invasion of Iran and part of their planning was "How can we get the public to focus on Iran enough to give Congress cover to ignore another Executive war?"
The actual narrative, undisputed by even the people involved, is that
1) a currency crash was intentionally instigated in Iran by the West, which caused protests. We have bragged about this.
2) Many of the educated Iranian middle class joined these protests to argue against the regime in general, which they always do.
3) US and Israeli-supported terrorist organizations took advantage of those protests (like a black bloc) to start burning down buildings and burning cops alive, armed by the west and networked through smuggled Skylink terminals,
4) the US and Israel bragged that the protests were materially supported by covert western intelligence in order to push the crackdown to atrocity levels, and to eliminate even the general public's support for the protests (which would be some restraint to the government.) They literally said that many of the protesters were Mossad agents. You might as well be saying "please kill them." It's as if Al Qaeda announced that they were materially supporting and completely infiltrating BLM protests, and when many BLM activists were arrested, they were carrying Al Qaeda satellite terminals and arms smuggled from Pakistan.
(The Iranian middle class was even out, because they aren't traitors, they just don't want to live in a theocracy. The West are who turned Iran into a dictatorship by replacing Mossadegh with the Shah. The West helped Iraq use chemical weapons against Iran. We care nothing about Iranians, we just want to steal from them. We're thieves, and we're consciously moving to a economic strategy of piracy in order to take advantage of our navy.)
5) The US moved as much navy to bear on Iran as it did when it invaded Iraq, and said that unless some magic words were said that nobody knows, it would invade.
You might be comfortable being manipulated like this, but I am not.
To the extent that the protests are being "engineered", certainly there are elements of that, but why wouldn't there be and why would that be bad a priori? The regime is uniquely terrible in the world, and if you listen to Iranian ex-pats who fled it seems clear a lot of the kids that supported the revolution in 1979 quickly realized that it was a mistake, and that they underestimated the extent to which the new regime would prioritize regressive islamism over actually addressing what were at the time legitimate economic inequality issues.
Washington has an easier way to do that: namely, to use its navy and the Sentinel Islands (controlled by Washington ally India) to prevent the transit of tankers from Iran to China.
There is an argument to be made that a maritime interdiction operation is a better approach, and the information I would need to decide definitively which approach I think is better is likely very classified.
No need for them to: they just have to permit US warplanes to operate from the Sentinel Islands.
But Central Africa, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, etc? Extreme suffering. But the activists don't activate.
Did they? It was occasionally in the news but that's about it.
The people taking a dump on those activists for how they "allocate" their activism not only dont care about the suffering their government participates in, they usually cheer it on.
This can be seen the most clearly in the case of the gazan genocide.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=20T6XrrLdiA&pp=ygUYbG9zIGFuZ2V...
Edit: Also, the Left seems to more often pick sides when its one ethnic group oppressing another, as identity politics is prominent in their messaging
Of course then the right would be protesting foreign interventions.
If Biden repeatedly shot boats that he alleged carried drugs without evidence and then shot survivors again for good measure until he eventually went and captured Venezuela's de facto head of state, people would support him a lot more? Really?
Same goes the other way of course. Republicans would be much more against it.
> democrats would support that much more, Republicans would be much more against it.
More people ≠ more Democrats
I, and many I know, would love to see the Iranian regime fall, just not via US regime change which tends to make things worse.
I think it's just an instinct to oppose anything the current administration supports. Same with Cuba and Venezuela.
But it consistently aligns them with some of the most suppressive regimes.
Venezuelans are glad Maduro is gone. Iranians want the US to do something. Lots of Cubans as well.
Any external meddling would have probably made it much bloodier.
You can be assured most Iranians do NOT want US to intervene. How many Americans want China/Russia to intervene to 'help' you get rid of Trump?
Get off your high horse and use a bit of empathy and common sense.
Empathy means that you understand that what YOU consider terrorism might mean 'supporting self-determination of oppressed and occupied people' by somebody else. Is it so difficult to understand that ordinary Iranians do not see their government as international supporters of terrorism?
I was 19 in 1989. While I do not claim to understand geopolitical realities in their entirety, I was old enough to distinctly remember how surprising the fall of communism felt. Despite almost all people I knew being (low-level, passive) anti-communists, nobody saw it really coming until the last few months. In fact, in June 1989, I had a choice to make - either to go to a competition to West Germany, or go with friends hiking to Caucasus. The choice was obvious - go to West Germany, who knows when will be the next chance to see The West. On the other hand, I could go to Caucasus anytime.... we know how that turned out to be.
Nice pet elephant
Have you lived in communistic (or otherwise authoritarian) country?
Also you seem to not grasp that the current regime are viewed as invaders forcing Islamic rule which I'm pretty sure is very very different from the scenarios your mentioning. And even in your scenario, if Trump really succeeds in destroying American democracy and takes everyone's guns away and closes the internet to the world and starts killing every and all opposition and terrorizes America for 40 years I'm pretty sure you'd like who ever the duck is capable of removing that to intervene. And it's not like I'm making it up, i happen to have many Iranians in my family, and many of them living in Iran still and i can assure you that the vast majority in the big cities want the US to kill off the regime. I'm sure there's some kind of rural population that loves sharia like the us has maga, but i don't think they are the majority any more.
Not saying that what's happening with ICE is okay. But it's a very sheltered view to think that is at all equivalent to what happens in those countries if you actively protest against the govt.
For Iranians, USA is strong foreign country that is hostile to them.
For Americans, Russia/China are (relatively) strong foreign countries that (they think) are hostile to them.
As Americans would NOT like if Russia/China was influencing their internal matters (Russia gate ?), so would Iranians NOT like if USA was deciding who is going to govern over them.
First, they are a proud nation with long history. Second, they have a very good reason (many historical precedents) to believe USA will not act in the interests of Iranian people, but in their own (and Israel's) interests.
It’s exactly because we compare against a just a corrupt government directly over a short period of time that our experience is fairly unique in the world.
People that ask "where are all the students on campus that were protesting Gaza" do so because taking action on injustice, in a way that demands accountability from their leaders, is an uncomfortable idea. For them, the purpose of taking action is largely to signal moral outrage, and making an aggrieved post on social media is the beginning and end of praxis on an issue. And if that is your mindset, why wouldn't you make an equal amount of posts about Iran as you would for Gaza? Since they are both Things That Are Morally Bad.
What they don't understand is that for people that e.g. protest in person, protesting isn't a quaint, feckless action merely meant to signal one's care about an issue to the right people. Rather, it is an action with a goal to effect specific change of behavior on a particular issue from a specific group of people (usually leaders in power that are beholden to the protesters). If you are American and protesting US military support for Israel based on the conflict in Gaza, there are practical, material, direct cause-and-effect reasons to make that argument towards your elected representatives; the same is simply not true for the Iran situation (which the majority of the US government is already aligned with bombing yet again).
It's just such a strange point of view to interpret lack of action on a particular issue as tacit support.
A coup is... not even remotely the same thing. How many coups do you know of that helped the local population?
Then you will say things like: but it was 80 years ago!!
But my larger point is that I don’t trust the current US administration to engage in regime change in a beneficial way as perhaps the US admin in 1945 did. You’re right that those examples and some others are good ones. But I believe the odds are that this situation would be one of the worse ones.
Do I support the Iranian regime? Hell no! I just also don’t think the US invading is a solution that would bring long term peace and prosperity.
It is always the same story: Look how poorly the regime manages the country!
Never said: The country is under such sanctions/blockade that any western country would have already folded long ago.
How do you know that? Is it just your general assumption "Westerners weak, must fold, third-worlders stronk, they endure"?
Under what conditions would you say that sanctions are OK? Or are they never? In that case, there still might be white minority rule in Rhodesia or South Africa.
At that time, there were two strong anti-shah factions in Iran. Islamists and communists. Guess which one was helped by USA? :-)
Neither was helped by the USA. The Shah was helped by the USA.
What the USA did is the same thing it does in all of the Islamic dictatorships that it props up - it used its intelligence and its cash to help its dictator exterminate all of his secular opposition. Actually kill. What was left was religious fundamentalist opposition that it couldn't touch, and that the Shah himself partially relied on to stay in power. That meant that when the general population was finally at the point of exasperation, the only institutions that were 1) prepared to be the vehicle of that exasperation and 2) had an government in waiting that could take charge after the government had fallen were the religious ones.
Same thing that happened in Egypt after decades of helping Mubarak kill members of the secular opposition and destroy their organizations. When the government was overthrown spontaneously by a public driven to their limit, the only people prepared to take over, and supported by the public, were fundamentalists. The US saw another Iran coming and quickly stepped in to destroy the popular will and install another dictator that they could control.
What happened is that Khomeini consolidated power after the revolution and eliminated these people.