Beryl Wajsman: Canadian media and leftists' neglect of Iran uprising is complicity in Islamist terror

When Iranians rise up against Islamic tyranny, they do not ask for much from the outside world — only to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. Yet their uprising has been given short shrift in media and by “progressives.”

For almost two weeks, Iranian protesters have put their lives on the line. Yet only this weekend, when tens of thousands were not just in the streets of every city in Iran, but also in every major Western city, including Montreal and Toronto, did media coverage open up, a little.

The “progressives” maintain their silence despite real-time videos showing Iranian bravery against the Islamic regime in more than a dozen cities in Iran. The left is too busy yelling “Free Maduro” to call for “Free Iran.” The fate of a 63-year-old dictator concerns them far more than the future of millions of Iranians.

Celebrities who love to signal their virtue are nowhere to be found. So are many feminists, who seem to have nothing to say about the savage repression of women by mobs of religious Iranian men spurred on by the mullahs. Even after the murder of Mahsa Amini, killed for wearing her head covering the wrong way.

To judge by their obsessions, Western leftists are against supremacy except when it’s Islamist supremacy. They’re against the police except when it’s an Islamic police state.

Montreal has been one of the most active centres of Iranian diaspora activism in North America. Since the uprising following the death of Mahsa Amini, Iranian Montrealers have marched relentlessly against the Islamic Republic. Women have burned headscarves in defiance of compulsory veiling. Families have held photographs of murdered and executed protesters. Survivors of religious persecution have spoken openly about prisons, torture, and exile. These demonstrations were not marginal or sporadic. They were sustained, disciplined, and morally clear.

And yet, the media largely looked away.

This absence becomes even more glaring when one considers what these protesters were actually saying. Iranian demonstrators did not merely oppose the regime in Tehran; many also spoke out explicitly against Hamas, recognizing the group as part of the same Islamist ideological ecosystem that has devastated Iran. They rejected the framing of Hamas as a “resistance movement,” calling it what it is: a theocratic, antisemitic terrorist organization that mirrors the values of the Islamic Republic. They called for secular governance, women’s equality, minority rights, and pluralist democracy — values the media and “progressives” claim to champion.

Still, the coverage has been sparse. I am witness to that. It has been my privilege — and that of my Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal colleagues — to stand with Montreal’s Iranian activists, help organize and speak at their protests. I have worked with the Iranian dissident diaspora for several decades going back to helping Canadian Nazanin Afshin-Jam’s successful campaign to free then 17-year-old Nazanin Fatehi from Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison. Fatehi was a rape victim who was sentenced to death for walking in a park unaccompanied by a male relative and thereby — under Iran’s Sharia Law — “inciting” a man to rape her.

Most of the media is very eager to cover protests that align with the positions of the left. Demonstrations framed as anti-Western, anti-Israel, or anti-capitalist are routinely elevated, contextualized sympathetically, and given extensive airtime. The voices of protesters are centred. Their grievances are explored. Their anger is validated. But when Iranians protest an Islamist regime — especially while rejecting Hamas and political Islam altogether — the media mostly evaporates.

In Quebec, this failure carries additional weight. The province’s debates over secularism are among the most contentious in the country, and the media frequently frames secularism as exclusionary, even reactionary. Iranian Montrealers explode that narrative. They support a strong separation of religion and state out of hard-earned knowledge. They know what happens when clerics gain political power. They know how quickly “religious freedom” becomes religious coercion. Their perspective could elevate the public conversation. Instead, it is ignored.

The consequences of this neglect are real.

Media disinterest does not merely reflect public discourse, it shapes it. By refusing to meaningfully cover Iranian-led protests, Canadians get a message that some struggles for freedom matter more than others. It tells Iranian women that their rebellion against forced veiling is less newsworthy than Western debates about symbolism. It tells Iranian Jews, Baháʼís, Kurds, and LGBTQ exiles that their persecution is too inconvenient to highlight. Most troubling, it distorts. When principled Iranian voices are absent from the airwaves, the public is left with a twisted narrative of Middle Eastern politics — one in which Islamist movements are romanticized and secular resistance is rendered invisible.

The media and “progressives” like to present themselves as defenders of democracy and human rights. But those values mean little if they are applied selectively. This is not journalistic neutrality or political objectivity. It is nothing less than complicity in Islamist terror.

Beryl P. Wajsman, B.C.L., LL.B., is president of the  Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal.