Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.
Leftists like to pose as human rights advocates. But the Left’s self-proclaimed zeal for human rights protection of the “oppressed” is highly selective.
Palestinian terrorists (whom the Left calls “resistance fighters”) are “oppressed victims” of Israeli oppression, according to the Left’s Orwellian Newspeak. At the same time, such far-left groups as ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Peace and Freedom Party, and Democratic Socialists of America have not hesitated in the past to rally in support of the Iranian theocracy’s repressive regime.
Last June, for example, as Israel and the United States were taking military action to dismantle the Iranian regime’s nuclear weaponization and ballistic missile capabilities, far-left militants chanted “Iran, Iran makes us proud! Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” and “Iran is defending itself against terrorist aggression from the US and Zionist regimes.”
In April 2024 at Princeton University, there were two contrasting protests the same day – one by a group of Iranians who had personally experienced the brutality of the Islamist regime and another by leftist U.S. students displaying Hamas and Hezbollah flags.
The Iranian protesters were demanding that Princeton fire Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a Visiting Research Collaborator with Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security who had previously served the terrorist-sponsoring Iranian regime in senior positions. During that time, Mousavian, a former Iranian ambassador to Germany, was linked to acts of terrorism in Europe and expressed his support for Hamas and Hezbollah in an interview with a leftwing German daily paper.
The Iranian protesters got their wish in June 2025 when Mousavian finally resigned after fifteen years from his Princeton faculty position. But he had fifteen years to use his academic platform to project a false moderate image of the Iranian regime.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s true terrorist sympathies were on display while he was on Princeton’s faculty when he attended the 2020 funeral of Major-General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. This terrorist leader was killed in a drone strike ordered by President Trump in early January 2020. In his January 25, 2020 articlepublished after Soleimani’s funeral, Mousavian lauded Soleimani and referred to Hamas as one of the groups “resisting U.S. and Israeli hegemony.”
Mousavian used the same old pro-Hamas, anti-American, and anti-Israel propaganda that leftists on college campuses shouted out after Hamas’s genocidal terrorist attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023. The U.S. students displaying Hamas and Hezbollah flags on Princeton’s campus in April 2024 were on the same page as Mousavian, whom the Iranian protesters on campus that same day demanded be fired.
The Red-Green alliance lives on. But while the protesters against imagined U.S. and Israeli oppression virtue signal to make themselves feel good, the Iranian people protesting their brutal regime are risking death from live ammunition fired at them by Iranian security forces.
The current protests started out as strikes and street demonstrations sparked by Iran’s collapsing economy. But the protests have ballooned into nationwide demonstrations demanding an end to the Islamist theocracy’s repressive regime, spreading even to regions of the country that were once considered bastions of support for the Iranian regime.
At first, the regime responded more cautiously than usual. But it was not long before it reverted to its brutal playbook. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said his regime would not “back down” in countering those he called “vandals.” Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said that “saboteurs” would be shown “no leniency.” Ahmad-Reza Radan, commander of the Iranian regime’s Law Enforcement Forces, warned that “no time or place will be safe” for the protesters.
They are following through on their threats as hundreds of protesters have reportedly been killed by security forces and more than two thousand have been detained so far.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, the Left’s pro-Hamas protests on college campuses have died down at least for now but the militants have found another cause. It is not a show of solidarity with the Iranian protesters fighting today for freedom from their repressive regime. The Left is focusing its efforts instead on obstructing the Trump administration’s law enforcement operations against criminal illegal immigrants. This led most recently to the killing of one such militant in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good, by an ICE agent as she ran into him with her vehicle.
A coalition of far-left groups mobilized nationwide demonstrations on January 10thand 11th, which it has called “ICE Out For Good Weekend of Action.” One such group, Indivisible, said that “The mobilization comes in response to the escalation of ICE violence in our communities, the killing of Renee Nicole Good…and the months-long pattern of unchecked violence and abuse in marginalized communities across America.”
We are seeing pro-illegal immigrant virtue-signaling by the Left, which has lured thousands of gullible people to also participate in these demonstrations while ignoring the suffering happening on the streets of Iran at the hands of a truly brutal regime.
Despite all the spinning, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s reckless remarks in the immediate aftermath of Ms. Good‘s death, a video clearly shows Ms. Good accelerating her car forward towards the ICE agent in front of the car right after her wife said, “Drive baby drive.” The agent was then hit before he shot into the car, killing Ms. Good.
Ms. Good had just previously disobeyed an order from an ICE agent to get out of her car, which she had been unlawfully using to block an ICE vehicle. She then drove her car towards the ICE agent. She was not fleeing away from him or other ICE agents. Taking all the circumstances into account, a reasonable law enforcement officer faced with a vehicle accelerating towards him could well have perceived Ms. Good’s conduct as threatening him with serious bodily harm. The ICE agent made a split second decision to respond forcibly in self-defense.
For many leftists, there is no such thing as objective truth because they view everything through the prism of the “oppressor vs oppressed.”
Illegal immigrants in the United States, including violent criminals who prey on innocent people, are included among the Left’s “oppressed.” Since illegal immigrant supporters claim that the Trump administration is persecuting these illegal immigrants through the instrumentality of ICE, leftist resisters feel entitled to crush ICE by any means possible as part of their overall resistance against the Trump administration.
One Democratic member of the House of Representatives told Axios last year that their “own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough … [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”
Now, with Ms. Good’s death, the Left has the “blood” it wants and is exploiting the tragedy to the hilt while not paying any attention to the Iranian regime’s bloody slaughter of its own people.
