Elizabeth Ahern-Flynn

The reason why campus activists aren't protesting about Iran is actually pretty simple. The U.S. isn't allied with Iran. The U.S. isn't facilitating the mass slaughter of Iranians by funding and arming the Iranian regime to the tune of billions of dollars. To my knowledge, there's basically no one in the mainstream media who is celebrating the killing of Iranian protestors. That's a good thing. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with Gaza, where cheering Israel's war crimes was extremely common. Campus activists were calling on their universities to divest from companies that were complicit in Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank. To my knowledge, there is no American university that has financial holdings in companies that are complicit in the Iranian regime's killing of protestors. It makes sense that campus activists in America would be most concerned with American wrongdoing. That's what they might have some influence over. They have no influence on the Iranian regime, which will continue committing murder regardless, because it's a murderous regime. Also, while there might be a tiny minority of people on the far-left who defend Iran's slaughter of its own people, I've seen very little of that. Are there many campus groups that have issued statements in support of the Iranian regime's actions? To assume that student activists who care about Gaza are fine with the Iranian regime's behavior is to assume quite a lot without evidence. This is classic whataboutism. What about Sudan? What about the Congo? What about Iran? Except in none of these cases is the U.S. actively and directly supporting a genocide. This whataboutism is a move to distract from the continued slaughter in Gaza and to demean and delegitimize student activists and anyone else who supports the basic human rights of Palestinians.