Western media’s silence on Iran’s uprising masks an uncomfortable truth: millions are rebelling against Islamic rule and state control, shattering progressive narratives about oppression, identity, and power.

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.

Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.

Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it.

When Islam Is Treated as a Race, Dissent Becomes Invisible

Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialised. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticising Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people”, Arabs, or “the Middle East”, as if Islam were a skin colour rather than a doctrine.

This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilisations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonisers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased.

By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticised. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely.

Iran’s Revolt Exposes the Failure of Clerical and Economic Control

There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues.

As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalised or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power.

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