I have taken the liberty of translating the brilliant @Tahmineh Dehbozorgi's post from X, as it contains many thoughts that deserve to be shared widely.
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"The Western liberal media ignore the uprising in Iran because an honest explanation would force them to admit something they are desperately trying 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, coverage of a rebellion is not merely about showing crowds and slogans. It requires answering a completely fundamental question:
Why are people risking their lives?
In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. People are rising because the Islamic Republic of Iran has for decades suffocated every aspect of life - freedom of speech, work, family life, art, women, and economic survival - under a clerical system that regards freedom as a crime.
That story cannot be told without confronting the regime's nature.
Western media refuse to do that, because they have fundamentally misunderstood islam.
Or worse: because they have chosen not to understand it.
In Western progressive discourse, islam has been 'racialized'. It is not treated as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a proxy for race or ethnicity. Criticism of islam is therefore portrayed as an attack on "brown people", Arabs, or "the Middle East" - as if islam were a skin color and not the doctrine of a political law-religion.
This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy.
Western liberal media routinely reduce entire civilizations to one stereotype: "all Middle Eastern people are Arabs", "all Arabs are Muslims", and "all Muslims are a uniform, oppressed identity group under white European colonial masters".
In this worldview, Iranians disappear completely. Their language, history, and culture - Persian, not Arabic; ancient, not colonial; distinct and not interchangeable - are erased.
By treating islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strip millions of people of the possibility of rejecting it. Iranian demonstrators become incomprehensible.
Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the unwritten rule that islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media talk over them - or ignore them completely.
There is yet another reason why the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media: the economic conditions.
As is well known, Iran is not merely a religious dictatorship. It is also a centrally controlled, state-run economy where markets are suffocated, private initiative is criminalized or seized, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price regulation, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and made corruption the only functioning system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on the state's dark void of empty promises.
An honest coverage of Iran would require an acknowledgment that these policies are harmful. They have been tested. They have failed. Catastrophically.
That is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions which routinely promote extensive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism.
Iran shows where such systems lead when isolated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It demonstrates that when the state controls people's livelihoods, deviation from the norm becomes existentially dangerous.
That recognition cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language.
Western liberal media do not wish to hear that. To acknowledge it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizers and colonized, white and non-white.
Iranian demonstrators do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to break free from.
That is what frightens Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored.
So the silence continues."
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Many thoughts to the Persian people and all other peoples trapped under this yoke.
I hope they succeed in winning freedom this time.
❤️🔥🪽
