The Long Brief: The Machinery of Selective Outrage

The same organizations that shut down universities over Gaza went silent while Iran massacred tens of thousands in a few days — then reactivated to defend the regime from consequences. Why.

Shabbat shalom, friends.

One month ago, a quarter of a million people filled the streets of Munich. They carried the Lion and Sun flag — pre-revolutionary Iran, the Iran that existed before the mullahs — and they carried Israeli flags. In Toronto, 350,000 marched. In Los Angeles, 350,000 more. The crowds stretched across 73 cities in 30 countries. Iranian diaspora communities — men and women who fled or were born into exile — rallied behind a single demand: the end of the Islamic Republic. Inside Iran, millions echoed from rooftops and windows, answering Reza Pahlavi’s call for what he called “our final battle.”

Two weeks later, on February 28, the United States and Israel struck. And within hours — not days, hours — a different crowd appeared in the same cities. ANSWER Coalition. CodePink. The People’s Forum. Palestinian Youth Movement. NIAC. American Muslims for Palestine. DSA. Black Alliance for Peace. The banners read “Hands Off Iran.” The chants defended the regime that had just, in mere days, massacred tens of thousands of its own people.

Two crowds. Same streets. Opposite allegiances. One mourned thousands of dead Iranians gunned down by their own government. The other mobilized to shield that government from consequences. Police were forced to impose conditions to keep the two groups apart — the split screen made literal.

The question is not why one crowd showed up. The question is why the other did — and why it showed up only when power, not people, was threatened. The answer has nothing to do with humanitarianism and everything to do with a political architecture that has operated, with traceable funding and identifiable actors, for decades. It connects CCP-linked money in Shanghai to campus encampments in New York. It connects the Islamic Republic’s execution chambers to lobbying offices in Washington. It connects the 1979 revolution in Tehran to the “Hands Off Iran” marches of March 2026.

The Machinery of Selective Outrage

The Syrian civil war killed well over 580,000 people across thirteen years. The Assad government and its allies were responsible for virtually all (more than 90%) of civilian casualties — barrel bombs dropped on apartment blocks, chemical weapons deployed against civilians in Ghouta, systematic siege-and-starve operations across multiple cities. Fourteen million displaced. Six and a half million refugees scattered across the region and Europe. The scale was staggering. The Western protest response was negligible. No sustained campus movement. No encampments. No divestment campaigns. No organizational infrastructure activated to pressure governments into intervention. Assad massacred more than half a million people — much of it documented in real time on social media — and the organizations that would later shut down American universities over Gaza held no marches.

The Tigray war — November 2020 to November 2022 — killed an estimated 600,000 people in two years, making it the deadliest conflict of the twenty-first century. Haven’t heard of it? You’re not alone. Most people in the West haven’t — not that it happened, not what happened, not where it happened (Ethiopia). The EU pegs the toll at 600,000 to 800,000. The US Ambassador to the UN confirmed more than half a million dead. El País called it “incomprehensibly invisible” — more dead than Ukraine, and the Western public barely registered it. No SJP chapters organized solidarity actions for Tigrayans. No “progressive” NGOs launched BDS-style campaigns against Ethiopian institutions. The invisibility was total and undisturbed.

Over one million Uyghurs have been interned without legal process in Chinese camps since 2017 — the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the Shoah. Birth rates in Uyghur regions fell 60% in three years — demographic engineering by the textbook definition. The United States declared it a genocide in 2021. At the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Ghulja massacre in 2025, a dozen activists stood outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

A dozen.

Now compare: after October 7, pro-Palestine protest activity appeared at over 525 academic institutions across the United States. More than 130 encampments. In basically every single state. Over 3,100 arrests. The Crowd Counting Consortium logged more than 3,700 protest-days. Roughly ten percent of American college students participated, with 45% expressing support. Campuses mobilized instantaneously for Palestine. But not for Uyghurs. Why then?

The infrastructure that powers these movements does not scale to suffering. It scales to utility. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: two million dead, no sustained Western protest against the perpetrators. Noam Chomsky spent the late 1970s downplaying the reports. Darfur: 300,000 dead, a brief flicker of campus activism in 2006–2008 that evaporated while the killing continued. Yemen: 377,000 dead from the war’s effects by 2021. Minimal Western mobilization — and most of what existed targeted the Saudi coalition, not the Houthi forces backed by Iran.

Review those numbers one more time. Syria: 580,000 dead over thirteen years — zero campus encampments. Tigray: 600,000 dead in two years — zero divestment campaigns. Uyghur genocide? A dozen activists outside an embassy. Gaza post-October 7? Before Israel even responded it started. 525 institutional protests, 130 encampments, 3,100 arrests, an entire academic year consumed by organizational mobilization. The protest infrastructure did not respond to the scale of human suffering. It responded to the identity of the accused.

Did ANSWER Coalition organize a single sustained action over Syria’s half million dead? Did CodePink launch a campaign against Ethiopian atrocities in Tigray? Did SJP’s 200 chapters hold a single die-in for Uyghur internees? The answer, in each case, is no — not because these organizations lack capacity, but because these conflicts do not serve the operational objective. Assad was an Iranian ally. Ethiopia is not a Western proxy. China funds the network. The selectivity is structural, and once you see the structure, the humanitarian framing collapses.

The question is why this disparity exists at such industrial scale — and the answer begins in Tehran in 1979.

1979: The Template

The Islamic Revolution was not a purely Islamist uprising. It was a coalition — clerics, nationalists, liberals, and Marxists united against the Shah, with Khomeini crafting rhetoric from his Parisian exile that appealed to each faction simultaneously. The Marxist organizations — the Tudeh Party, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, the MEK — provided essential revolutionary infrastructure: organizational capacity, student networks, educated cadres, and the secular legitimacy that a clerical movement needed to win over the Iranian middle class.

The arrangement was transactional and temporary. The Islamists needed the left’s organizational capacity. The left believed — with a combination of revolutionary romanticism and, frankly, delusion — that the clerics were a transitional vehicle, a useful front for a broader progressive revolution. Both sides understood they were using the other. The Islamists were better at it.

The MEK turned against Khomeini first, launching armed resistance in June 1981. The regime’s response was swift and total: within six months, 2,665 people were executed — 90% of them MEK members. Entire organizational networks dismantled. The Tudeh held on longer — tragically, absurdly longer — supporting the Islamic Republic in the hope that loyalty would earn them a seat at the table. Instead it earned them televised confessions: Tudeh leaders arrested, tortured, and paraded before cameras praising Islam and declaring the superiority of Islamic government over Marxism-Leninism.

Then came 1988. Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the mass execution of political prisoners —some 30,000 dead. The victims included Tudeh, Fedayeen, and MEK members — many originally convicted of offenses as minor as distributing pamphlets. Prisoners who had already served their sentences were re-interrogated, asked a single question about their political allegiance, and executed within hours.

The red-green alliance is the operational partnership between radical leftists and Islamists — two movements that disagree on virtually everything except the enemy — the United States, Israel, and the Western order. The reds supply the campus infrastructure and the ideological vocabulary. The greens supply the religious compulsion and the funding. Iran 1979 was the template: they allied to topple the Shah, and Khomeini executed his leftist partners the moment he had power. The alliance survived. The lesson didn’t.

There’s a template here. Marxists and Islamists unite to destroy a shared enemy. The Islamists consolidate power. The Marxists are liquidated. Every subsequent instance of red-green collaboration operates within this structure, and every Western intellectual who champions the alliance idiotically ignores the history. The Soviet Union understood the utility of the partnership before anyone else — supporting Islamist movements when they weakened Western-aligned governments, even when those movements were ideologically hostile to communism. The Cold War logic was clear. The enemy of my enemy is useful. That logic survived the Cold War. It survived the Soviet collapse. It is the operating principle of every organization documented in this piece.

Michel Foucault was the Western intellectual prototype. He traveled to Iran twice in 1978, met Khomeini at Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, and published a series of articles in Corriere della Sera and Le Nouvel Observateur praising the revolution as “political spirituality.” He described Khomeini as “a man who stands up bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people.” His enthusiasm persisted after the regime began executing opponents.

Foucault was not an outlier. He was the archetype — the Western intellectual who sees in Third World revolution a redemptive force that his own societies have lost. The revolution doesn’t need to be democratic. It doesn’t need to be humane. It needs to be anti-Western. That framing — Islamist revolution as authentic resistance, Western criticism as imperial imposition — unfortunately did not die with Foucault. It festered. It migrated into our institutions.

The Alliance Reconstitutes in Western Institutions

The Soviet collapse in 1991 should have ended the red side of the alliance. It lost its state sponsor, its operational funding, and its claim to a viable alternative system. Instead, the Marxist left relocated — into Western universities, NGOs, and activist networks where postcolonial theory provided the intellectual scaffolding for a new kind of anti-Western politics that didn’t require Moscow’s imprimatur.

The mechanism was straightforward. Postcolonial and critical theory reframed the global order as structurally colonial. The West as permanent oppressor. The non-West as permanent victim. Moral authority automatically assigned to whichever side opposed Western power regardless of that side’s actual conduct. The framework absorbed Islamist politics without friction. Palestinian armed factions became “resistance.” Theocratic regimes became post-colonial states defending sovereignty against imperial aggression. Jihad became a liberation theology. The categories did the analytical work that evidence could not — and academic departments, generously funded, produced a generation of graduates who internalized this lens as baseline reality.

The Palestinian cause became the operational focus. It was the one issue where Marxist anti-imperialism and Islamist politics aligned without internal contradiction — the one cause that could mobilize both the campus left and Muslim student organizations, that could draw on both Marxist rhetoric about settler colonialism and Islamist rhetoric about Al-Aqsa. BDS provided the institutional vehicle. Students for Justice in Palestine — over 200 chapters in American universities, most active well before October 7 — provided the campus footprint.

The organizational lineage traces directly to the Muslim Brotherhood’s American infrastructure. CAIR was co-founded by individuals tied to the Islamic Association for Palestine, which was established with startup funds from Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook. AMP helped create SJP and dedicated a large portion of its budget to expanding student activism. At Columbia, a coalition of over 100 student groups organized under the banner of Columbia University Apartheid Divest — a coalition whose breadth demonstrates how deeply embedded the infrastructure had become before the first encampment tent went up.

Qatar accelerated the process from the outside. Qatar funneled money into Western university programs and Middle East studies departments — an investment designed to shape curricula, research agendas, and the intellectual formation of the next generation of analysts. Al Jazeera’s English-language operation provided a media pipeline that laundered Islamist framing into respectable journalistic register — professional production values, familiar formats, editorial choices that consistently framed Israel as aggressor and Palestinian armed factions as resisters. The Brookings (and you thought maybe they were exempt? ha!) Doha Center offered think-tank credibility. The investment strategy was patient, institutional, and deliberate. If you shape the intellectual environment in which a generation of journalists, policy analysts, and activists are trained, and the protest infrastructure takes care of itself. By the time a campus SJP chapter organizes a divestment vote, the faculty who supervise it, the journalists who cover it, and the NGO staffers who advise it have all been trained in the same framework — one that treats anti-Israel politics as baseline morality and dissent from that baseline as complicity.

The alarming Obama-era rapprochement with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood created a permissive environment in Washington. The policy framework treated Islamist actors as partners rather than adversaries, and the institutional apparatus that supported this realignment — think tanks, advocacy organizations, academic programs — embedded deeper into the foreign policy ecosystem. NIAC benefited directly. It positioned itself as the respectable bridge between Washington and Tehran, providing intellectual cover for engagement while its founder maintained documented ties with the regime. When the rapprochement collapsed under Trump, the infrastructure remained in place, now operating independently of any particular administration’s preferences — and oriented entirely toward opposing the administration that had rejected engagement.

The BDS movement, which became the institutional spine of campus anti-Israel activism after its formal launch in 2005, deserves specific attention as the operational vehicle that welded the alliance together in practice. BDS provided what neither the Marxist left nor Islamist organizations could alone produce. A single-issue campaign with institutional targets, measurable goals, and a moral framework that universities and corporations could engage with on their own terms. The campaign’s genius — from the alliance’s perspective — was its modularity. A student could support divestment from Israel without understanding the organizational lineage connecting their campus chapter to the Holy Land Foundation. A professor could endorse academic boycott without knowing that the infrastructure promoting it was funded through CCP funds. BDS laundered the alliance’s politics into the language of institutional governance.

What we now contend with is an institutional ecosystem where radical left and Islamist organizations share funding streams, campus infrastructure, legal support networks, and a common target set. The ecosystem does not require central coordination (though there’s plenty of that). It requires shared incentives — and those incentives have been stable since 1979.

The Network: Who Funds, Who Marches, Who Benefits

Start with the money.

The House Ways and Means Committee exposed the architecture for us. Neville Roy Singham and his wife Jodie Evans — the peripatetic co-founder of CodePink who pivoted from anti-China activism to pro-Beijing advocacy after marrying Singham in 2017 [at least the pivot was well-compensated] — donated over $20 million to The People’s Forum between 2017 and 2022, funneled through shell companies, donor-advised funds, and Goldman Sachs.

A February 2026 House hearing revealed a “coordinated $100 million system” moving funds from Singham through private LLCs to activist organizations including The People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition, the International People’s Assembly, and the “Shut It Down for Palestine” campaign. Singham attended a Communist Party workshop in July 2023 about promoting the CCP internationally. He shares office space with Chinese state media in Shanghai. He worked as a Huawei consultant from 2001 to 2008. Representative Darin LaHood described “a sophisticated, multi-layered flow of capital funds that originate in Singham and Shanghai.” Senator Grassley asked the DOJ and FBI to assess whether The People’s Forum and CodePink should register under FARA.

Evans herself is a case study in how the money changes the politics rather than the other way around. She shifted from criticizing China in 2015 to defending it after marrying Singham, including defending the mass detention of Uyghurs.

Now follow the thread to Iran. NIAC — the National Iranian American Council, which presents itself as a civic organization representing Iranian Americans — and its founder Trita Parsi have operated for years as the Islamic Republic’s most effective American advocate. A federal judge found Parsi’s behavior “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.” Court documents revealed direct communications between Parsi and high levels of the regime. When NIAC sued journalist Hassan Daioleslam for reporting on its regime ties, NIAC lost — and was sanctioned by the DC Circuit for discovery abuses, including false declarations under oath. A former FBI special agent concluded NIAC “appears [to be] lobbying on behalf of Iranian government interests.” NIAC did not register under FARA.

Don’t worry, Hamas isn’t left out of this. AMP’s board includes at least two members — Salah Sarsour and Osama Abu Irshaid — with documented ties to the Holy Land Foundation, which was shut down after funneling millions to Hamas. Five HLF leaders were convicted and court documents described HLF as the fundraising arm for Hamas and IAP as its media entity, both created by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. The Senate found at least nine AMP/AJP officers with past or present ties to Hamas-associated groups. AMP created SJP. SJP organized the encampments. The pipeline runs from Hamas through a Holy Land Foundation network to American campus activism, and it runs through documented organizational and financial channels.

The ANSWER Coalition descends from the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Workers World Party — self-described socialist organizations that Singham funds. ANSWER has organized the largest anti-Israel rallies in Washington since October 7. PSL’s ideology is explicitly anti-imperialist in the Leninist sense. To them, the United States and Israel are the enemies, and any force that opposes them — including theocratic regimes and jihadist networks — is objectively progressive. The intellectual gymnastics required to call a clerical fascist state an anti-imperialist ally would be impressive if they weren’t so suicidal. We’ve seen this before. The Tudeh made the same calculation in 1979. It ended in mass graves.

Follow the organizational chart: CCP money flows to Singham. Singham funds The People’s Forum, ANSWER, CodePink, and PSL. CodePink co-sponsors events with NIAC, AMP, and DSA. AMP funds SJP chapters on campus. NIAC provides the Iran-specific lobbying and messaging capacity. The network is traceable. The funding is documented— in congressional investigations and federal court records. The output is remarkably consistent. Mobilization against Israel and the West. Silence on every atrocity committed by allied regimes. It’s a system rather than merely a collection of independent actors who happen to agree.

October 7 Activated the Infrastructure

On October 9, 2023 — barely two days after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, and before any Israeli ground operation had begun — Columbia’s SJP and JVP chapters published an open letter expressing “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance.” Not with Palestinian civilians. With the resistance — the term of art reserved for armed factions — including Hamas.

Stanford launched an encampment on October 20, thirteen days after the attack and before any ground incursion into Gaza. It lasted over a hundred days. AMP co-sponsored over 300 rallies after October 7. The tone was set one day after the massacre when AMP New Jersey posted a rally announcement to “defend Palestinian resistance” alongside an image of a bulldozer breaking through the Gaza border fence. The bulldozer image was not ambiguous.

The Crowd Counting Consortium logged over 1,500 pro-Palestine campus protest-days before the Columbia encampment launched — two-fifths of all logged protest activity. The wave began almost immediately after October 7—some starting during the atrocities. Not after the ground operation. Not after the casualty figures climbed. During and after the massacre of Jews — which is the event these organizations chose to celebrate.

Columbia’s CUAD coalition grew more explicitly supportive of Hamas over the course of 2024, retracting its earlier condemnation of a student who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Within Our Lifetime leader Nerdeen Kiswani arrived at the Columbia encampment and called for liberation “by any means necessary.” The language tracked Hamas’s own operational framing. The organizations — AMP, SJP, CUAD, WOL — were not responding to events. They were executing a deployment plan that predated the events by years.

To be explicit, none of this was spontaneous. The organizational relationships were in place. The funding was flowing. The campus chapters existed. The legal support networks were operational. The media allies were ready. October 7 did not create a movement. It activated a system — a system that had been built, funded, and maintained for exactly this purpose. And the system’s true nature became visible not when it activated, but when it didn’t. When Iran’s own people were massacred and the same organizations went silent — the same infrastructure that shut down Columbia and occupied campuses in some forty-five states could not produce a single vigil for tens of thousands of dead Iranians.

Iran’s Crimson Winter Earned Zero Marches