The student movements don’t frame themselves as narrowly targeting “American wrongdoing” but instead use sweeping moral language like genocide, apartheid, and absolute evil. Once you do that, people are going to notice when the outrage is selective. That isn’t “whataboutism,” it’s a basic credibility problem.
The idea that this all comes down to U.S. leverage or divestment is unpersuasive. Campus activism has often been symbolic first and practical second. Universities protest plenty of things they have no real influence over. Claiming Gaza is uniquely actionable feels like a post hoc justification, not a real explanation.
There’s also a huge leap in treating “the U.S. is actively supporting a genocide” as an established fact. That’s a highly disputed claim, and disagreeing with it doesn’t mean someone is cheering war crimes. Reducing the debate to that kind of moral absolutism is intellectually lazy and/or overly convenient.
And no one needs to believe activists support Iran to see the imbalance. The issue is silence and intensity. Some atrocities generate nonstop protests and encampments; others barely register. Pointing that out isn’t an attempt to distract. It’s pointing out selective outrage.
If a movement wants universal moral authority, it can’t also demand immunity from criticism when its priorities are this obviously uneven.
I think that the "selective outrage"/"double standards" argument isn't a good one. Everyone has their issues that they care about more, and its not a reasonable or realistic goal to care the exact same about everything.
Interesting. Thank you for sharing. I think caring more about one issue isn’t the problem. Turning that issue into a mandatory moral litmus test, while rejecting questions about consistency, is.
You convenient ignore the fact that the Iranian regime threatens Israel directly, as well as indirectly through its proxies, and thus has major responsibility for what has occurred in Gaza. Hamas's goal is Iran's goal: genocide against Israel.
The Iranian regime that has systematically oppressed its own citizens and is now killing thousands of them in the streets is the same regime that has facilitated and funded Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s genocidal ambitions and actions against Israel. So the absence of campus protests against the Iranian regime that you twistedly try to justify is actually consistent with protestors’ proclaimed support for those Iranian proxies.
"[I]f you ask a college activist why they are willing to protest in support of Palestinians but not Iranians, they might answer, logically, that the United States is complicit in the killing in Gaza because of the money that flows to Israel, whereas it already sanctions the Islamic Republic—so there is no policy change to agitate for. This argument, however, sounds pedantic to me, like a point scored in a debate rather than a real explanation for why some human dramas compel empathy and action and others do not."
Beckerman quotes actual Iranian exiles, whose painful experience of betrayal by the left belies your denialist take that "there might be a tiny minority of people on the far-left who defend Iran's slaughter of its own people." A representative excerpt:
"Afary recalled confronting a colleague who was dismissive of the 2022 protests, which were largely driven by feminists; this person wondered why Iranian women can’t just wear hijab like other women in the Middle East. 'Are you saying this because you don’t want the government of the Islamic Republic to be overthrown because it supports the Palestinian cause?' Afary asked her. She said yes. 'To my face!' Afary said. . . . The ideological left doesn’t know what to do with violence that doesn’t involve a Western aggressor, according to Kamran Matin, another exile and an international-relations professor at the University of Sussex in England. Matin noted other groups that received only muted support from anti-imperialists, including the Yazidis, persecuted by ISIS, and Rohingya, victims of the Myanmar government—in which case the aggressors were not Western hegemons. If you jump to the barricades against these atrocities, 'then the whole edifice of postcolonial anti-imperialism basically collapses. Because for them, it feels like they dilute their case against the West by accepting non-Western cases.'"
Is it really so difficult for them to protest the Iranian regime but claim the US is backing them as well, and is ultimately responsible? If they're so intent on finding a way to blame the West for everything
I think that’s right, and explains much of the difference between the two.
Two points though: clearly protests against e.g. the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen were much smaller than those around Gaza, even though the leverage point would apply very similarly.
Second, it would still reflect well on progressives to show greater solidarity. For example, there are countries where significant protests in support of Ukraine, Palestine, and Kurdish rights have taken place even though the respective national governments weren’t directly complicit in their oppression.
I believe the constant circulation of Gaza footage and news - often including extremely graphic scenes - on TikTok feeds for young people, contrasted with the far more limited visibility of content from Iran for the same demographics, also helps explain the relatively muted response to Iran among Gen Z. Which leads us to another set of questions...
Well...how much of the coverage was organic, and how much (if any) was by (nefarious?) design? By this I mainly mean what surfaces on TikTok, where a very large majority of Gen Z (around 82–83% in some 2025 datasets) are daily users of a Chinese-owned platform.
This may sound conspiratorial and could ultimately have no merit, but it isn’t entirely far-fetched. We’ve seen numerous studies and real-world examples of algorithmic manipulation for political purposes. Russian actors, for instance, have done so -through different methods - but the potential clearly exists.
Even setting deliberate manipulation aside, an important question remains: to what extent is youth activism shaped by what appears on their timelines and is amplified massively by algorithms?
All that said, Palestinians have endured an extraordinarily harsh reality, and asking for / demanding / or protesting for an end to violence is a fully legitimate and necessary political demand.
https://x.com/afalkhatib/status/2009678223475650879 Per Gazan American Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib , responding to pro-hms chants: "The pro-Hamas movement: For two years, I have warned nonstop about the clear and present danger posed by the normalization of Hamas as a legitimate entity and form of “resistance” that is worthy of support by the “pro-Palestine” movement. I urged academics, journalists, community leaders, and those with any genuine interest in Gaza and the well-being of the Palestinian people to speak out against pro-Hamas chants, behavior, the celebration of October 7 on University campuses and in the streets, and the mainstreaming of a vile, fascistic terror organization that has decimated the people of Gaza for over 20 years. I begged that once Hamas is condemned, isolated, and the humanity of Israeli hostages is recognized, people are free to voice their support for Palestine and condemnation of Israeli actions all they want, but the moral and strategic foundation upon which action must be built should be the rejection of Islamist terror as a tool for the “liberation,” a means for “resistance” or any pursuit of a “free Palestine.” But no, ‘Ahmed, these are fringes, and support for Palestine is not support for Hamas, you Zionist!’ I challenge anybody who believes this nonsense to go into a mainstream Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, or “pro-Palestine” space in the United States and share a substantive critique and condemnation of Hamas and its vile terrorism. Even if you are actually pro-Palestine, in the overwhelming majority of instances, you will be immediately shut down, attacked, called a Zionist, probably assaulted, or given lectures about Hamas being the legitimate outcome of years of oppression by Israel, which is directly responsible for the terror group’s actions. Now, everything is out in the open – “say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here!” Regardless of what you may be protesting, and irrespective of how legitimate you might think it is, framing your actions through the prism of a Jihadi terrorist group has immediately lost you any legitimacy or authority to speak. Worse, look at how some added the Shahada, or Muslim creed, to the Palestinian flag – not because they are religiously pious but because this action is meant to signify that Palestine is an Islamist society and because most Jihadi groups put the Shahada on their flags and banners. In other words, a free Palestine to many is likely going to be a failed Arab-Islamic state that is far from the romanticized notions being promulgated by academics, “pro-Palestine” allies, and hordes of deluded westerners. Shame on anyone who has continued to be quiet for two years, and is the reason why “pro-Palestine” activism has failed and should be finished and replaced by something entirely new and from scratch."
I agree with you, but I'd go further and say that even if it is a "double standard", I don't think thats a bad thing. You've talked about it with the virtues of hypocrisy, and I think its justa fact of human nature how we form our worldviews and politics.
The student movements don’t frame themselves as narrowly targeting “American wrongdoing” but instead use sweeping moral language like genocide, apartheid, and absolute evil. Once you do that, people are going to notice when the outrage is selective. That isn’t “whataboutism,” it’s a basic credibility problem.
The idea that this all comes down to U.S. leverage or divestment is unpersuasive. Campus activism has often been symbolic first and practical second. Universities protest plenty of things they have no real influence over. Claiming Gaza is uniquely actionable feels like a post hoc justification, not a real explanation.
There’s also a huge leap in treating “the U.S. is actively supporting a genocide” as an established fact. That’s a highly disputed claim, and disagreeing with it doesn’t mean someone is cheering war crimes. Reducing the debate to that kind of moral absolutism is intellectually lazy and/or overly convenient.
And no one needs to believe activists support Iran to see the imbalance. The issue is silence and intensity. Some atrocities generate nonstop protests and encampments; others barely register. Pointing that out isn’t an attempt to distract. It’s pointing out selective outrage.
If a movement wants universal moral authority, it can’t also demand immunity from criticism when its priorities are this obviously uneven.
I think that the "selective outrage"/"double standards" argument isn't a good one. Everyone has their issues that they care about more, and its not a reasonable or realistic goal to care the exact same about everything.
I wrote about it more in depth here if you are interested: https://breadsandwich.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-double-standards
Interesting. Thank you for sharing. I think caring more about one issue isn’t the problem. Turning that issue into a mandatory moral litmus test, while rejecting questions about consistency, is.
You convenient ignore the fact that the Iranian regime threatens Israel directly, as well as indirectly through its proxies, and thus has major responsibility for what has occurred in Gaza. Hamas's goal is Iran's goal: genocide against Israel.
The Iranian regime that has systematically oppressed its own citizens and is now killing thousands of them in the streets is the same regime that has facilitated and funded Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s genocidal ambitions and actions against Israel. So the absence of campus protests against the Iranian regime that you twistedly try to justify is actually consistent with protestors’ proclaimed support for those Iranian proxies.
Well said, Shadi.
what Haviv said:
https://x.com/havivrettiggur/status/2011899223827234939?s=20
This is bullshit, man
What exactly about it is bullshit?
I'm more convinced by Gal Beckerman's response to this argument in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/01/the-iranians-who-feel-betrayed-by-the-left/685644/):
"[I]f you ask a college activist why they are willing to protest in support of Palestinians but not Iranians, they might answer, logically, that the United States is complicit in the killing in Gaza because of the money that flows to Israel, whereas it already sanctions the Islamic Republic—so there is no policy change to agitate for. This argument, however, sounds pedantic to me, like a point scored in a debate rather than a real explanation for why some human dramas compel empathy and action and others do not."
Beckerman quotes actual Iranian exiles, whose painful experience of betrayal by the left belies your denialist take that "there might be a tiny minority of people on the far-left who defend Iran's slaughter of its own people." A representative excerpt:
"Afary recalled confronting a colleague who was dismissive of the 2022 protests, which were largely driven by feminists; this person wondered why Iranian women can’t just wear hijab like other women in the Middle East. 'Are you saying this because you don’t want the government of the Islamic Republic to be overthrown because it supports the Palestinian cause?' Afary asked her. She said yes. 'To my face!' Afary said. . . . The ideological left doesn’t know what to do with violence that doesn’t involve a Western aggressor, according to Kamran Matin, another exile and an international-relations professor at the University of Sussex in England. Matin noted other groups that received only muted support from anti-imperialists, including the Yazidis, persecuted by ISIS, and Rohingya, victims of the Myanmar government—in which case the aggressors were not Western hegemons. If you jump to the barricades against these atrocities, 'then the whole edifice of postcolonial anti-imperialism basically collapses. Because for them, it feels like they dilute their case against the West by accepting non-Western cases.'"
Is it really so difficult for them to protest the Iranian regime but claim the US is backing them as well, and is ultimately responsible? If they're so intent on finding a way to blame the West for everything
I think that’s right, and explains much of the difference between the two.
Two points though: clearly protests against e.g. the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen were much smaller than those around Gaza, even though the leverage point would apply very similarly.
Second, it would still reflect well on progressives to show greater solidarity. For example, there are countries where significant protests in support of Ukraine, Palestine, and Kurdish rights have taken place even though the respective national governments weren’t directly complicit in their oppression.
Good point about Yemen. People like Abby Martin, K Ball, Grim and the Gray Zone folks did complain about that as well though to be fair
I believe the constant circulation of Gaza footage and news - often including extremely graphic scenes - on TikTok feeds for young people, contrasted with the far more limited visibility of content from Iran for the same demographics, also helps explain the relatively muted response to Iran among Gen Z. Which leads us to another set of questions...
Which questions does that lead us to? :)
Well...how much of the coverage was organic, and how much (if any) was by (nefarious?) design? By this I mainly mean what surfaces on TikTok, where a very large majority of Gen Z (around 82–83% in some 2025 datasets) are daily users of a Chinese-owned platform.
This may sound conspiratorial and could ultimately have no merit, but it isn’t entirely far-fetched. We’ve seen numerous studies and real-world examples of algorithmic manipulation for political purposes. Russian actors, for instance, have done so -through different methods - but the potential clearly exists.
Even setting deliberate manipulation aside, an important question remains: to what extent is youth activism shaped by what appears on their timelines and is amplified massively by algorithms?
All that said, Palestinians have endured an extraordinarily harsh reality, and asking for / demanding / or protesting for an end to violence is a fully legitimate and necessary political demand.
https://x.com/afalkhatib/status/2009678223475650879 Per Gazan American Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib , responding to pro-hms chants: "The pro-Hamas movement: For two years, I have warned nonstop about the clear and present danger posed by the normalization of Hamas as a legitimate entity and form of “resistance” that is worthy of support by the “pro-Palestine” movement. I urged academics, journalists, community leaders, and those with any genuine interest in Gaza and the well-being of the Palestinian people to speak out against pro-Hamas chants, behavior, the celebration of October 7 on University campuses and in the streets, and the mainstreaming of a vile, fascistic terror organization that has decimated the people of Gaza for over 20 years. I begged that once Hamas is condemned, isolated, and the humanity of Israeli hostages is recognized, people are free to voice their support for Palestine and condemnation of Israeli actions all they want, but the moral and strategic foundation upon which action must be built should be the rejection of Islamist terror as a tool for the “liberation,” a means for “resistance” or any pursuit of a “free Palestine.” But no, ‘Ahmed, these are fringes, and support for Palestine is not support for Hamas, you Zionist!’ I challenge anybody who believes this nonsense to go into a mainstream Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, or “pro-Palestine” space in the United States and share a substantive critique and condemnation of Hamas and its vile terrorism. Even if you are actually pro-Palestine, in the overwhelming majority of instances, you will be immediately shut down, attacked, called a Zionist, probably assaulted, or given lectures about Hamas being the legitimate outcome of years of oppression by Israel, which is directly responsible for the terror group’s actions. Now, everything is out in the open – “say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here!” Regardless of what you may be protesting, and irrespective of how legitimate you might think it is, framing your actions through the prism of a Jihadi terrorist group has immediately lost you any legitimacy or authority to speak. Worse, look at how some added the Shahada, or Muslim creed, to the Palestinian flag – not because they are religiously pious but because this action is meant to signify that Palestine is an Islamist society and because most Jihadi groups put the Shahada on their flags and banners. In other words, a free Palestine to many is likely going to be a failed Arab-Islamic state that is far from the romanticized notions being promulgated by academics, “pro-Palestine” allies, and hordes of deluded westerners. Shame on anyone who has continued to be quiet for two years, and is the reason why “pro-Palestine” activism has failed and should be finished and replaced by something entirely new and from scratch."
You're slightly correct but the reason is also a "Third Worldist Logic". Read this article by Zineb Riboua. https://www.city-journal.org/article/israel-us-west-decolonization-third-world
I agree with you, but I'd go further and say that even if it is a "double standard", I don't think thats a bad thing. You've talked about it with the virtues of hypocrisy, and I think its justa fact of human nature how we form our worldviews and politics.
I wrote a bit about that here: https://breadsandwich.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-double-standards
I didn't read your article but Stanley Fish had the same verbatim title in a New York Times piece many years ago
Interesting peice by him (https://archive.nytimes.com/campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/two-cheers-for-double-standards/), I don't think I'd agree with it (except in the boring way that overall you have to judge people by their full body of work), but a slightly different take.