The reason why campus activists aren't protesting about Iran is simple
A short primer on Gaza and "whataboutism"
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.
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.
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.