There are moments when politics stops hiding behind diplomatic language and reveals itself in the street. The last three years gave the West two such moments.
In one city, women burned hijabs while crowds chanted for the fall of a dictatorship. In another, demonstrators marched behind the slogan "Globalize the Intifada." The contrast was not merely political. It revealed two competing moral visions of the world.
One protest wave came from Iranians rising against the Islamic Republic in 2026, both inside Iran and across the diaspora. The other emerged after the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, as pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across cities throughout the West. These two movements were not simply expressing different views on foreign policy. They embodied fundamentally different ideas about freedom, justice, and civilization.
The Iranian protests showed that the pro-Western instinct is not dead. It showed it is very much alive, courageous and often found most clearly among people who have lived under the enemies of the West.
In January 2026, protests inside Iran grew from economic anger into a broader challenge to the clerical regime, with slogans against the theocratic dictatorship and open calls for regime change, while the regime responded with internet shutdowns and violence. Their struggle did not remain confined to Iran. It inspired extraordinary demonstrations across the free world.
In February 2026, roughly 250,000 people gathered in Munich in support of Iranian protesters, with similar rallies in Toronto and Los Angeles, and numerous other cities after Reza Pahlavi called for a global day of action. Berlin illuminated the Brandenburg Gate with “Freedom for Iran” and “Woman, Life, Freedom,” a message impossible to misunderstand: these people were not asking the West to apologize for existing, but for the West to remember what it is.
The second protest movement pointed in the opposite moral direction. It revealed, at best, profound confusion. After Hamas-led terrorists murdered nearly 1,200 people and abducted more than 250 hostages on October 7, Western streets filled with demonstrations aimed not primarily at Hamas, but at Israel, accompanied by chants about "resistance," "intifada," and "from the river to the sea." The problem was never that people cared about Palestinian civilians. Any decent person should care about innocent civilians in Gaza. The issue was that many demonstrations rapidly became something darker: public displays of anti-Western resentment, apologetics for Hamas, intimidation of Jewish communities, and a broader sense of civilizational self-loathing.
The contrast matters because it shatters one of the most damaging myths of our age: that all cultures, political traditions, and moral systems are morally equivalent. Human beings are equal in dignity, but cultures are not.
Iranians do not need Western academics to explain "cultural context." They have lived it. They know what compulsory veiling means, what political prisons look like, and what happens when a government claims divine authority over every aspect of life. They understand that freedom begins with the body, the conscience, and the right to say no. That is why "Woman, Life, Freedom" is more than a protest slogan. It is a declaration that women are not the property of the state, the mosque, or the family; that life should not be sacrificed to endless revolutionary martyrdom; and that freedom is not a Western luxury, but a universal human necessity.
That is also why their protests resonated so deeply with many pro-Western observers. They reminded us that the West is not defined by geography, ethnicity, or consumer brands. It is a political and moral tradition built on individual liberty, secular law, accountable government, freedom of conscience, equal rights, and open debate. Many Iranians recognize the value of those principles more clearly than people who have spent their entire lives enjoying them, because they have experienced the alternative firsthand.
The Protest Divide
Now compare that with the dominant mood of much of the pro-Palestinian protest movement. There is, of course, a morally serious way to speak about Palestinian suffering. One can criticize Israeli policy, mourn civilians in Gaza, support humanitarian aid and Palestinian self-determination, and call for a just political settlement. None of that requires glorifying Hamas, intimidating Jews, or turning the conflict into a broader war against the West.
Yet that was too often the direction many demonstrations took. Instead of demanding that Hamas release the hostages or end its rule over Gaza, crowds chanted "Globalize the Intifada" and "From the River to the Sea." October 7 was treated not as a moral catastrophe but as the beginning of a revolutionary struggle.
These slogans are not harmless poetry. "From the River to the Sea" became one of the defining chants after October 7, provoking widespread concern because of what it implies about Israel's continued existence. "Globalize the Intifada" has likewise been interpreted by many Jewish communities and political leaders as a call to export political violence beyond the Middle East. In Australia, Queensland even criminalized the public use of both slogans in menacing or harassing contexts following the 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attack. Whether one agrees with such laws or not, the broader point remains: these slogans flourished in a climate where Jewish life in the West became visibly less secure.
The data reflects that reality. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States during 2024, the highest annual total ever documented. Britain's Community Security Trust reported 3,528 incidents, its second-highest year on record after the post-October 7 surge in 2023. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that most European Jews no longer felt able to live openly Jewish lives, while Reuters reported that some Jewish organizations saw antisemitic incidents rise by more than 400 percent after October 2023. The result was a public atmosphere in which Jews across the West increasingly found themselves blamed for a war thousands of kilometres away.
The contrast with the Iranian protest movement could hardly be greater. Iranian demonstrators risk imprisonment, torture, and death to oppose a regime that funds Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other militant groups across the region. Yet many Western activists who speak endlessly about oppression have remarkably little to say about the Islamic Republic itself, or about the Islamist movements that systematically suppress women, execute dissidents, persecute minorities, and crush civil society. In much of today's protest culture, the label "resistance" seems capable of absolving almost any form of authoritarianism.
The Iranian protester and the Western Hamas apologist are not moral equals. One risks everything to dismantle a religious dictatorship. The other enjoys the freedoms of liberal democracy while romanticizing those who destroy such freedoms wherever they gain power. One understands, through lived experience, how fragile liberty is. The other mistakes liberty for a platform from which to denounce the civilization that makes such protest possible.
The West's Crisis of Confidence
This is why Central and Eastern Europeans should understand this issue better than anyone. In our part of the world, we know what it means when beautiful words are used to defend ugly power. "Peace" once meant Soviet tanks. "Anti-fascism" often meant communist dictatorship and the Berlin Wall. "Liberation" meant occupation. "People's democracy" meant no democracy at all. We have seen empires wrap repression in moral language. So when today's radicals chant about "resistance" while defending jihadist murderers, we should not be impressed. We should recognize an old lie wearing new clothes.
We do not owe the enemies of liberty our silence. Nor do we need to pretend that every anti-Western movement is a misunderstood cry for justice. Some movements are exactly what they claim to be. Hamas is not a social justice organization. The Islamic Republic is not an anti-imperialist liberation project. Hezbollah is not a charity with rockets. The Taliban are not simply cultural conservatives. They are authoritarian movements built on violence, coercion, and the denial of fundamental human freedom.
What they fear most is not Western military power or Western wealth. It is the Western idea that the individual comes before the collective. The freedom to leave the tribe. To reject inherited beliefs. To criticize religious authority. To mock political leaders. To change or abandon one's faith. To allow women to live as equal citizens. To protect minorities through law rather than the goodwill of the majority. These are precisely the freedoms that the Islamic Republic seeks to crush and that Hamas cannot tolerate.
That is also why cultural relativism collapses the moment it is confronted with reality. If all cultures are equally good, why do dissidents flee toward liberal democracies rather than theocracies? Why do Iranian women risk imprisonment and death to remove compulsory hijab while some Western activists dismiss criticism of that system as "Islamophobia"? Why do so many of the loudest critics of the West choose to live in Western societies, study at Western universities, rely on Western courts, and exercise rights protected by Western free speech? Their lives answer the question more honestly than their slogans.
Reclaiming the Public Square
This is why pro-Western people must stop behaving like a defeated minority in their own societies. The Iranian rallies of 2026 showed that the public square does not belong only to radicals, Islamists, communists, anti-Semites, and professional grievance movements. It also belongs to people willing to defend freedom without apology.
The lesson is simple: show up.
For too long, ordinary citizens in the West went to work, raised families, voted, and complained in private while allowing the loudest activists to dominate public life. Politics abhors a vacuum. If decent people abandon the streets, the streets will be filled by those who celebrate intifada, excuse terrorism, and romanticize dictatorship. If defenders of liberal democracy remain silent, the microphone will always belong to its enemies.
Showing up does not mean imitating the hysteria of extremists. It means disciplined public action: rallies for Iranian freedom, for the Israeli hostages, for Ukraine, for dissidents living under dictatorships. It means saying without embarrassment that democracy is preferable to dictatorship, liberty to theocracy, and that Western civilization remains worth defending.
In many ways, some of the strongest defenders of liberal democracy today are not those born into it, but those who have lived without it: Iranians, Ukrainians, Hong Kongers, Venezuelans, Cubans, Syrians, and countless others. That should both humble and encourage the West. A civilization is not dying while people continue risking everything to enter its moral world. It begins to die only when those who inherited it stop believing it is worth defending.
The West is not finished. It is being tested. Whether it passes that test will depend not only on those who wish to destroy it, but on whether those who still believe in freedom are willing to defend it.
Damir Omerbegović
Writer | Commentator
