Elica Le Bon, an Iranian-American attorney and activist, went viral on TikTok talking about how young Americans are being brainwashed into backing Hamas terrorists and women-hating ayatollahs in Iran. She expands on her thoughts for The Post.
Since Oct. 7, myself and others in the Iranian community have been unsettled by an anxious awareness of how radicalized Westerners are inching dangerously close to support for the Islamic Republic.
It started with, “We just support Hamas, stop making it something it’s not” (as though this were perfectly acceptable on its own).
Then when the Red Sea attacks happened, it soon grew into “Get you a friend like Yemen! Turn another ship around!” (failing to address the Houthis by their appropriate title and instead conflating them with Yemen’s government). That was strike two.
Not much later, we heard vocal support for Hezbollah firing rockets into northern Israel, celebrated as “resistance.”
That’s strike three of three. All of Iran’s main proxies.
Now they cry for Iran’s ayatollahs to attack Israel.
TikTok talking points
These protesters are romanticizing terror, romanticizing theocrats.
A generation of TikTok-educated so-called “leftists” and “progressives” turn their support toward the Islamic Republic, as they cheered on from the safety of New York and London streets a series of rockets that did nothing except seriously injure a 7-year-old Bedouin girl.
Was this the “win” from the “axis of resistance” they had thrown their weight behind?
They are celebrating the same regime that systematically murders and flogs women for showing their hair, much less engaging in celebratory TikTok dances online. The only word one can think of to describe this generation of leftists is “lost.”
Completely lost.
I’ve long wondered what it could be that has so seamlessly targeted and programmed the radical left in such a way that it now supports fascistic, authoritarian regimes.
One obvious answer is how Western academic institutions have become a hotbed for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps propaganda, framing these oppressive regimes as “the good guys,” “fighting Western imperialism,” “it’s just their culture” and other such racist, orientalist charges that presume Middle Eastern folk know no better than savagery and the world should just accept us at that level.
How else can you really believe that women want to be oppressed, to be forced to wear the hijab, to be robbed of education?
At a deeper level, though, it’s more than that. Those talking points would never work on an intellectually resilient populace. Instead, I fear what we’re witnessing is an excess of privilege.
I fear we are dealing with a generation that is so removed from suffering, oppression, war and tyranny, that they’ve grown bored with our rights, freedoms and privileges.
They don’t understand how crude, insensitive and frankly dangerous it is to champion this type of violence. Instead, they fantasize about nation states clashing with each other in the Middle East so they can live vicariously through the rush of excitement.
I don’t know if they’ll stop until they entirely corrode our democracy.
The deadly reality
Dying isn’t exciting for the people of the Middle East.
It’s all we’ve known for the past 45 years, and Israelis and Palestinians know this story well, too. We are tired of the oppression and suffering that Western “leftists” are salivating over.
We want Iran to be free, we want peace between a future free and democratic Iran with Israel and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. We are urging people to take the lives of all the people affected in this seriously — from Iran to Gaza to Israel to Yemen to Lebanon to Syria and beyond — and start moving the needle towards the type of resolution.
We want a better future for our children — not theocratic terrorists.
Either get with us or get out of our way.
