Robert Hersov argues Western media downplays Iran's uprising because it's fundamentally anti-Islamic and anti-theocratic, which threatens liberal narratives. He claims media silence stems from treating Islam as an immutable identity beyond criticism, and draws parallels between Iran's state-controlled economy and South Africa's ANC policies.
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The Western liberal media and South African mainstream media— yeah, that's you, Adrian Basson and ANC24— are downplaying the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission they're desperate to avoid. And that is, the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world. Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: Why are these people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life, speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival under a theocratic and fascist Islamic clerical system that calls your life crime. And there's no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime. Western and our South African mainstream media refuses to do so because they fundamentally misunderstood Islam, or worse, They've chosen not to understand it, or they kowtow to their ANC paymasters, who in turn are being paid by the mullahs. Not for long, though. Islam in Western progressive discourse has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or as a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on brown people, Arabs, or the Middle East, as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.
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This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: all Middle Easterners are Arabs, all Arabs are Muslim, and all Muslims are a monolithic oppressed identity group by white European colonizers. Iranians disappear entirely in this crazy framework. Their language, their history, their culture. In 1975, at Tehran University, 44% of all graduates in medicine were women, and 55% in education. Persian, not Arab, ancient, not colonial, and distinct, not interchangeable, are erased. By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible, and their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticised. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them or ignores them completely. There's another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media And that's on economic issues. Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprises criminalised or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. But like the ANC. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalisation, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. Bit like the ANC. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government's dark void of empty promises. Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They've been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically. And this is deeply inconvenient for media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead and when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, nonconformity becomes existentially dangerous. And that lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas, but do it in kind of softer language. Our liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, white and non-white. Iranian protesters don't fit that bill. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape. And that is what terrifies the liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored. And so the silence continues. If the monstrous mullahs are removed, then the number one state sponsor of terrorism worldwide, Iran and its evil Islamic State, will not be around to fund the likes of the nasty ANC. And Trump is going to turn his attention to punishing Cyril, Fikile, nasty Naledi, demonic Dango, and Hamas-supporting Imtiaz Suleiman. Their time is coming.
