The Women Of Iran Are Braver Than The Institutions Meant To Protect Them

Greta Thunberg. AOC. Fill in the name of every Hollywood female celebrity who posted “Free Palestine” and expressed outrage over the killing of women and children on their social media accounts. Golden Globes. United Nations. Doctors Without Borders. Leftist activists. All virtually silent. But the voices of the Iranian men and women in the streets throughout Iran, fighting for justice, equality, freedom from oppression, and against a religious zealot regime silencing their every move? Their voices echo.

From the women setting fire to images of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while lighting their cigarettes, their faces on clear display, to the bloodied elderly woman shouting, “I’m not afraid, I’ve been dead for 47 years,” the bravery of these Iranian women is a direct confrontation with the emptiness and fecklessness of the many international organizations that claim to fight for women, yet remain silent when women’s suffering goes against their political agendas.

While the women of Iran fight against the regime, the greatest failure of the international community is not ignorance of Iranian women’s suffering, but the deliberate decision to look away when condemning it is politically inconvenient.

I’m writing this from an apartment complex in New York City, with direct sightlines to the United Nations (UN), and it strikes me as odd that only a few months ago, world leaders convened here, all echoing the same message: “We have been ineffective in our mission.” But I purport that they are beyond ineffective and have reached utter failure. The UN was established to prevent further world wars, to protect the vulnerable, to stand up against slavery, and to protect human rights, yet China and Russia, two of the most notable violators of those rights, still retain permanent seats on the Security Council.

The latest unrest in Iran has led to reports of between 12,000 and 20,000 deaths.

Iran sat for years on the Human Rights Council while obliterating the rights of humans. Who chaired the 2025 Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW)? Saudi Arabia. Not exactly the stalwart nation for the freedom of women. So, are we surprised that when given the edict to stand up for women in nations where true oppression occurs, like Iran, the UN provides only empty statements and the removal of Iran’s seat on the UNCSW, a seat no serious body would have ever given them in the first place? What wars have been stopped? What vulnerable populations have been protected?

To those who dismiss the UN’s selective moral outrage, the latest unrest in Iran has led to reports of between 12,000 and 20,000 deaths. To put this into context, this is a daily genocide rate that, if true, surpasses the daily death rate of the Holocaust. Getting confirmation on the death toll has been difficult since the regime decided to cut off communications with the outside world. Yet whether the deaths are 2,000 or 20,000, the scale and speed of the killings should have triggered emergency global action. Instead, it triggered silence, or pushback from major media outlets calling for us to wait until we have the facts, a far cry from the way these establishments have reacted to other conflicts around the world.

Two weeks after the massacre of Iranians began, the UNCSW had not posted a single statement in solidarity with the women of Iran, likely because calling out radical Islam is politically incorrect. Responding to the UN’s repeated failures, in a move that was widely criticized by those on the Left, President Trump directed his staff to withdraw from the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, along with 31 others, citing them as organizations that “advance globalist agendas over U.S. priorities, or that address important issues inefficiently or ineffectively such that U.S. taxpayer dollars are best allocated in other ways to support the relevant missions.”

For the women of Iran, unjust treatment has been a foot on their chest since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised that by overthrowing the Shah, an Islamic government would ensure national independence and freedom for all citizens, which was appealing to the women of Iran. Thus, Iranian women played a crucial role during the 1979 Revolution against the monarchy. They were fighting for women’s rights under the auspices of the Communist Party and aligned themselves with Khomeini. However, the clerical leaders of the Islamic revolution manipulated the plights of the women and Communists against the monarchy to overthrow the Shah and erase the very rights supported by the monarchy in the first place.

In the last 47 years under the rule of Ruhollah Khomeini and subsequently Ali Khamenei, women have experienced a complete degradation of their place in society.

After Khomeini’s victory, women in Iran were subjected to subhuman status: compulsory hijab covering, even for non-Muslim women; limitations on the jobs they could hold; the loss of divorce rights and of their children; and a complete silencing of their voices in government. The end result of Khomeini’s victory, and the ousting of the Shah, was mass executions and imprisonment of the same people Khomeini used to secure his victory, including moderate clerics who believed in his message but detested his practices. Since 1979, the Ayatollah and the Islamic regime have failed the people of Iran, especially its women, at every turn.

Once in power, Khomeini made it clear that women were of no value to him or the religious zealots he led. In photos of Iran before the revolution in 1979, while under the leadership of the Shah, Iranian society was not perfect, but it did look much like modern America. The Islamic regime has since reversed all progress. Having grown up in the Middle East, I can tell you firsthand that Iranians are brilliant, hard-working, modern people. Iran is a society built on the blending of many cultures, communities, ethnicities, and religions.

Pre-revolution, women were free to wear modern clothing and were taught in school, and women served in the Senate and as female judges. A completely equitable society certainly didn’t exist, but in the last 47 years under the rule of Ruhollah Khomeini and subsequently Ali Khamenei, women have experienced a complete degradation of their place in society. Yet the world stands silent for fear of upsetting and offending Muslims around the world, many of whom also detest what the regime is doing to the women of Iran. If Islam is a religion of peace, and Khamenei’s thugs are not practicing the version of Islam that represents how many Muslims around the world feel, then international bodies should have no issue calling out the horrors of the regime, because this isn’t representative of Islam, right?

There are hundreds of quotes from both Khomeini and Khamenei that underscore the way women are considered tools for the men of the regime. Do a few Google searches and your face will burn in humiliation. Quotes like those, coupled with brutality, have pushed the women of Iran to a breaking point, as in the case of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was murdered by the Iranian “morality police” in 2022 for the simple crime of not covering her head properly. Following Amini’s murder, the women of Iran were rife with anger, sparking protests from the Iranian “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in which hundreds of protesters were killed. But again, where was the outcry from the rest of the world?

The Islamic Iran Participation Front women’s branch issued a statement on the 36th anniversary of the revolution, stating, “We were not supposed to have conditions in which our daughters and women worry about acid thrown on their faces in the alleys and streets.” Islam purports to value women above all. Many argue the validity of that statement and how it’s applied throughout societies, but what is not debatable is that if women were not heavily involved in these protests, this momentum for freedom would be absent. The reality is, no one in the IRGC wants to shoot their wife, daughter, or niece, but thanks to Khamenei and his theocrats, that is unfortunately where we are.

When there is a society in the East fighting for the same values we hold in the West, we fail to live out our own values by ignoring their plight.

Having grown up in the Middle East, what bothers me the most is thinking of the girls I went to school with who now live in Iran. Not only have they and their families been subjected to the tortures of this regime, they are now also subjected to the silence of the “feminists” who scream from the rooftops about the injustices that occur in the West against women, yet offer no words about the plight of the women in Iran. In discussing this with a friend, after years of seeing posts about Palestine on her profile, she stated, “We have domestic problems to deal with; the rest of the world can wait.”

The plight of the women in Iran is enough for me to state that we can’t wait. But my response to that is this: when the values of the regime that abuses the women in Iran also threaten our sovereignty in the West, can it really wait? Wait for what? Until the regime develops a weapon? Strengthens its alliances with China and Russia? Until the regime destroys our allies in the Middle East who do not agree with their principles or tactics?

The revolution in Iran is a complex topic, but the hope for a bright future is in the hands of the lions and lionesses of Iran. As an Iranian fellow for the Hamilton Society, I have studied at length the plights of the Iranian people. As an American, it's easy for me to state, “That issue 7,000 miles away? Not my issue.” But when there is a society in the East fighting for the same values we hold in the West, we fail to live out our own values by ignoring their plight. Women in the West have the influence, power, and resources to keep a light shining on the women of Iran. This is about revolution, freedom from oppression, and keeping radical Islam from destroying the freedoms that women in the West are so quick to take for granted. In the meantime, yet again, all eyes are on the United States and the role that we will, or will not, play in keeping the Islamic regime at bay amid the failures of the international bodies who claim to exist for this very reason.

Taylor Hathorn is a visiting fellow with the Independent Women’s Center for American Safety and Security.