Christy Walsh ✍ Irish far-left politics likes to present itself as the moral opposition . . .
. . . anti‑imperialist without compromise, pro‑uprising by instinct, committed to gender equality, and internationalist by self‑description.
People Before Profit (PBP) gives this posture institutional weight because it holds Dáil seats and helps shape protest culture. On the fringe, Saoradh express the same instincts with fewer euphemisms.
The problem is not that Irish left condemn Western abuses. The problem is the optical defect: sharp moral vision when the oppressor is Western‑aligned, and selective blindness when the oppressor belongs to the anti‑West camp. If you want to see it cleanly, line up what is said about Palestine and Hamas with what is said, or not said with comparable urgency or qualification, about Iran’s repression of popular protest, and about Russia’s imperial war on Ukraine. The pattern looks less like universalism and more like a hierarchy of victims.
Palestine Is Not Hamas, And Liberation Is Not Islamism
Islamism is a political ideology that subordinates individual liberty to clerical authority and treats dissent, minority rights, freedom of conscience and women’s equality as negotiable. Where it governs, it usually collides with basic freedoms. Islamist movements are not synonymous with anti‑colonial liberation movements. Their programme is often theocratic and authoritarian, which places them in conflict with universal human rights, including women’s rights, freedom of belief, and political pluralism. Islamism is the coercive use of religion.
Palestinian self‑determination and a freedom struggle against occupation are legitimate political goals. The rights at stake do not depend on whether Hamas exists. Palestinians have the right to safety, equality, political rights, and an end to collective punishment.
But it is precisely here that much Irish activism commits its first analytical and moral error: collapsing Palestinian liberation into the political project of Hamas and Islamism. Hamas is not ‘Palestinian resistance’ in the abstract. It is an Islamist organisation whose goals are not Palestinian freedom. When the Irish left treats Hamas as the authentic or inevitable expression of Palestinian struggle, it launders an Islamist programme into liberation language and recasts religious extremism as the legitimate voice of Palestinians, including Christian and LGBTQ Gazans. The left silences valid criticism of Islam by adopting terms like “Islamophobia” into their vocabulary.
This is not merely a theoretical point. It goes to the heart of what solidarity is supposed to mean. A consistent pro‑Palestinian position can and should defend Palestinian rights while refusing to romanticise, excuse, or rebrand Islamist human‑rights abuses and atrocities as “resistance”. When activists cannot hold these two thoughts at once, solidarity becomes factional allegiance rather than principle.
Iran: Resistance Versus Repression
A large current in UK and Irish pro‑Palestinian politics frames Hamas as “legitimate resistance” that may fight back by any means necessary. October 7 is often handled as context, blowback, or the inevitable eruption of rage under occupation, rather than as a moral and political line. October 7 started as a well‑planned operation and descended into wanton terrorism because the goal was to spark Muslims around the world to attack Jews. Hamas atrocities are excused by whataboutary even when the victims are innocent Israelis and children.
That is the rhetorical move that matters, because it becomes portable. Once you learn to dissolve agency whenever the actor is in the “anti‑West” camp, you can dissolve almost anything.
Now place beside that rhetoric the Iranian “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising after Mahsa Amini’s death in custody. The protests were overwhelmingly non‑violent. Women, students, and workers marched, chanted, and defied compulsory veiling. Security forces responded with live ammunition, mass arrests, torture allegations, deaths in custody, and executions after flawed trials. If the moral doctrine supports popular struggle against oppression, Iran should have been a natural cause célèbre.
Yet this is where the cross‑eyed pattern appears. Violent Islamist militancy is elevated as “resistance” in Gaza, while non‑violent mass resistance in Iran is treated as secondary, awkward, or far less urgent to mobilise around. Treating armed theocratic violence as emancipatory while downplaying peaceful demonstrators shot in the streets is not a minor inconsistency. It is a collision between professed principles and real allegiances. We saw the left’s pattern of excusing a similar abusive and oppressive regime in Syria.
Support for Islamism differs from support for Palestinian liberation, which is a legitimate struggle. Left support for Hamas involves conscious blindness that sacrifices Gazan civilians to Islamism’s strategic goals. Hamas effectively strapped a suicide belt around the entire Gaza Strip, using Gaza as the fuse for a wider ideological war and not Palestinian freedom. When Irish activism fuses Palestine to Hamas, it does not strengthen Palestinian rights. It strengthens religious extremism and makes solidarity morally incoherent, and Iranian peaceful protest becomes an inconvenient contradiction. Self-determination struggles try to avoid civilian casualties; Hamas’ religious ideological war requires civilian casualties.
Gender Equality With A Blindfold
Irish left discourse advocates for gender equality unless Islamism is involved. Iran is the sharpest mirror because the uprising was triggered by the policing of women’s bodies by the morality police, and women were central to the protests against compulsory religious dress codes and gender oppression. The repression was not subtle or contested. It was a security state enforcing clerical power through violence.
If women’s liberation is a principle, then Iranian women resisting compulsory veiling should have been treated with the same moral clarity that Irish left activism claims for other causes. When gender equality is deployed with full force against one adversary but becomes hesitant or marginal when the oppressor is an anti‑West theocracy, the conclusion is unavoidable. The left overlooks gender inequality and other abuses because it is more committed to “anti‑West” resistance than to universal human rights.
The same point applies to minorities inside Iran. Kurdish, Baluchi, and other communities suffered disproportionately in protest crackdowns and long‑standing discrimination. An Irish left that makes anti‑racism central at home cannot plausibly bracket oppression abroad because the oppressor is useful against the West.
Workers’ Solidarity That Stops At Certain Borders
Irish left mobilisation leans heavily on trade‑union language and symbolism. Protests are dense with “solidarity” rhetoric. Yet Iran again exposes the selectivity. Labour activists and striking workers have faced detentions and harsh repression after protesting. If labour internationalism is real, Iranian workers and teachers facing a theocratic‑security dictatorship should not be an afterthought or expendable when “anti‑West” rhetoric is more important.
The same structural problem appears in how activists frame international law. On Gaza, Irish left rhetoric often invokes universal standards: collective punishment, war crimes, genocide claims, UN conventions, ICC referrals, diplomatic expulsions. Whatever one thinks of the exact legal characterisations, the rhetorical posture is universalist. But a universalist posture cannot coherently become selective when applied to Iran’s killings of protesters, torture in detention, and executions. If human‑rights law is universal, it travels. If it does not travel, it is not a standard. It is a weapon.
Ukraine And Russia, The Second Mirror Of Palestine
The Russia problem mirrors the Iran problem because it arises from the same “anti‑West” lens. In the UK, Stop the War‑style framing has often centred NATO expansion and “blocs,” sometimes sliding into narratives where Western policy becomes the primary culprit and Russia’s agency is contextualised into the background.
Similar impulses appear among the left, including a tendency to treat Ukraine as a proxy rather than a people resisting invasion, and to moralise primarily against NATO rather than Russia. The convenience of the left’s selective cross‑eyed view is stark here because it requires wilful blindness to Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression on a peaceful neighbour. Precisely the "imperialism" the left claims to oppose.
Set beside Palestine, the contradiction is sharp. Irish far‑left discourse demands self‑determination for Palestinians and insists that the dominated have a right to resist domination. Yet parts of the same milieu oppose military aid to Ukraine or frame Ukrainian defence as “escalation”, while treating Russian imperial acts as reactive or secondary. The left does not have a principled anti‑war ethic. It is a selective anti‑West ethic.
The rhetorical technique is also revealing. In Israel‑Palestine discourse, “both sides” framing is attacked as moral evasion because it obscures power and responsibility. The Left justify Russian atrocities as consequence of NATO provocations: Ukraine is an innocent party and not part of NATO. Symmetrical language becomes tolerable precisely where it disregards this unprovoked act of invasion. Invasion means invasion. The outcome is predictable: victims are downgraded whenever the oppressor is not Western‑aligned.
PBP are elected, visible, and influential in street politics. That creates a duty to be precise. PBP explicitly opposed €100 million in non-lethal military-mine sweepers, radar systems and anti-drone jamming devices to protect civilian population centres. When an organisation claims to champion self‑determination, gender equality, and workers’ rights as universal standards, its positions on Ukraine and Iran are not optional side‑issues. They are tests. If the emphasis repeatedly flows toward NATO‑bashing while the moral clarity reserved for Gaza is not sustained toward Russia’s aggression or Iran’s repression, the gap between principle and practice becomes political fact, not internet argument.
Anti‑West atrocities are rebranded as ‘anti‑imperialist blows,’ Islamist terror is dismissed as ‘propaganda’ or explained as difference in culture. Russia’s war framed as part of a “multipolar” resistance to Western power. In that form, the cross‑eyed logic is explicit. If it harms the West, it is resistance. If the West condemns it, it is propaganda. If the victim resists an anti‑West state, the victim’s cause becomes complicated, inconvenient, conditional, or ignored. Human rights are not universal where religious or cultural exceptions might apply. Groups like Saoradh show the endpoint of the same habit: universal human rights replaced by bloc loyalty, immoral support is framed as solidarity.
Viewing Gaza through the lens of the Troubles is emotionally resonant, but it is structurally flawed: the IRA was a secular nationalist movement, whereas Hamas -extremist religious ideology.
Three Explanations Account For The Pattern Of Contradictions
- First, politics is organised around US‑aligned versus US‑opposed states, with indulgence granted to the latter because they function as counterweights.
- Second, Islamist movements are miscast as progressive anti‑colonial forces, obscuring their religious extremism and turning critique into betrayal of the “anti‑imperialist” narrative.
- Third, Palestine/Gaza have close parallels with the Six Counties. But Iran’s internal struggle and Ukraine’s national defence do not fit as neatly into a simple coloniser‑colonised binary, so they receive less activist energy even when state violence is open and lethal.
A Hierarchy Of Victims
Hamas uses the legitimate Palestinian liberation struggle to piggyback religious extremism. The left collapses these categories, laundering Islamist ideology into liberation language and miscasting it as progressive anti-colonialism. Iranian women and workers resisting a theocratic police state deserve the same moral clarity routinely claimed elsewhere. Ukrainian civilians resisting annexation deserve the same self-determination principle invoked for Palestine.
Traditional Irish republicanism was always anti-imperialist and committed to self-determination. There is no consistent solidarity in supporting Islamist terror or Russian imperialism alongside it. Palestinian freedom must include freedom from Islamist extremism, liberation means nothing if it installs in Gaza the theocratic repression that Iranian women brave bullets to escape.
If the Irish far left wants to keep claiming moral leadership, the demand is simple. Apply the standard consistently. Condemn Iran’s repression with the same urgency used for Gaza. Treat Russian aggression as aggression, and treat Ukraine’s right to resist as the same principle you insist on elsewhere. If that cannot be done, the rhetoric has been exposed. It is not principled anti-imperialism. It is selective outrage.
For all the West’s faults and hypocrisies, the freedoms that make Irish and British protest politics possible are protected by liberal-democratic law. Those protections are precisely what authoritarian systems, including authoritarian Islamist regimes, suppress. It is morally indefensible for the left to enjoy those rights at home while minimising, excusing, or romanticising Russian and Iranian regimes abroad that crush them for others. The left exercises in Ireland freedoms (protest, speech, organisation) that would be extinguished under the regimes they defend or excuse. The left is not merely inconsistent - it practises moral hypocrisy.
⏩ Christy Walsh was stitched up by the British Ministry of Defence in a no jury trial and spent many years in prison as a result.
2020
