The people’s uprising in Iran is a rejection of religious extremism | Opinion

What is unfolding in Iran is not merely a revolt against a repressive Islamic regime. It is also a reckoning with how moral language has been hollowed out — how outrage became performative and authoritarianism learned to disguise itself as resistance.

That reckoning is felt here across the United States, where members of the Iranian diaspora watch events unfold with fear, grief and clarity. Many have family inside Iran and know people imprisoned, exiled or killed. Many carry a visceral frustration: that solidarity is claimed in their name while their voices are talked over or ignored.

For decades, much of Western discourse has relied on a familiar shortcut: casting the West as the permanent oppressor while framing everyone else as victims beyond agency. Rooted in selective postcolonial readings and reinforced by Cold War anti-Americanism, this framework does not clarify injustice — it polices it, deciding where outrage is permitted and which crimes are explained away.

Iranians disrupt this binary.

When figures such as musician Roger Waters recycled this script recently minimizing Islamist tyranny, Iranians rejected it outright — the moral alibi no longer works.

Here is a society ruled by those who share its religion, language and history — yet it produces executions, gender and religious apartheid, mass imprisonment and a state sustained by fear. During the most recent unrest alone, more than 36,500 Iranians were killed by their own government, according to human rights monitors. There is no foreign occupier to expel — only governance and its catastrophic failure.

This was no accident. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded by Ruhollah Khomeini, who fused religion with state power through Velayat-e Faqih — a doctrine that justified clerical supremacy as divine authority — and paired it with annihilationist hostility toward Israel as a marker of its revolutionary legitimacy in the 1960s. This framework did not remain confined to Iran: Groups such as Hezbollah were founded on the same doctrine, pledging allegiance to Iran’s Supreme Leader. Within this logic dissent became heresy, execution purification and cross-border violence solidarity.

Iranian protesters are not trying to reform that inheritance. They are rejecting it outright.

Inside Iran, this ideology is enforced through violence. Outside Iran, it is sustained through what political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann called the “spiral of silence” — the process by which fear of social punishment drives self-censorship until dominant narratives masquerade as consensus. In this climate, Western discourse rewards moral performance, recasts authoritarian regimes as victims of Western “imperialism” while erasing other imperial histories such as the Ottomans and Arab Islamist colonial imperialism refusing to recognize Iranians as political actors with clear judgment, intent and a demand for regime change. Within this victim–rescuer–oppressor framework, prestige accrues to those who perform outrage, insulation is extended to power and those risking their lives are rendered invisible.

The consequences are visible. Democracies are scrutinized relentlessly, while tyrannies are indulged. Outrage is constant against Israel and the West, yet muted when authoritarian regimes — from China and Russia to the Islamic Republic — massacre their own populations. More than 50 Muslim-majority states have remained largely silent because Iran’s rejection of political Islam threatens a decades-old regional order built on grievance and repression.

Reducing Iranians’ nearly half-century struggle to a foreign plot — CIA, Mossad or regime change — erases their civil rights movements, the agency of women burning compulsory hijabs, workers striking and families mourning those they lost in their own struggle demanding regime change.

Iranians are not asking permission. They are unapologetically demanding secularism, are openly pro-Western and explicit in their rejection of political Islam as governance. They are choosing accountability over victimhood, liberty over slogans and peace over permanent rage — including peace with Israel.

For Kansas and Kansas City, solidarity means listening to Iranians, not narrating their struggle for them. A free Iran would not only liberate Iranians — it would weaken Islamist radicalism and strengthen the foundations of free societies everywhere.

Iranians have fought for regime change for decades. Standing with them is not partisan. It is a matter of moral clarity.

History does not move on outrage alone. It moves when people refuse to live inside lies.

Azzie (Azadeh) Amani-Taleshi is founder of PishkeshMarket.com and board member of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit American Public Square.

This story was originally published January 30, 2026 at 2:34 PM with the headline "The people’s uprising in Iran is a rejection of religious extremism | Opinion."