Iran’s supreme leader has been enjoying himself lately on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform. In one post, he delighted at pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses; in another, it was someone waving the flag of Hezbollah, his proxy militia in Lebanon. Here was proof, said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that even in the Great Satan itself the world is waking to the evils of America and Israel, and backing his “resistance” movement against oppression.

Khamenei’s gloating is understandable; he’s surely right about the damage that the war is causing to the international reputations of the US and Israel. But his hypocrisy is mind-melting. One of the great ironies of the war in Gaza is that it has given a free pass for repression to one of the world’s ugliest regimes — Khamenei’s.

Iran’s 85-year-old leader has, of course, been leading chants of death to America and Israel since long before he reached the pinnacle of power, in 1989. His government became a key supplier of cash and weapons to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, President Bashir al-Assad in Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and a rash of militias in Iraq. They back Iran in wanting to oust the US and Israel from the Middle East.

These groups are also murderous toward their own populations. At home in Iran, Khamenei’s Islamist regime is increasingly unpopular, as attested by years of rolling street protests and record low turnout at the last presidential election, in which no regime opponent was allowed to stand. Rule by fear and repression has only intensified since Hamas invited Israel’s invasion of Gaza, by attacking Kibbutzes with calculated savagery, last October.

The regime carried out 834 executions in 2023, up 43% over the previous year, as the pace increased from two executions per day before Oct. 7 — when Hamas triggered the Gaza war — to three to four per day afterward, according to Iran Human Rights, a nonprofit that tracks Iran’s use of the death penalty. Amnesty International’s count was slightly higher. More recently, the religious police, briefly cowed in 2022 by the scale of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, have returned to the streets to crack down on women who wear their hair uncovered, or are otherwise “improperly” attired.

The methods that Khamenei’s security forces used to suppress those protests included killing hundreds and arresting thousands. For a while the world was seized with outrage at the sight of women and girls getting arrested, or in some cases beaten or even killed, for refusing to dress the way a regime of aging male religious fundamentalists thought appropriate.

But that was before Gaza seemed to suck away all available indignation, whether at the brutalizing of women in Iran, the killing or deliberate starvation of as many as 600,000 people in Ethiopia’s Tigray province or the 8 million displaced by war and now threatened with famine in Sudan.

The social media channels used by those active in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement went suddenly dark in the days after Hamas struck and Israel began its retaliation. They’ve resumed since, but the attention – especially from the West – never really returned.

“It’s the government’s aim to do this, to completely kill the movement and get the entire world fixated on Gaza. In the meantime, they have been arresting girls who still go out in the street without a headscarf, and executing people,’’ says Koushna Navabi, an Iran-born artist in London who was driving a poster campaign to raise awareness across Europe. “Even we ourselves went quiet.”

It isn’t only Iran that’s benefiting from the horrors of Gaza to bury their own gruesome records of slaughter and repression. Its friends in the so-called axis of resistance are too. From 2007 until last October, Hamas ran Gaza alone. Its rule was marked by summary executions of Palestinian opponents, repression and the criminalization of same-sex relations.When I see “Free Gaza” placards on US campuses, I can only ask, from whom? The Israel Defense Forces, for sure, but Palestinians also need liberation from Hamas. Yes, they won a round of legislative elections by 45% to 41% in 2006, but the group then seized executive power in a bloody coup and never had a vote since. What polling we have suggests the war has boosted Hamas’s standing in Gaza, which is hardly surprising, but also that given an alternative to the current crop of Hamas and Palestinian Authority leaders, Gaza’s voters would choose it.

Assad’s crimes seem forgotten, but they included the use of chemical weapons and barrel bombs dropped on his own people, as well as torture, execution and ethnic cleansing on an industrial scale. Hezbollah has used terrorist tactics such as suicide bombing, assassination and abduction to achieve its war aims. Its arsenal of rockets and missiles is entirely devoted to hitting Israel, an obsession that has brought Lebanon as a whole close to ruin.

In Yemen, the Houthis – an Islamist militia now basking in praise across the Middle East for their attacks on international shipping, ostensibly in protest at Israel’s killing of innocent Palestinians – press thousands of children into military service. According to the Women’s Coalition for Peace in Yemen, the Iran-backed militia also was responsible for 1,893 incidents of kidnapping, torture and rape against women from 2017 to 2022. Other reports have documented hundreds of forced disappearances and dozens of deaths in detention. That’s quite apart from the Houthi contribution to the 377,000-plus people that the United Nations estimates to have died by 2022, as a result of its war against government forces backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. None of this aims to belittle the suffering in Gaza, or to excuse Israeli actions, or indeed US examples of hypocrisy. Rather than an exercise in “whataboutism,” it’s meant as an appeal to not treat this conflict as a simple tale of good guys and bad guys, colonial oppressors and the oppressed. There certainly are innocent victims — far too many of them. But these are the Palestinian and Israeli non-combatants who have been killed, maimed, raped or forced from their homes. For the rest, there are no heroes to be found here. It is a rogues gallery of ruthlessly cynical ideologues using Gaza to cloak their own long record of crimes against humanity.

____

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.