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I proudly join in solidarity with my fellow musicians, entertainers, and actors supporting those fighting for freedom in Iran!
Of course, I jest.
There is no one doing that. No one spending even a dime of their celebrity currency on behalf of the beleaguered Iranian masses now marching for deliverance from a murderous regime.
We live in a moment of relentless moral commentary. Causes are amplified. Injustices are ranked, sorted, and displayed. And yet, in the face of one of the clearest cases of state repression in the modern world, the cultural class most fluent in the language of justice has gone conspicuously silent. One can’t know for certain, but it seems to me that most celebrity reactions are of the knee-jerk variety. A kind of shout-out that is carefully considered only insofar as it will be well received by an adoring audience.
For over four decades, the Iranian regime has imprisoned dissidents, executed protesters, persecuted women, silenced journalists, intimidated artists, and executed people for homosexuality. These facts are neither hidden nor contested. Executions are announced. Sentences are public. The repression is systematic and ongoing. And yet, the voices that have spoken most stridently against Israel and U.S. “imperialism” have suddenly lost their voices.
This silence cannot be explained by fatigue. Hollywood has not grown quieter about Ukraine, Gaza, climate change, or domestic politics. Nor can it be explained by uncertainty. The Iranian regime is not morally ambiguous. It is a theocratic authoritarian state that enforces religious conformity through violence and fear. One does not need a briefing to recognize oppression when women are beaten for refusing to veil.
So why the silence?
Simply put, opposing the Iranian regime has become inconvenient. And it may not be incidental that Iran’s leadership has, for decades, pledged itself to the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state—a reality that renders condemnation of Tehran uncomfortably adjacent to defending Israel.
Public moral discourse in elite cultural spaces has collapsed into a single axis: oppressor and oppressed, empire and resistance. Within this framework, Israel and the United States are assigned the role of primary villain, and any force positioned against them benefits from a kind of moral insulation. Iran, despite its internal brutality, occupies a strange protected space, not because it is admired, but because criticizing it risks appearing to align oneself, however indirectly, with the assumed evils of the West. That alignment is now suspect.
This same pattern revealed itself starkly after October 7. In the wake of mass murder, rape, and kidnapping, one might reasonably have expected unwavering universal condemnation. And yet, here too, the silence was striking.
Many of the same cultural figures who speak readily about injustice could not bring themselves to say a word about the hostages. Their captivity did not register as a moral emergency. Their release, when it occurred, was not celebrated. There were no statements of relief, no acknowledgments of suffering, no insistence, however minimal, that kidnapping civilians is wrong regardless of context.
This was not ignorance. It was purposeful omission. Silence was the safer bet. The same logic now applies to Iran.
To speak forcefully in support of Iranian protesters today is to risk being accused of laundering imperial narratives, advancing Western talking points, or erasing “context.” Silence, by contrast, carries no cost. In some circles, it carries approval.
This leads to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion: it is as unfashionable to support Iranian protesters as it was to insist on the basic humanity of Israeli hostages.
Not because either cause lacks justice, but because both disrupt a carefully curated moral story. Iranian protesters are resisting a regime that defines itself as anti-Western. Israeli hostages are victims whose existence complicates the reduction of the conflict to a single axis of virtue and vice. In both cases, acknowledging their suffering requires abandoning moral monoculture in favor of something older and harder: applying moral distinction rather than performing the latest culturally acceptable gestures.
Celebrity activism, despite its language of courage and conscience, is largely governed by social incentives. Public figures speak most readily when the moral lines are clear, the audience receptive, and the reputational risk minimal. They avoid causes that invite ambiguity or threaten social standing. This is both a personal indictment and a structural reality. Celebrity culture is a status economy, and status depends on remaining within the bounds of acceptable belief.
At present, condemning Israel or the United States is widely believed to confer social capital. Condemning Iran does not. Acknowledging hostages does not.
The result is a quiet inversion. Iranian women who refuse compulsory veiling, students who chant for freedom, artists who risk prison for a line of poetry, and civilians abducted from their homes all find themselves strangely sidelined. Their suffering is real, but it is not useful. Their humanity is undeniable, but it does not flatter the ideological needs of the moment. And so it is set aside, not angrily, but efficiently.
Silence, in moments like this, is not neutral. It is a position. And it communicates something unmistakable.
It tells the world that solidarity is selective. That some victims are too inconvenient to acknowledge. It suggests that suffering alone is insufficient to warrant concern, that it must first pass an ideological test.
Those risking their lives in Iran understand this. So do the families of hostages who waited in silence for the world to care. They know they were seen—and passed over. And they will remember it long after the slogans of the present have faded.
Silence, after all, has a long half-life.
Peter Himmelman
