Western Anti-Westernism

For a while now I’ve been noticing something that feels a bit strange: a growing strain of anti-Western sentiment among people in the West itself. The current situation in Iran hasn’t created that feeling, but it has simply made it impossible for me to ignore.

Criticism of Western societies can often be healthy and necessary. But when criticism turns into a reflexive assumption that the West is always the primary villain, something has gone wrong.

It highlights something uncomfortable—that some ideas within political Islam and jihadist movements sit in direct conflict with the liberal values Western societies are built on. That shouldn’t be controversial. Yet judging by the public conversation, it clearly is.

The contradiction is this: many people who speak passionately about women’s rights, gay and trans rights, and freedom of expression suddenly become far more hesitant when the ideology violating those values calls itself anti-Western. There’s often an emphasis on being “politically correct”, which isn’t the same as being right, well-informed, or intellectually honest.

Since the strikes on Iran’s leadership, I’ve been struck by how confused the discussion has become, particularly among young, university-educated people who would normally identify as liberals, leftists, or progressives. I see plenty of activism online about Israel, Palestine, or the rise of domestic fascism, but many of the same people were strangely quiet when, just over a month ago, the Iranian regime was killing tens of thousands of its own protesters. When the regime in question is a theocracy that imprisons dissidents and enforces religious law through violence, the moral clarity suddenly fades.

During the 2022–2023 Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, human rights organisations reported that at least 551 protesters were killed, including 68 children, and more than 22,000 people were arrested.

This was not a minor disturbance, but a violent suppression of the very values Western activists claim to defend.

Why does this happen?

Why is it that the standards people apply to Western societies suddenly become much harder to apply when the perpetrators are regimes that define themselves in opposition to the West?

One possibility is that some people have become so accustomed to criticising Western societies and their own political philosophies that they struggle to apply the same moral standards elsewhere. When the West is the villain, the language of human rights comes very easily. When an anti-Western regime is the perpetrator, that same moral clarity disappears.

The deeper problem, I think, is that many educated Westerners struggle to take religious fanaticism seriously on its own terms. They are comfortable talking about structural injustice, historical grievance, and Western power, but far less comfortable admitting that some people really do believe profoundly illiberal things, and act on those beliefs. But this way of looking at the world often overlooks the power of ideology. It assumes that violence must ultimately be a reaction to Western actions, rather than something driven by beliefs people themselves hold and take seriously.

At a certain point, this stops being nuance and starts becoming a refusal to see what is plainly in front of you.

There is also an obvious double standard here.

When a white supremacist or neo-Nazi commits violence and explicitly states his motives, we take him at his word. When he cites a manifesto, we treat the manifesto as a causal factor. But when a jihadist explains his actions in explicitly religious terms, many otherwise educated people suddenly become reluctant to believe that religion has anything to do with it. We grant the white supremacist the agency of his convictions, while we treat the jihadist as if he is merely a puppet of his circumstances.

There is a profound irony here: in an attempt to avoid sounding “imperialist,” Western activists often end up silencing the very voices in the Middle East who are pleading for the world to recognise the theological nature of their oppression. To treat these ideologies as mere “reactions to the West” is to deny these people their own agency and their own struggle.

Many of the most courageous critics of political Islam today are Muslims themselves—journalists, activists, and dissidents who risk imprisonment or death for defending secular government and individual liberty.

The protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini showed just how many Iranians reject their system. Women cutting their hair in protest were not calling for Western domination. They were asking for something much simpler: dignity.

It is a tragedy that the global solidarity which briefly burned for her has, for many, been extinguished by a refusal to name the ideology that killed her.

Part of the hesitation to criticise Islam, I understand. People are worried they’ll be interpreted as hostile toward Muslims as people. Nobody wants to be labelled “Islamophobic”. But the term “Islamophobia” is often used in a way that creates a category error.

Yet this fear of being labelled often shuts down open and honest conversation about something that clearly matters: the ideological motivations behind movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and other jihadist groups.

This reluctance becomes even harder to understand when one considers that between roughly 80% and 95% of the victims of Islamist terrorism over the past decade have been Muslims living in Muslim-majority countries. To remain silent about the ideology is to remain silent about the primary cause of death for the people you claim to protect from “Islamophobia”.

And it’s important to be very clear here. Criticising jihadism is not the same thing as criticising Muslims as people. Any sort of bigotry against Muslims, or any group for that matter, is unacceptable and contrary to the very values of freedom and tolerance that are fundamental to the West.

In fact, the people with the most at stake in confronting jihadist ideology are Muslims themselves, particularly those who reject the weaponisation of their religion for authoritarian control or violence. And it’s also true that no one has suffered more from politicised strains of Islam and the terrorism that follows than Muslims themselves.

Defending the rights of Muslims to live free from bigotry is a liberal prerequisite; defending the right of a theocratic ideology to be exempt from criticism is a liberal surrender.

The conflict here isn’t just geopolitical. It’s ideological. Liberal societies are built on ideas like freedom of expression, secular governance, gender equality, and the rule of law. The political theology governing Iran rejects each of these principles.

The clerical regime in Tehran is not simply conservative or traditional. It is a brutally repressive theocracy. This is not a misunderstood political system. It is a dictatorship justified through religious authority. If liberal values mean anything, they cannot be applied selectively. The same principles Western liberals invoke when criticising their own societies must apply everywhere—including the people living under regimes like the one in Tehran.

If those values are truly universal, they must apply to everyone—not only when it is politically convenient.