On Sunday, UN Secretary General António Guterres posted that he was “shocked by reports of violence & excessive use of force by the Iranian authorities against protesters resulting in deaths & injuries.” Indeed, the head of the world’s largest diplomatic organization apparently was so “shocked” that he was struck dumb for two full weeks as millions of Iranians risked their lives in the streets of every important city in their country to demand an end to the tyranny of the Islamic Republic, which has ruled Iran as an oppressive theocracy since 1979.

Guterres, the socialist former prime minister of Portugal, shares his long and seemingly awe-struck silence with leftist media outlets at home and abroad, virtually every left-leaning NGO in the world, most voices in the international human rights industry, Western colleges and universities, the pro-Palestinian movement, Hollywood celebrities, debased Eurocrats who squandered their Christmas holidays in high dudgeon over a handful of their fellows being banned from travel to the United States, and others who, one might presume, believe that human rights are, as the UN once said, “universal.”

So why are the principled paladins of the international left mum about Iran? Are they limited and ignorant? Do they care too much about other humanitarian causes to fret over those outside their normal ambit? Do they believe that Muslims who are oppressed by other Muslims deserve less attention than Muslims who are oppressed by governments of other faiths? Are they suffering from compassion fatigue? All of these are possible reasons for their silence, but there is one overall factor uniting these disparate leftists who explode in visceral anger at the slightest hint of iniquity in a Minnesota daycare fraud investigation, but maintain this long and conspicuous silence as machine gunned bodies have piled up in Tehran.

Simply put, what is happening in Iran is a complete and humiliating refutation of the left and nearly everything for which it stands. They have nothing to say to the Iranians or for their hypocritical selves.

Consider the facts on the ground. Iran’s brave protestors are demonstrating against the Islamic Republic, a horrific regime that is held sacrosanct by the left because of their overlapping anti-Western ideologies. Iran’s attempted resistance to Western “imperialism” makes its tyranny acceptable to the left. Iran, in their view, may not be perfect, but it has rejected Western values and replaced them with third-world values which the international left values up to and sometimes beyond the moment its adherents are forced to live under them.

The mullahs in Tehran may be murderous, but their regime supports and finds common cause with America’s enemies from Havana to Beijing. To the international left, that exemplifies great valor, no matter what the Iranian regime does to its own people and no matter what it costs them in material or cultural terms. Any protest of such a regime is ipso facto a protest of a leading source of anti-American animus that runs strong on both cultural and strategic levels. As was the case with international communism during the strange and brutal life of the Soviet Union, for the left protesting the mullahs—no matter how gruesome their horror—is either totally unacceptable or simply something that it would prefer to dismiss as “complicated” in the interests of global anti-American and anti-Western “solidarity.”

The spirit of the protests themselves forms an even more vivid picture of rejection.

The international left elevates Islam to the point that any criticism of the religion or its followers is dismissed, castigated, and in some cases—especially in the UK and Europe—even criminalized as “Islamophobia,” “hate speech,” “discrimination,” and, in a recent trend, even “blasphemy” under laws once meant to protect Christian faiths. Yet in the streets of Iran today, the protestors are demanding a secular state while beating up despised clerics, torching mosques, burning Korans and Shiite prayerbooks, and announcing that they are not Muslims but rather Persians who were long ago conquered and oppressed by Muslims.

Imagine what would happen to any Ivy League apologist for Islam who instructed them that they are wrong about the religion of peace and submission to God’s will. Indeed, an increasing number of Iranians, especially young people, are now converting to Christianity as a personal act of protest.

The international left despises traditional monarchies, considering them relics of feudalism and, in the developing world, a shameful legacy of elite collaboration with colonialism. Yet the protests in Iran are overwhelmingly monarchist in sentiment, with millions of people chanting the Persian equivalent of “Vive le Roi!”, flying the flag of Iran’s prerevolutionary monarchy, and calling for the return of the Shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, to the exclusion of any other possible opposition leader or organization, including Iranians who are affiliated with the international left. Try explaining that national mood in a rational conversation with a self-satisfied “No Kings” marcher in the comfort of his suburban blue state home.

The international left commits itself to “non-violence”—except when it doesn’t—but in Iran, the protestors are ignoring the received Gandhian wisdom by storming and burning government buildings, killing and injuring security police, marking the homes of regime officials for future retribution, and chanting that they cannot truly be free until the mullahs lie dead. To what can only be the utter bafflement of your standard Trader Joe’s shopper, they’re not exactly hippies wearing sandals and holding candles while babbling about a river and a sea they cannot find on a map.

If there is someone the international left hates more than anyone—even as it claims to abjure all forms of hate—it is, of course, Donald Trump. Yet the Iranian protestors are calling on Trump at every opportunity to save them from their hateful rulers—including with overwhelming military force of at least the magnitude he unleashed last June, when he devastated Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Videos you probably will not see on British television (or what Iranians gathered in London are now deriding as “Ayatollah BBC”) show protestors renaming streets after our president. They seem quite unconcerned about the Epstein files.

And finally, what international leftist doesn’t hate tobacco and its many uses? How horrified they must be to see one of the Iranian revolution’s most iconic video shorts, which shows a pretty, young Persian lass nonchalantly using a flaming photo of Ayatollah Khamenei to light her cigarette. As the Iranian regime goes up in smoke, so are the fallen values and hypocritical ideals of the international left.