Pirate's Cove

This was not quite the response anyone was expecting

European Parliament bans Iranian diplomats to avoid ‘legitimising the regime’

All the Iranian diplomats and representatives will be banned from the European Parliament’s premises as a response to Iran’s crackdown on protesters, the Parliament’s president, Roberta Metsola, announced on Monday.

“This House will not aid in legitimising this regime that has sustained itself through torture, repression, and murder,” Metsola wrote on X.

The ban will apply to all the Parliament’s premises in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and will remain in place until revoked by another president’s decision.

What about the member states banning those diplomats?

In the meantime, the European Union is prepared to push for fresh sanctions on the country after the repression of the protesters.

Earlier on Monday, a European Commission spokesperson confirmed that Brussels was working on “new, more severe” sanctions against the Iranian regime using a “dedicated legal framework” to target individuals and entities accused of “serious human rights violations and abuses”.

Their yammering is decidedly calmer than against Israel when Israel said “ENOUGH!” after the big Hamas attack and started annihilating Gaza, with the EU going after Israel

When solidarity costs too much: Europe’s silence on Iran

Over the past year, Europe’s streets have been chock full of protesters. Hundreds of thousands have turned out in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and Brussels – demonstrating on behalf of Gaza. Parliaments have convened emergency sessions. Millions have signed petitions. Several governments have halted arms sales to Israel. For much of the time, Gaza has dominated Europe’s political discourse, particularly on the left.

Meanwhile, in Iran, something remarkable is unfolding. Women are tearing off their hijabs in open defiance. Students are facing down security forces. Workers are walking off the job. Protesters are being dragged to prison, tortured, and executed after trials in kangaroo courts. And Europe’s response? A few statements. Some vigils. NGO reports that barely make the news. Nothing remotely approaching the mobilization for Gaza.

This isn’t about compassion fatigue or lack of information. The images are there. The stories are brutal. The gap reveals something fundamental: certain causes carry an ideological cost, and that cost determines which struggles ignite mass solidarity.

In fairness, there have been a few decent sized demonstrations in European cities that are anti-Iran’s regime/pro-solidarity with the protesters, but, nothing close to the pro-Hamas ones. Those protests were led by all the Islamists in EU countries, of course, which is why we didn’t see the same in countries like, say, Poland.

The uprising in Iran checks every box that should matter to progressive Europeans. It targets a theocratic regime that subjugates women, censors thought, executes dissidents, and denies basic freedoms. The protesters in Iran demand exactly what the European left claims to defend as universal human rights: free speech, bodily autonomy, and the dignity of self-determination. By any measure, what is happening from Tehran to Iranian backwaters is a textbook liberation movement.

Yet it remains marginal in Europe’s political imagination. The reason is structural, not moral.

Iran is Israel’s primary ideological and military adversary. For decades, Tehran has funded Hamas and Hezbollah and built its regional strategy around confronting the Jewish state. This creates an uncomfortable reality: Israel and the Iranian protesters share, at minimum, a common adversary. Whether through intelligence cooperation, cyber operations, or simple geopolitical alignment, any weakening of the Iranian regime potentially serves Israeli interests.

That overlap – real or perceived – is precisely what makes the Iranian revolt so difficult to integrate into the current framework of the European left.

Is that true? There might be something too it.

Consider what each cause offers symbolically. Supporting Gaza reinforces moral identity, provides clear political positioning, produces a coherence of activism, and fits seamlessly into existing frameworks that rely on Western guilt and the rejection of colonialism. Supporting Iranian protesters, by contrast, requires condemning a regime that positions itself as “anti-imperialist,” complicates familiar geopolitical narratives, and creates potential alignment – even indirect – with Israeli interests. The cognitive dissonance and ideological ambivalence are too much to bear.

It’s worth reading the rest.