There are few spectacles more morbidly predictable than the Western left’s reaction to the death of a tyrant. Cue the wistful obituaries, the chin-stroking essays about “complicated legacies," the faint sob of moral confusion dressed up as deep insight. When Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - a murderous tyrant who ruled through fear, crushed dissent, and sanctified violence - finally left this world, much of the press didn’t sigh in relief, let alone praise the good Lord, but reached for the softest adjectives money could buy. The result was a fugue of delusion: compassion for oppressors, pity for the pitiless, and a nauseating nostalgia for despotism.
Consider the headlines.
-The Washington Post cooed about Khamene as an “avuncular figure" with a “bushy beard and easy smile."
-The New York Times reduced a four-decade murderous theocracy to the work of a “hard-line cleric."
-Meanwhile, actress Jane Fonda - forever seeking her next photo-op as our geriatric globetrotting moralizer - worried aloud about American military responses while sparing not a syllable for the Iranians hanged, beaten, or disappeared under Khamenei’s reign - let alone the thousands murdered by his global reign of Islamic terror.
In stark but welcome contrast, a Sky News anchor, bucking the polite ritual of handwringing, erupted on air to point out the obscenity of this posturing: the old tyrant was no misunderstood monk; he was a killer cloaked in clerical robes.
This groupthink reflex has become the left’s religion. Evil is never fully condemned, only “contextualized." Brutality is filtered through psychoanalysis. Terror becomes “resistance." Their empathy, once a moral force, now drapes itself over murderers like a silk shroud of post-modern “conversation" with the vile. This isn’t compassion - it’s cowardice masquerading as intellect. It’s a moral hall of mirrors: cruelty dressed up as complexity, fanaticism reframed as nuance. The left that once championed free thought now pens poetic obituaries for despots and writes morally-neutral love sonnets to regimes that would silence them first if they had a chance.
And then there’s Britain - ever the courteous bystander to catastrophe. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval for a “specific and limited defensive effort" to destroy Iranian missiles came out like a nervous apology to a world whose disapproval he fears, not a statement of resolve. The hesitant hand of Westminster, palsied by reflexive pandering under the highbrow guise of restraint, dares permit the use of its bases only for “defensive" moves - as though to strike evil “first" would stain the nation’s moral gloves. One can almost see the cabinet’s performance: a chorus of furrowed brows and tepid courage, rehearsing the language of restraint and virtue over afternoon tea while history waits impatiently for someone to act.
Moral clarity used to be the left’s pride - opposing empire and tyranny with genuine conviction. But now, they genuflect before murderers who sport an “easy smile," whisper apologies to theocrats, and lick-polish the boots of monsters in the name of understanding. The West’s progressive moralists have become curators of a perverse museum - one where cruelty is painted as courage, cowardice as compassion, and every mirror reflects only their own trembling ersatz virtue back at them.
Those like the New York Times who semantically swoon over a mass-murderer’s love for poetry, will forever be incapable of appreciating the poetic justice meted out to him by the iron fist of American and Israeli moral clarity. But we do.
Daniel Winston is a therapist and writer living in Northern Samaria, Israel and can be reached at DanielWinston.com.