A warning from Britain’s Iranian diaspora

Walking through central London as part of the Free Iran protest movement a couple of Sundays ago, I kept noticing the faces of bystanders. There was certainly very little in the way of support. But equally, open hostility wasn’t the predominant response either. Many of the expressions were marked by something harder to discern – a kind of consternation, an ill-disposed bemusement, as though what was in front of them couldn’t quite be metabolised, not without a certain level of discomfort anyway.

The marchers, among them actual survivors of imprisonment and torture, were carrying the traditional Iranian lion-and-sun alongside the flags of America and Israel. They have been calling for the same freedom that Britain has, for the longest time, claimed to represent in the world. And yet there on the faces of onlookers was not recognition, but something else entirely.

I have spent a great deal of time with the Iranian diaspora. I have photographed them during their Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations in Golders Green, at the permanent encampment outside the Iranian Embassy in Knightsbridge, and at their Sunday protests on Whitehall, where they gather outside Downing Street, calling on the government to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). They are, in my experience, some of the most serious and clear-eyed people living in the UK at the moment. They have seen political Islam from the inside, not as a theoretical proposition but as a lived system of repression and coercion. A system that has disappeared friends, imprisoned family members and attempted to overwrite a truly great civilisation. The country of Hafez and Rumi has in their exile become a byword for extremist and authoritarian terror and a nation that is now ranked 145th out of 148 for the treatment of women. Some of these protesters literally have the scars.

Unusually for people coming from the part of the world they do, and increasingly Britain, these protesting Iranians appear to be largely free of anti-Semitism too. Not carefully managed about it or judiciously restrained. It just doesn’t seem to be there. When they speak of Jews and Israel, there is none of the loaded hesitation, the over-careful neutrality or the strained balancing act one detects in even the most educated and well-meaning of British liberals. These Iranians see Jews really as cousins. And not without good reason. The relationship between Persians and Jews is probably the oldest and most honourable in the Bible. Cyrus the Great, who put an end to the Babylonian captivity and sponsored the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, is the only non-Jew ever to receive the title, Mashiach (Messiah).

This Persian-Jewish bond was forged long before Christianity or Islam existed and continued into the modern era. During the time of the last Shah, Iran was among the first nations to recognise the state of Israel, and the Israeli airline, El Al, flew between Tel Aviv and Tehran almost daily. Something of that long-standing familial recognition has quietly re-emerged in the Iranian protest movement that has grown up in cities all across the West in recent months. Among Iranians and Jews there, one finds an ease and immediacy of understanding that requires no translation. They know what the other has experienced and there is no need to establish first principles.

The Islamic Republic, which took power after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, completed this inoculation. It made anti-Semitism central to state doctrine. Friday sermons, school curriculum, even how Iran addressed itself to the world. How could any of us forget Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s illustrious world symposium of Holocaust denial in 2006? For Iranians who have managed to escape the regime, anti-Semitism was never one detachable prejudice among others. It characterised the whole fraudulent package – the lies, the coercion, the false sense of moral grandeur. When they rejected the Islamic regime, naturally they rejected anti-Semitism, too.

The mullahs produced something else which has become genuinely rare in contemporary Britain – people with an acute instinct for the early signs of coercive ideology in a society, an awareness of the gap between a society’s stated values and what it is actually becoming. These are men and women who understand what freedom costs because they have already paid for it with theirs. And they know how quickly a country can be lost.

That is why, when the conversation turns from Tehran to London, as so often it does, what they say carries a weight that is absent from so much of the commentary that now passes for serious discourse in the UK. Their insights are drawn from bitter experience. They recognise a familiar pattern – and they care. The Iranians feel they are watching, for a second time in their lifetimes, a society that is moving, with surprising speed, from the liberal moral consensus of 20 years ago, towards something much more confused – and considerably more dangerous. What has become known as the red-green alliance, a convergence of left-coded moral language with Islamist political energy, ended, in their own country’s history, in the destruction of a free society.

The Iranians have watched on as a political class has been increasingly willing to indulge sectarian religious grievance, while slowly abandoning the civilisational inheritance that made tolerance so valued in the first place. They watch as Keir Starmer grows furious during Prime Minister’s Questions at those expressing concerns about the recent Trafalgar Square ‘Open Iftar‘, claiming people with views very similar to their own are trying to create divisions in British society. They see the PM warmly embracing Hasam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador, at a separate Ramadan event in Westminster Hall – the same man who, on a favoured centrist political podcast, free-wheeled a semi-fictional account of Middle East history and has repeatedly refused to condemn 7 October; a man who has called terrorists, victims. The Iranians watch as blasphemy laws creep back into British life via the ever-more strained definitions of ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘anti-Muslim hate’ as it is now being called. And they hear the jargon of diversity deployed as a veto on very well-founded fears. They recognise this atmosphere and they know where it goes…

Outside Downing Street, alongside the demand to proscribe the IRGC, the Iranians have a second refrain. ‘Shame on you BBC’ – or, as they also call it, ‘Ayatollah BBC’. BBC Persian is their obvious target. Its former head, Sadeq Saba, noted that many Iranians feel the service has lost credibility in its attempt at ‘balanced’ coverage over the years, as it increasingly leans in towards more of the Islamic Republic’s perspective, while ignoring the very clear antipathy so many ordinary Iranians feel towards it. For them, BBC Persian does not represent balance but something more like an acquiescence. For others it is craven timidity. Much of this is likely a product of the fact the service’s ranks have historically been drawn from the ‘reformist’ current within Iran – people shaped within the Islamic Republic’s own media ecosystem. Many of them arrived in the UK with well-rehearsed habits of managed distance from the regime’s worst realities.

This was brought home in BBC Persian’s coverage of Ayatollah Khamenei’s death at the end of February. As Iranians poured into the streets to celebrate, everywhere from Tehran to Finchley (now home to a diaspora community of many thousands), BBC Persian struck quite a different tone. Announcing his death, Farnaz Ghazizadeh, a lead presenter, appeared to seriously lose her composure on air. And something similar had happened after President Raisi’s death in 2024.

This, it should be said, is not evidence of some sort of conspiracy or duplicitous coordination on the part of BBC Persian with the regime. But it does reveal something about the proclivities of the Persian service – and why, for people who have actually lived under these men, that much-vaunted BBC impartiality has been seriously compromised.

It is not just BBC Persian either – BBC News suffers similar problems. The widespread and popular protests against the Islamic regime from the end of December into the New Year were under-reported or often ignored. And the subsequent lethal regime crackdown, resulting in the massacre of protesters took too long to meaningfully register. When it finally did, the broadcaster’s estimates of likely casualties were overcautious – putting the death toll in the thousands, rather than the likely figure of tens of thousands. In terms of BBC News’s analyses too, it painted protesters’ grievances as stubbornly economic, even as the little footage that was escaping Iran suggested almost immediately, far broader, more terminal frustrations.

As it has for many in the Jewish community, the corporation’s position on Israel has felt more like activism than journalism. Right up until her departure as BBC head of news last year, Deborah Turness had repeatedly proclaimed the BBC’s solidarity with ‘journalists’ in Gaza – a position that would have been unthinkable in any previous era of BBC editorial culture. Its coverage of the war in Gaza has been consistent with that posture: obsessive in its focus, imbalanced in treatment, and in common with much of the British establishment, marked by a chronic unwillingness to name plainly the theocratic, annihilationist ideology, at the heart of Gazan political and social life. The same Islamist ideology, in its essential character, that the Islamic Republic has spent decades imposing on Iran.

The genuine menace of Islamist ideology is all around us today. Two Jews were murdered outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur last year. Not long after, two Muslim men were convicted of plotting what police believe would have been the deadliest terror attack in British history – an ISIS-inspired plan to massacre hundreds of Jews, again on the streets of Manchester. In 2024, Israeli musician Itay Kashti had been lured to a remote cottage in Wales, handcuffed to a radiator and brutally beaten. In February, a Gail’s bakery in North London was trashed for tangential links to Israel; the Guardian ran a piece that fell just short of justifying why. And then the burning of those four Hatzola ambulances.

And now, it’s not just Jewish people under attack. Iranian opposition supporters have begun to see their cars and homes targeted for arson and over the past week, we can add to that list an attack on an Iranian TV station, two more London synagogues (one in Kenton and one in Finchley), a Jewish charity’s offices and the Israeli Embassy, which was apparently targeted twice last week.

The official response to all this is depressingly familiar. Statements are made. Security outside synagogues is apparently tightened. ‘Antisemitism has no place in Britain’, the Prime Minister seems to imagine… Meanwhile the attacks keep coming and the online sewer continues to flow – a vile stream of hatred across social media that no government has seriously confronted and no platform meaningfully checks. And the ideas themselves, of course, remain entirely and lethally untouched – the ideology behind all this managed scrupulously out of sight.

Only a moment’s reflection takes us back to the protests and unrest after the awful Southport killings in the summer of 2024. Starmer could not have been more outraged or urgent in his response – concerning, as it happens, communities of mainly working-class white Brits. The law was deployed with unusual speed and severity, court hearings were fast-tracked, anyone and everyone even remotely connected to these events seemed to be prosecuted and in many cases imprisoned, often for longer than the same conduct in a different, less political atmosphere.

And meanwhile, here in 2026, when Jews are placed in increasing physical danger, with two already murdered just for being Jews, better security feels about as serious as it’s going to get. Where is that same personal contempt from Starmer for these people? Where is his zero-tolerance response to the escalating anti-Semitic violence which is happening now? And while the political classes sneer at Trump’s supposed messianic delusions and condemn Israel’s action against Hezbollah, actually committed religious fundamentalists in our own society are increasingly doing their worst on an almost daily basis – and seem somehow forever to dodge the political agenda.

The Iranian cause could have hardly been more legible. Freedom from theocratic tyranny, freedom for women and minorities, and that special freedom – not to be gunned down by your own government in the thousands. A generation or so ago, their plight would have been so obvious to us.

And if we did not know the response they’d actually received was in large part the result of Europe’s oldest pathology, we might be tempted to read their lack of popular appeal as the inevitable fate of darker-skinned people telling an uncomfortable story in contemporary Britain. They are, after all, from a Muslim-majority country and refusing the script assigned to them. They should, by the logic of the culture around them, be the recipients of progressive solidarity – not its critics. But they are supposed to be talking about Islamophobia and not Islamism. And they should be on the Gaza march, not outside Downing Street demanding the proscription of the IRGC. Their inconvenience is layered: they carry the wrong flag, the wrong narrative and are in the wrong skin.

What has changed is not the Iranians. It is us. The solidarity that should have been extended to them was always conditional on accepting certain articles of faith that Western progressivism now implicitly requires. When the Iranian diaspora naturally and proudly aligned with Israel, they found themselves irreconcilably at odds with this worldview, one cultivated by activists and institutions over many years – and one in which the word genocide now travels freely, stripped of its meaning and singularly indicting one people, and one state, alone.

By the time of the Islamic Republic’s massacres in January, the flag of that state was no longer seeable, its name, Israel, no longer sayable. The blue and white Star of David had become the purest kind of trigger – loaded with a presumed and totalising injustice and the weight of everything the culture had learned, or remembered, to deplore. By hoisting Israel’s colours the Iranians found themselves utterly immiscible with the reigning narrative and so, in a very real way, genuinely invisible, too.

There is a profound difference between not knowing and refusing to know. The Iranian diaspora arrived in this country with a cause that should have felt unmistakably just and historically grounded. But they chose truth over indulging one of the West’s oldest and most persistent prejudices, and truth also over the lie of diversity at any cost. That is their distinction. It is also, for now, the cause of their continued invisibility.

The question this poses is not really about Iran. It is about what kind of society cannot recognise, in the people standing directly in front of it, the values it still claims to hold.

Max Sadie is a photographer who has been documenting the Iranian diaspora and its protest movement in London.