When Iran kills its own people, the absence of popular anger on the streets and campuses of the West is itself a form of noise — a silence speaking loudly.

This does not mean, at the governmental level, there has not been determined and unambiguous condemnation of Iran.

Donald Trump's recent decision not to launch immediate military action against Iran is not restraint, hesitation, or retreat, but a tactical delay — taking into consideration the deployment of U.S. military resources and perhaps an opportunity for Iran convincingly changing its political and military posture — in the same way that earlier pauses preceded the B-2 bomber strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Yet what remains missing is widespread popular outrage.

Iran's war against its own people has produced hesitation and indifference among large segments of public opinion — including in many of the same academic and cultural environments which recently mobilized intensely during the Gaza war.

Young Iranians are beaten, imprisoned, and killed for demanding freedom. They are not confronting a foreign enemy.

They are confronting their own government.

Yet while their courage appears in parts of the western media, it has not generated widespread grassroots outrage.

During the Gaza war, public emotion influenced politics, media, and institutions. Whatever one thinks of that conflict, one fact is clear: public outrage mattered.

In Iran, there is no comparable mobilization.

This absence reflects not only moral confusion, but a troubling absence of moral judgment.

Some attempt to compare Israel in Gaza with Iran suppressing its own people.

But the situations are fundamentally different.

Gaza was a battlefield shaped in large part by Iran's proxy strategy — financing, arming, and directing groups that deliberately targeted civilians.

Iran helped create a form of warfare in which civilians had nowhere to escape.

In Iran itself, there is no battlefield. There is repression.

The regime fires into unarmed crowds.

It arrests teenagers.

It executes dissent.

The victim and the executioner share the same nationality.

Moreover, Iran has inflicted, by some estimates, more than 10,000 civilian deaths in less than a month — a rate of killing so extreme that even the most aggressive messaging and casualty framing used by Hamas-aligned outlets during the Israel-Gaza war did not claim anything comparable in a single month.

Public outrage helps shape media priorities, diplomatic language, and institutional behavior. Silence is never neutral.

Iran is not a peripheral actor in Middle Eastern violence.

It's one of its central organizers — exporting instability, financing armed groups, and repeatedly using civilian suffering as a strategic tool.

At the same time, it squanders national resources on regional destabilization instead of improving the quality of life of its own citizens, while brutally repressing those who refuse to conform to the rigid ideological rules of the Islamic Republic.

Together, these realities have fueled today’s growing movement for regime change.

Even at the level of international institutions, moral clarity has been limited.

Compared with his unusually stark language on Gaza, the secretary-general of the United Nations has adopted a notably more restrained public posture on Iran — emphasizing calls for "maximum restraint" rather than directly condemning the regime responsible for the repression.

The recent Israeli-American victory in the twelve-day war weakened Iran’s aura of inevitability and reminded Iranians that their rulers are not invincible.

That psychological shift helped make today’s protests possible. And also produced Iranian strategic vulnerability.

For the first time in years, Iran is not only politically challenged at home, but militarily exposed abroad. It means that American options, long viewed as symbolic or excessively risky, are now potentially credible and, if carefully designed, could be effective.

Military, diplomatic, and political tools may, together, help weaken a tyrannical system and open the path toward a government that genuinely cares for its citizens.

But popular action remains a decisive advantage.

If the campuses and public spaces of the United States and Europe were mobilized in support of Iranian demonstrators — and in support of political pressure on Tehran — the effect would not only strengthen American policy.

It would weaken the regime’s most useful defense: the claim that it represents resistance to the West rather than repression of its own people.

Such support could shorten suffering.

It could reduce the likelihood of prolonged bloodshed by accelerating the regime's loss of legitimacy. It could also dissolve much of the ideological protection that has long shielded Tehran from full moral accountability.

In that sense, public outrage is not a substitute for political action. It's its multiplier.

The United States may have the strength and moral clarity to act.

But when democratic societies speak with one voice, regimes fall faster — and with fewer victims.

Iranian demonstrators are not asking the world to fight their battles.

They are asking the world not to look away.

Mark L. Cohen practices law and was counsel at White & Case starting in 2001, after serving as international lawyer and senior legal consultant for the French aluminum producer Pechiney. Cohen was a senior consultant at a Ford Foundation Commission, an adviser to the PBS television program "The Advocates," and assistant attorney general in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He teaches U.S. history at the business school in Lille l'EDHEC. Read more Mark L. Cohen Insider articles — More Here.