Iran is being betrayed by leftists.....

The West has abandoned Iran...

Apart from ethnic Iranians, there has hardly been a single demonstration in any Western capital in support of the Iranian democrats.

Yet isn't there a class, in Australia and in the rest of the West, of people deeply concerned about human rights? The class that Robert Manne and Judith Brett call the moral middle class? Weren't there thousands of demonstrators against the World Trade Organisation and G20 meetings in Australia because the global economy allegedly repressed the rights of poor people?

What about the groups explicitly dedicated to human rights? In the twilight struggle against the communist empire, human rights groups played an honourable and at times indispensable role in gaining freedom for the likes of Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and countless others.

It was a tremendous consolation to these dissidents when a US president, or indeed a humble human rights group, campaigned on their behalf.

Recently I interviewed David Menashri, one of the great authorities in the world on Iran. He was born in Iran and studied for his PhD there. Now he is a professor at Tel Aviv University. He is in no sense a military hawk on Iran. He asked this simple question: "Can't the West exercise its moral muscles? What a gesture it would be if all the European nations, and Australia, temporarily withdrew their ambassadors from Iran in protest at what is happening there."

The truth is the language and practice of human rights advocacy in the West has become completely corrupted by the postmodern ideologies of the contemporary Left. In this parallel universe all crimes are a subset of imperialism and the only true villains are the US, Israel and, for us, Australia.

When Frank Brennan commented that the Victorian human rights charter had been ineffective in its own terms and had little to do with human rights, but had become "a device for the delivery of a soft Left sectarian agenda", he was, perhaps somewhat unconsciously, making a broader point about the debasement and collapse of authentic human rights advocacy in the West.

Where are you on Iran, Louise Adler, happy to accuse Israel of war crimes without the slightest evidence, but apparently unstirred by the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians in Iran?

What have you got to say, Antony Loewenstein, stupidly and inaccurately labelling Israel an apartheid state and approvingly quoted in the Iranian official media, but listless on your blog in the face of the Iranian repression?

What about The Age's cartoonist Michael Leunig, who once drew a cartoon so morally obtuse, stupid and offensive that it was happily accepted by an Iranian newspaper in a competition for cartoons that would offend Jews (the cartoon was submitted without Leunig's knowledge), but who is apparently unmoved to draw an image in sympathy with young Iranian democrats?

The conclusion must be that many Western human rights organisations, and many of the most self-congratulatory and morally vain posturers, are not interested in human rights at all. They are interested in advancing a soft Left sectarian agenda. Except, of course, that the word soft may be wholly misplaced.