There is a delicious irony in the sight of Iranian-Americans, draped in the Lion and Sun of a bygone era, using the World Cup as their platform for dissent. For decades, the mullahs in Tehran have sought to export their revolution through football, plastering stadiums with propaganda and parading players as mouthpieces of the regime. Now, the tables have turned.
The very stage they coveted has become a megaphone for their enemies. It is a classic historical tragedy: the oppressor’s tools become the oppressed’s weapons. One thinks of the gladiatorial arenas of Rome, where emperors staged games to distract the masses, only for those masses eventually to turn the circus into a theatre of rebellion.
Here, in a Qatari stadium, a handful of exiles have done what millions inside Iran dare not: they have roared. And the world heard them. The regime’s reaction, predictably, is to label them traitors and foreign agents.
But this misses the point. The protests are not just about football; they are a symptom of a deeper decay. The Islamic Republic, like the late Roman Empire, has become a hollow shell, sustained by oil money and secret police.
Its ideological vigour is dead. The youth, the women, the educated classes: they have already voted with their feet, emigrating in droves. Those who remain are seething.
The World Cup protests are merely a visible crack in the dam. The question is not whether the regime will fall, but when. And whether the West, in its eternal naivety, will once again choose to back the wrong horses, as it did in 1979.
The Iranian people deserve better than a clerical dictatorship or a return to the Shah’s police state. They deserve a modern republic, one that respects both faith and freedom. But history, as I often remind readers, is a brutal judge.
It punishes not only the tyrants but also the timid. Let us hope that the roar from the stadium becomes a rising tide that washes away the decaying pillars of the mullahs’ power.
