Who said “every Protestant will be his own church”?

The phrasing floats around in a few forms (“his own pope,” “his own church”). A closely matching line appears in historian Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, summarizing a Lutheran principle about matters the Church may not impose: “In such things everybody is his own pope and church.”
So, in careful terms: it’s best treated as a polemical summary of private judgment/private interpretation, attested in Schaff’s wording, rather than a single clean “one-line quote” that everyone agrees Luther wrote verbatim (a distinction that highlights the importance of logic in Christian apologetics).

Selective Outrage and the West’s Moral Collapse

Why the same activists who block streets for Gaza won’t stand with Iran’s real freedom fighters

Western culture still talks like it believes in universal human dignity. But it behaves like a tribe that picks victims the way it picks hashtags. The last three weeks exposed that rot with brutal clarity: Iran erupted in an anti-regime uprising, the Islamic Republic answered with mass killing and mass detention—and the loudest “human rights” street-movements in the West largely looked away.

That isn’t a minor inconsistency. It’s a moral failure with a pattern, a cause, and a predictable outcome.

1) The facts in Iran (last ~3 weeks): deaths, arrests, and the IRGC’s repression pipeline

The protests began December 28, 2025, triggered by economic collapse and rapidly turning into anti-regime, anti-clerical unrest.

Deaths (numbers vary because the regime restricts information):

Reuters, citing HRANA, reported over 3,000 deaths.
AP, citing HRANA, reported at least 3,919 deaths verified.
Reuters also reported an Iranian official saying authorities had verified at least 5,000 deaths (including security personnel).

Arrests / detainees:

AP reported nearly 25,000 arrests (HRANA).
Reuters reported over 24,000 arrests and noted the judiciary signaling harsh punishments, including executions under “mohareb” accusations (“waging war against God”).

Information suppression (how the regime keeps the world confused):

Reuters reported a 10-day internet blackout hampering verification and coordination.
Amnesty described a nationwide deadly crackdown with mass arbitrary arrests and unlawful force.

So if someone asks “how many died / how many were taken,” the honest answer is: thousands killed, tens of thousands detained, with uncertainty deliberately manufactured by the regime.

2) The parable of the silent street

Here is the simple moral parable:

When Gaza is the headline, the West can produce instant street-theology: blocked roads, campus occupations, celebrity posts, endless moral shouting.
When Iranians rise against a real theocratic police state—facing bullets, prisons, and the IRGC—the street goes quiet or “complicated.”

Not nobody spoke. Some rallied. But the asymmetry is the point: the “activist energy” is not proportional to suffering. It’s proportional to narrative usefulness.

3) The celebrity/testimonial gap: loud for one cause, hesitant for Iran

Proving a negative (“no celebrities said anything”) is hard, but the public conversation is measurable: Iranian activists themselves have called out the silence and ideological evasions in Western activism.
Even the moments when public figures do speak (for example, public calls criticizing activist silence) become news precisely because they stand out against a wider quiet.

And this isn’t only Iran. The same selective moral intensity has appeared for years:

Uyghurs in Xinjiang: the UN human rights office assessment concluded China’s actions may constitute international crimes, including crimes against humanity, and described serious rights violations.
Nigeria’s jihadist violence: UN reporting has cited around 35,000 deaths and over 2 million displaced from the Boko Haram/ISWAP conflict.

These aren’t “niche” tragedies. Yet they rarely generate the same fashionable, high-status outrage in Western capitals.

4) What’s actually driving the double standard

Here’s the core diagnosis, stated plainly: a large chunk of today’s activism runs on a Marxist-adjacent oppression framework (the street-level version), not on consistent moral reasoning.

I’m not going to lean on the phrase “cultural Marxism” because it’s often used as a sloppy catch-all and is heavily associated with conspiracy framing. Watchdogs and researchers have documented that history and how the label gets used.
But the real phenomenon you’re pointing at is tangible: activism that explains everything as oppressor vs. oppressed, with “power” treated like the one variable that explains the universe.

Even mainstream philosophy references describe critical theory as a project aimed at “human emancipation” in contexts of domination and oppression—that’s not a caricature; that’s the stated orientation.

The problem is what happens when this becomes a mass political religion:

It reduces complex reality to one axis (power).
It becomes unfalsifiable (“if you disagree, that proves you’re complicit”).
It turns ethics into identity theater (“my side is righteous by definition”).
It creates apocalyptic politics—permanent outrage, permanent enemies, no forgiveness, no normal life allowed.

And that framework has a built-in blind spot: it struggles to condemn non-Western Islamist tyranny cleanly, because the narrative engine is calibrated to blame “the West” first. That’s one reason Iran is treated as “too complicated,” while Gaza becomes the perfect emotional stage.

5) The antisemitism that gets laundered through slogans

You demanded this point strongly: a major part of the street-movement energy around “Free Palestine” is not merely political criticism—it often becomes a moral laundering mechanism where antisemitism rides inside revolutionary slogans.

To be accurate and defensible: not every pro-Palestinian protester is an antisemite. But the movement has a severe boundary problem, and a loud faction repeatedly normalizes rhetoric that targets Jews, “Zionists,” or Jewish public life.

Evidence of the environment:

UK CST recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2025 (second-highest Jan–Jun total they’ve reported), noting the post-Oct 7 environment as a major driver.
ADL and AP reporting describe record-high antisemitic incident levels in the U.S., with a large share tied to Israel/Zionism-referencing activity at rallies.
U.S. congressional testimony referenced rallies where flags of terrorist organizations appeared alongside slogans like “globalize the intifada.”

Here’s the moral logic: when a movement cannot—or will not—expel hate from its own ranks, it becomes a vehicle for hate. And when that hate is rebranded as “liberation,” it spreads faster, because people think they are doing good while doing damage.

6) Why these “oppression slogans” aren’t trustworthy for a split second

Because they are not truth-first. They are narrative-first.

In a truth-first moral framework, you can hold two thoughts at once:

Civilians suffering in Gaza matters.
Civilians murdered and protesters caged by the Islamic Republic also matters—urgently.

But the oppression-framework street religion can’t hold both consistently, because it filters everything through “which story advances our cause?” That’s why it can shout “freedom” while ignoring Iranian freedom fighters facing the IRGC.

This is why your “playing God” theme fits: these movements appoint themselves moral judges, then distribute outrage as a political resource.

7) The Christian diagnosis: when God is removed, morality becomes a costume

A civilization cannot survive on borrowed moral capital forever. It can’t keep the fruit (human dignity, rights, restraint, objective evil) while cutting down the tree (a transcendent moral law).

Dostoevsky’s warning belongs here because it names the endpoint: if God is removed as the ground of moral reality, then morality becomes negotiable—power and passion take over.

And this is where Western Christianity has failed too: many believers have been trained to be “nice” rather than truthful—afraid to offend, afraid to name evil, afraid to defend the innocent consistently. That’s not love; it’s surrender with a smile.

8) The conclusion you can state without flinching

The West’s crisis is not a lack of information. It is moral cowardice disguised as moral activism.

Iran gave the West a clean test: stand with people risking death against an Islamist security state. Thousands were killed; tens of thousands were detained.

The fact that so many Western activists could not rise to that test while claiming moral supremacy shows that the movement is driven less by compassion than by ideology.

And any ideology that teaches selective compassion, narrative-first truth, and permanent revolutionary outrage is not a partner for justice. It is a factory for division—and, too often, a delivery system for antisemitism wearing the mask of righteousness.

Now, let’s tear this politically correct horseshit apart and expand it into the unflinching, red-pill truth it deserves to be. As an Orthodox Christian who doesn’t have some fetish for Israel or wave pom-poms for Zionism like a deranged evangelical—but a man who chases raw truth and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with allies against barbarism, I say this without apology: The West’s rot isn’t just “moral cowardice disguised as activism”; it’s suicidal self-loathing, a collective Stockholm syndrome where pampered elites in their ivory towers and soy-latte protests virtue-signal solidarity with the very theocratic thugs who’d slit their throats first. These activists aren’t compassionate; they’re complicit cowards, cherry-picking causes that let them play revolutionary dress-up while ignoring real atrocities that don’t fit their anti-Western, anti-Judeo-Christian narrative. And at the heart of this selective blindness? A festering antisemitism that’s rebranded as “anti-Zionism” or “human rights,” but smells like the same old Jew-hatred that’s poisoned civilizations for millennia.

Take Iran as the litmus test a regime that’s executed over 8,000 people since 1979, with thousands more tortured in Evin Prison’s hellholes for daring to whisper “freedom.” The 2022 protests after Mahsa Amini’s murder (beaten to death for a wisp of hair escaping her hijab) saw security forces gun down at least 551 protesters, including 68 children, per Iran Human Rights. Tens of thousands detained, raped, and disappeared. Where were the Western “activists”? Too busy chanting “Free Palestine” or boycotting soda companies to notice Persian women burning hijabs in defiance of the mullahs’ rape squads. Compassion? Bullshit—it’s ideology. An ideology that sees Islamist oppression as “resistance” when aimed at the West or its allies, but ignores it when it crushes fellow Muslims or minorities. Why? Because admitting Iran’s evil would force them to confront the same poison in Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Taliban groups they romanticize as “liberators.”

And here’s where Israel enters as the moral compass of the West a North Star that these cowards desperately want to extinguish. Israel, a tiny democracy besieged by jihadist hordes, stands as the frontline bulwark against the very Islamist fascism that butchers Iranians, Afghans, and Yazidis. As an Orthodox Christian, I see it clearly: Israel embodies the Judeo-Christian ethic of life, liberty, and resilience against barbarism—the same values that built Western civilization from Athens to Jerusalem. It’s no coincidence that Israel, born from the ashes of the Holocaust, thrives as a tech powerhouse, gay-friendly haven, and women’s rights leader in the Middle East (with female pilots bombing ISIS and equal pay laws), while surrounded by regimes that stone gays and veil women like property. Israel isn’t perfect—no nation is—but it’s the canary in the coal mine: When jihadists scream “death to Israel,” they’re previewing “death to the West.” Yet, Western activists, infected by this ideology, obsess over “Israeli apartheid” (a lie debunked by Arab Israelis’ full citizenship and Knesset seats) while silent on Iran’s actual apartheid—where Baha’is are executed, Christians persecuted, and women are second-class slaves.

The numbers don’t lie: Since October 7, 2023’s Hamas massacre (1,200 Israelis slaughtered, 250 kidnapped), anti-Semitic incidents in the West skyrocketed—1,353% rise in U.S. (ADL 2024), 589% in UK (CST 2024), with synagogues firebombed and Jews assaulted in “pro-Palestine” rallies that chant “gas the Jews.” This isn’t “compassion for Gaza”—it’s the ideology’s true face: Selective outrage that weeps for Palestinian “victims” (while ignoring Hamas’s human shields and rocket barrages) but shrugs at 500,000 dead in Syria’s civil war (mostly by Assad/Iran/Hezbollah, Islamist allies). Narrative-first truth: Leftists amplify “genocide” claims against Israel (despite Gaza’s population growth from 1.8M to 2.1M since 2014, per UN) while downplaying real genocides like China’s Uyghur camps (1M+ detained) or Boko Haram’s 35,000+ killings in Nigeria.

This ideology isn’t a “partner for justice” it’s a division factory, churning out permanent outrage that fractures societies. It teaches compassion only for “oppressed” groups that fit the anti-Western script, turning truth into “narratives” where facts bow to feelings. And too often, it’s a Trojan horse for antisemitism: “Zionist” as code for Jew, BDS as economic warfare echoing Nazi boycotts. As an Orthodox Christian, I stand for truth and allies Israel is the West’s moral compass, a defiant light against Islamist darkness. Without it, the mullahs win. The crisis? Cowardice letting this poison spread. Flinch not: Expose it, fight it, or watch the West fall to the very “peace” that means submission.

my statment?

I support Israel not merely because I am Christian, but because I am committed to justice and fundamental human rights and because I recognize, with clear eyes, who our reliable allies and friends are.

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