The recent events surrounding the Iranian women’s soccer team have cast a stark light not only on the harshness of Tehran’s regime but also on the superficiality of certain individuals who continue to view slogans like ‘globalise the intifada’ as the epitome of political insight. These individuals are, in essence, akin to Lenin’s “useful idiots” in the eyes of radical Islamists, unwittingly supporting causes that contradict their professed values.

The Iranian athletes have been subjected to a level of female oppression that is often overlooked by Western activists when it conflicts with their broader agendas. This oversight highlights a troubling irony, especially when figures like former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, naively endorse such slogans without fully grasping their implications.

It is crucial to remember that groups like Hamas are no less oppressive than Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and their theocratic rulers. When athletes fear for their safety and that of their families simply because they choose not to sing their oppressive state’s national anthem, it becomes evident that not every cause dressed in the rhetoric of resistance is inherently progressive or just.

The blunt-force irony of that, given names like former Australian of the Year Grace Tame who ignorantly led such chants, is depressingly real.

Hamas, let’s not forget, is no better than Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and theocratic leaders.

When women fear reprisals against themselves and their families simply for refusing to sing their repressive state’s national anthem, it’s a sharp reminder that not every cause wrapped in the language of resistance is progressive.

Sometimes ‘resistance’ is just another word used to sanitise coercion, fanaticism and the crushing of dissent.

Iranian state television labelled the national women’s team wartime traitors, declaring ‘traitors during wartime should be dealt with severely’.

Pictured: The Iranian footballers who accepted Australia’s offer of asylum

Concerns have been raised about the fate of the women who chose to return to Iran, namely striker Afsaneh Chatrenoor, who appeared to be led onto a bus on the Gold Coast

You shudder to think what will happen to those now returning to Iran, including to the families of those who don’t. That sort of repression is the reality of life inside a theocratic authoritarian regime – which is what a globalised intifada aims to achieve everywhere.

That’s what makes the chant sound not just provocative but extremely politically ignorant. It’s repeated by people who speak endlessly about rights, justice and liberation while overlooking what life under Islamist authoritarian rule actually looks like, especially for women.

They are happy to romanticise struggle in the abstract, but far less interested in the reality of regimes that police dress, punish defiance, threaten families and treat female autonomy as a problem to be contained, rather than a right to be respected.

And you had better not be homosexual in one of these regimes.

That’s the broader point many refuse to think through: resistance isn’t automatically virtuous. It depends on what is being resisted, by whom, and in the name of what. Once that moral test is abandoned, any slogan can be dressed up as noble. Any brutality can be waved away because it sits on the preferred side of an ideological story.

And this all played out right here in Australia as we celebrated International Women’s Day. That’s an inconvenient truth for the hypocrites promoting intifada slogans.

A great many of the people who chant these slogans do so from the comfort of a liberal democracy they neither properly value nor seriously understand.

They enjoy the protections of free speech, due process, pluralism and individual liberty while cheering on political traditions and movements that have very little regard for any of these things.

The events of this week are a sharp reminder that not every cause wrapped in the language of resistance is progressive. (Pictured: Left-wing activist Grace Tame with property investor and Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi)

Tame infamously led a crowd chant to ‘globalise the intifada’ at a Sydney rally

They perform radicalism beneath the shelter of the very system they are too shallow to defend. That’s easy to do here in Australia. It’s a lot harder in places where the state expects ideological conformity and punishes those who step out of line.

And that is why this Iranian team episode matters. It shows what politics looks like when power isn’t checked by liberal norms, when women are controlled rather than protected, and when family members are used as leverage against dissent.

You won’t hear anything resembling a mea culpa from the self-righteous chanters. Their failure isn’t just bad taste; it’s a lack of broad thinking. Their inability, or unwillingness, to follow an idea through to its practical meaning in the real world is their lifetime limitation, made worse by stubbornness that prevents pivoting when making a mistake.

They hear a chant and imagine solidarity; they hear the language of struggle and imagine virtue. However, they are incapable of stopping to consider what sort of politics flourishes when liberal democracy is absent – in particular, what happens to minorities and women in these systems, or how quickly people like them would find themselves silenced if they had to live under the kinds of regimes they are forever making excuses for.

That applies to celebrity activists such as Tame, and to Greens politicians who indulge this rhetoric or try to explain it away as just another form of expressive dissent. They trade heavily on the language of rights, but their rights talk looks selective when they cannot plainly acknowledge what the Iranian women’s soccer team episode puts beyond argument: that illiberal regimes do not liberate women, they control them, punish them and crush dissent.

Why aren’t they protesting about that, chanting for change?

Liberal democracy matters, yet it’s so often taken for granted by those who have never had to do without it. It’s easy to sneer at it from inside its protections.

If those chanting to globalise the intifada ever got what they unwittingly are calling for, it would be the last chant they would ever be allowed to make. Because they would be treated as more than just ‘difficult’, to borrow the PM’s turn of phrase, by leaders of such a regime.