Iran protests and that word we won’t say
The protests have since spread to over 100 cities – 111 by January 8 according to the BBC.
If you’ve been reading about the January 2026 protests in Iran, you could be forgiven for thinking they’re about the failing economy. They aren’t; not really. The economy is the trigger but it isn’t the cause.
The Iranian currency has indeed crashed, with the rial falling to a record low against the US dollar. Inflation is out of control, with, for example, the cost of rice increasing tenfold over the past three years. And yes, the protests were started by bazaar merchants in Tehran, a significant development given the merchants’ long-standing alignment with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The protests have since spread to over 100 cities – 111 by January 8 according to the BBC.
But it is reductionist, or even inaccurate, to suggest that the protests are all about the economy. The proximate cause is not what happened a week or two ago but a deep hatred for a regime that rapes and blinds women, has taken Iran from a thriving modern nation to a hub for global terrorism, and that murders its own civilians en masse.
Protests in Iran have broken out much more frequently in the past decade than at any previous point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022 being the most significant to date.
Pressure for Iranian society to protest again has built steadily over the past seven months. In June 2025, when Israel and the US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, footage of Iranians cheering on their government’s enemies flooded the internet. The effects of heatwaves, blamed largely on water mismanagement and widespread government corruption, came next, followed by floods and devastating fires. All of these factors made January’s protests all but inevitable.
Yet these are still only factors sitting on top of a baseline which much of the media seems shy to report: a longstanding, passionate and fundamental hatred from the Iranian people of the regime that oppresses them.
Reading about the protests, I did not see much mention of the fact that Iran has the highest per capita execution rate in the world. Iran Human Rights group documented over 1500 executions in 2025 alone, usually after sham trials and often in the form of public hangings from cranes.
A June 2024 GAMAAN survey of 77,216 respondents from inside Iran showed that 89 per cent support becoming a democracy, with only around 20 per cent of the population supporting the Islamic Republic. Fires, floods and fiscal failures aren’t what these protests are about; it’s undeniable that hostility towards the regime is what is driving them forwards. Chants of “Death to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei” and “[Crown Prince Reza] Pahlavi is returning” speak to this. The slogan “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon” expresses outrage from the Iranian people that they’ve been dragged into wars via the regime’s funding of their proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Some of our media seem reluctant to talk about the appalling human rights abuses Iranians are suffering at the hands of their government, instead focusing on those economic drivers. The Guardian quotes Iranian president Pezeshkian calling for restraint on how the demonstrations are handled: “Any violent or coercive behaviour should be avoided,” (what a nice guy) but they fail to quote Supreme Leader Khamenei’s ominous threat that “rioters must be put in their place.” This threat is especially chilling given that protesters in Iran are regularly shot or executed. SBS states that “DFAT suspended all embassy operations in Tehran… after the Labor government announced Iran was responsible for two alleged attacks on the Jewish community in Melbourne and Sydney,” yet they fail to mention that Australia designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organisation on November 27, 2025, after they (SBS) themselves earlier quoted an expert calling the designation “complex and significant”. Why can’t these outlets just call terrorists terrorists?
Even though a failing economy might have triggered the protests and even though some people who are generally sympathetic to the regime might be marching on the streets this time, it’s clear that the majority of Iranians are out there for other reasons. They want to be free from the terrorists who have ruined their country, dragged them into pointless wars and murdered their people.
Iranians are protesting knowing it could well lead to their deaths – a level of bravery I don’t have the words to describe. It’s a mark of respect to this bravery to call out what these protests are really about.
Pete Malicki is an Australian playwright, producer and business leader. He is not Jewish.