Filtered Conscience

There is a question I have been encountering frequently in recent days: 

Is it possible for a person to stand with the civilians in Palestine whose right to life is being stripped away, while simultaneously supporting the struggle of women and the people in Iran against their regime?

When this question is asked of me, my answer is clear: Yes. Because what I defend is not regimes or religions; it is human rights. The fact that this answer is considered "complicated" today reveals exactly where the real problem lies.

Human rights have ceased to be a universal value and have instead turned into a position passed through political filters - much like religion being pulled away from being an internal journey and instead used to construct systems of mass control.

The struggle for survival is now perceived as support for a specific religion or a regime. Conscience has stopped being a moral reflex arising from within the individual and has become a selective mechanism taught by states, ideologies, and the media. In the Israel-Palestine conflict, the truth that Hamas is often used as a pretext, violence as a tool, and the ultimate goal is land and erasure has been obscured. Those who defend the right to life are portrayed as regime supporters, and infrastructures have been built to silence their voices.

This has pushed everyone who says "Free Palestine" into a state of mental gridlock, forcing them into silence or making them feel hypocritical through a manufactured psychology of inconsistency. Saying "no" to the death of a child has been conflated with "I support a religious state regime."

The same pain is presented under different labels, and human rights defenders who uphold the same core principles are accused of being two-faced. Conscience, in its "packaged" form, has become a tool where it is pre-determined for whom and when it will function.

What is being defended in Palestine is not a religious or political structure; it is the right to life. In Iran, what is being protested is not religion itself, but a regime that state-mandates religion to control bodies and lives. We are expected to see these as different. Yet, these two stances do not contradict each other; on the contrary, they meet on the same ethical ground. The contradiction begins only when one centers identity instead of humanity.

A human being’s demand for life, liberty, and dignity does not change based on the geography they were born in, the language they speak, or the faith they hold. If defending this today appears "double-sided" or "contradictory," the problem lies not in that defense, but in the fact that conscience has been filtered by state ideologies.