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For someone who has spent the better part of the last few years insisting she is bravely “telling uncomfortable truths”, JK Rowling is remarkably startled whenever the internet tells one back.

On X yesterday, the author waded into the protests in Iran with a tweet that sounded, at first glance, like a boilerplate human rights sermon: “If you claim to support human rights yet can’t bring yourself to show solidarity with those fighting for their liberty in Iran, you’ve revealed yourself. You don’t give a damn about people being oppressed and brutalised so long as it’s being done by the enemies of your enemies.”

Coming from Rowling, whose feed has increasingly doubled as a culture-war noticeboard, her tweet landed less like a rallying cry and more like an invitation for people to check her receipts. And they did.

Part of the backlash was triggered by something she had shared just three days earlier: a post declaring “Iranians are rejecting Islam, the Islamic Republic, and Sharia Law en masse,” accompanied by footage of protests. Rowling enthusiastically chimed in, praising the protesters’ bravery and framing them as “light in what lately has felt like a very dark world.”

The leap from criticising a regime to implying a wholesale rejection of a faith followed by millions was, at best, sloppy. At worst, it echoed the kind of worldview that has long made Muslims the convenient shorthand villains in Western discourse.

But the real reason X turned on her wasn’t semantic nitpicking. It was memory.

For over two years, as Israel carried out a genocide in Gaza — killing over 68,000 Palestinians, including women and children — Rowling remained conspicuously silent. No threads about “revealing yourself”. No anguished appeals to human rights. No urgent calls for solidarity with a besieged, majority-Muslim population being bombed with Western weapons and diplomatic cover.

Now, suddenly, she had discovered oppression again.

Users were quick to call it what it looked like: selective feminism. One pointed out that speaking passionately about Iranian women while ignoring Palestinian women enduring mass killing and displacement wasn’t solidarity at all, but moral sorting — choosing which victims are socially acceptable to care about.

Another described it bluntly as “imperial feminism”, returning on schedule, that familiar habit of Western figures championing women’s rights only when it aligns neatly with geopolitical comfort zones.

Others were less restrained. Several accused Rowling of being a hypocrite who had stayed mute during a livestreamed genocide, only to now posture about brutality and liberty.

Some framed her sudden moral awakening as suspiciously aligned with regime-change narratives that Western audiences have been trained to cheer.

A few recalled her long-running transphobia controversies, arguing that someone so comfortable policing marginalised communities at home doesn’t get to sermonise about freedom abroad without pushback.

What cut through, though, was the exhaustion in the responses. Many had seen this movie before. Western celebrities discovering selective outrage, deploying the language of human rights as a moral accessory, and bristling when the people they claim to defend refuse to play grateful audience.

It is important to note that supporting the struggle of people — especially women resisting a system that polices bodies, behaviour and belief — is not the problem. But pretending that solidarity exists in a vacuum, detached from every other injustice happening in the same region, often enabled by the same global power structures, is.

Rowling’s framing, that those who hesitate to amplify her tweet have “revealed” themselves, collapses under even mild scrutiny. People aren’t allergic to Iranian protests. They are allergic to being lectured about moral consistency by someone who conspicuously abandoned it when Palestinian lives were being erased in real time. You don’t get to accuse others of conditional empathy while practising it yourself.

There’s also the uncomfortable undertone in celebrating Iranians as rejecting Islam, as though liberation must necessarily look like secularisation approved by Western liberals. It flattens a complex society into a convenient ideological story: brave people shedding backward beliefs to join the modern world.

It’s a narrative that has historically justified everything from sanctions to invasions, usually with disastrous consequences for the very people it claims to save.

The internet’s pushback, in that sense, wasn’t just about Rowling. It was about rejecting a familiar hierarchy of suffering — where Muslim pain only matters when it fits an approved script, and where women of colour become symbols rather than subjects.

Rowling may genuinely believe she is standing on the right side of history. But history has a way of asking inconvenient follow-up questions: Who did you speak for when it cost you something? Which oppressions moved you to action, and which you quietly scrolled past?

People are clearly done letting famous figures feign righteousness without accounting for their silences.