From Sydney’s kettled streets to Canberra’s sanctions theatre, how the US military-industrial complex choreographs our protests, media, and middle-power obedience.

The humid February evening outside Sydney Town Hall hangs heavy with the acrid sting of pepper spray, a chemical veil that claws at the eyes and burns the throats of those packing Sydney’s streets. It is February 9, 2026: organisers claim tens of thousands march in solidarity with Palestine, while police log a modest 6,000. Our rulers and their agencies always understate crowd numbers. It’s a way to convey an illusion of control, but either way, the approaches to the newly drawn perimeter lines teem with people, eyes streaming, throats raw, voices rising in unified chants for justice and an end to the carnage in Gaza.

Mounted officers from the NSW Public Order and Riot Squad wheel their sweating horses directly into the crush of bodies, batons rising and falling in a brutal, sickening, mechanical rhythm. Clockwork Orange ultra-violence. Journalists choke on the toxic capsicum fog; Greens MLC Abigail Boyd is struck by police.

A shocking image shared online captures a man with his hands raised being punched repeatedly backward through the heaving crowd, while Muslim men kneeling in prayer on the asphalt are man-handles, hauled unceremoniously to their feet, foreheads still damp from prostration, and dragged away by officers.

NSW Police arrest 27 that night. Paramedics treat dozens more for spray exposure. The Palestine Action Group accuses officers of “repeatedly charging us with horses and pepper spray,” and a 69-year-old woman later claims that she’s broken vertebrae after being pushed to the ground in the chaos. This is no mere crowd control; it is a display of raw state force, triggered to shield the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

A late-2025 UN Human Rights Council commission of inquiry has branded Herzog and other senior Israeli figures’ statements as incitement to the commission of genocide against Palestinians. It’s language that should send a chill through any democracy still capable of blushing. Yet Herzog arrives not as a figure under such grave scrutiny, but as a state guest, swaddled in the soothing rhetoric of “solidarity” and “community safety,” a comforter for grief that Australia seems all too eager to endorse.

Legal Levers Tighten the Grip

The Minns Labor government reaches for two well-worn instruments of modern state control, levers honed for exceptionalism and paperwork. First, the Police Commissioner’s Public Assembly Restriction Declaration (PARD), rammed through the NSW Parliament after the horrific Bondi Beach terror attack in December 2025, which allows vast areas to be declared off-limits to any authorised public assemblies or marches.

Second, a “major event” declaration; typically deployed for sporting spectacles or music festivals, repurposed here to corral politics, grief, and raw public rage into the same managerial frame. Protest organisers mount a desperate Supreme Court challenge and lose, hours before the rally is set to begin.

Premier Chris Minns, whom the Greens have branded openly pro-Israel, defends the crackdown by pointing to the $5 million cost of pro-Palestine protests in 2024; as if the right to dissent comes stamped with a budget ceiling, and democracy itself awaits approval on an invoice. Even granting the legitimate burdens of policing in the wake of Bondi, PARD’s sweeping powers equate public mourning with terrorism, eroding civil rights not just for one side, but for everyone who dares to raise their voice in the public square.

A Tale of Two Protests. And Two Standards

Just a week earlier, in Canberra, under the same broad apparatus of government, the Albanese federal administration struck a starkly different pose. Looking grave and resolute, it updated its sanctions list with targeted measures against 20 individuals and three entities linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s paramilitary-intelligence arm.

The Senate swiftly passes a motion condemning Tehran’s violence against its own protesters. A teary PM, Anthony Albanese expresses heartfelt support for Iranian demonstrations, while Foreign Minister Penny Wong announces further measures that align, whether she intends it or not, with Washington’s familiar escalatory rhythm: sanctions first, moral theatre second, and “all options” murmured ominously in the wings.

Pro-Palestine citizens, mourning a Gaza death toll that health authorities peg at over 70,000, met riot horses, pepper spray, and kettling. Iranian-Australians waving the Lion and Sun flags of the ousted monarchy, alongside portraits of Reza Pahlavi, drew nods from the Prime Minister himself and, too often, the uncritical sympathy of our national broadcaster, the ABC.

“Some Australian demonstrators express support for ‘Crown Prince’ Reza Pahlavi,” the ABC reports, as if this exile from Potomac, Maryland, truly speaks for a nation weary of dictatorship.

The Mechanism of Selective Grief

This selective compassion is not mere hypocrisy; it is the very mechanism by which a middle power like Australia is conscripted, one sympathetic headline at a time, into someone else’s illegal war. When Israel grinds Gaza into dust, complete with the “double-tap” strikes that kill rescuers rushing to the wounded, Albanese offers calibrated “concern” and calls for restraint, his face a mask of gravity laced with evasion.

When reports surface of the Islamic Republic brutalising its own citizens, we see targeted sanctions within days, a Senate motion, and a ministerial register of virtue-signalling that dovetails neatly with an American script that has never met an oil province, a rare earth deposit, a precious metal vein, or a strategic corridor it didn’t yearn to “stabilise.” Yet reports of support for another Shah are too ludicrously improbable for anyone.

Popular protests are being orchestrated, again. It’s easy to understand uprisings when America and its allies have ruined your currency. But another Shah? US-Israeli Regime Change agents are at work again.

Reza Pahlavi 2.0, son of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last Shah, whose regime was cemented by the 1953 CIA-MI6 Operation Ajax coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh for the sin of nationalising Anglo-Iranian Oil assets emerges. He’s even flogging a “Phoenix Project” blueprint for post-revolutionary Iran from his comfortable U.S. exile.

His father’s secret police, SAVAK, ran torture chambers with bureaucratic efficiency: electrified flesh, state terror, administrative calm. That brutality helped ignite the 1979 revolution, one of the world’s largest.

A 2009 Brookings analysis lays bare Pahlavi’s core problem. He’s got no supporters in Iran, no serious monarchist movement to mobilise. Even Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned in Evin, the very hellhole SAVAK helped perfect, dismisses the Pahlavi project as “the opposition against the opposition.”

And yet, on the ABC, he is packaged like the Easter Bunny for export, smiling from a 2023 visit with “Uncle Bibi” Netanyahu as if he knows exactly which winds to catch. Alignment with Washington and Jerusalem requires no direct orchestration from Foggy Bottom.

When diaspora rallies chant slogans, elevate figureheads, and echo geopolitical aims, often laced with Israeli intelligence narratives, the line blurs between genuine local anguish and a grifter’s ring-in with dodgy backers. You don’t have to be paid to be useful; you only have to be eager.

Our think tanks, such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), funded by governments, defence primes, and foreign agencies, supply a legitimising framework. Editorial pages provide moral urgency. The diaspora offers the human face. Iran’s real desire for change, its regime’s indisputable brutality sharpened by decades of Western sanctions that have degraded civilian life, gets repurposed as prelude to regime change.

Eisenhower’s Warning and the Industro-Military Fraud

This is the choreography Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 farewell address:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

We are being played, not for the sake of Iran’s stability or the good of its people, but to install a puppet the U.S. can control. A right-leaning palace, eager and grateful for contracts with American and multinational oil giants, ready to hand over the Straits of Hormuz, the rare earths, and the pipelines on a silver platter.

It’s regime change dressed in feminist and humanitarian garb, but the strategy is as old as gunboat diplomacy.

A Civil War in Our Streets

These scuffles in Sydney, and the fault lines spreading to Melbourne, where Victorian laws threaten to mirror NSW’s exceptionalism in pro-Palestine marches, are no mere clashes. They disguise a civil war within our own polity: between those on the unthinking right, cheering empire’s scripts without question, and those who grasp that humanity is complex, unique, wonderful, and entitled—nay, expected—to voice dissent.

It’s a battle for the place of the original, fearless, independent citizen, one encouraged to think for themselves rather than march in lockstep with allies’ agendas. When we police Palestinian grief as a “security breach” but hail Iranian protests as a “democratic awakening,” we are not standing with the oppressed. We are subcontracting our conscience, training obedience as virtue, alignment as morality.

Sovereignty is not a sentiment, not a lapel pin, not a tearful speech at a diaspora rally. It is the right to decide, in our name, what we endorse, what we fund, what we excuse, what we condemn, and what we refuse.

Demand parliamentary inquiries into PARD’s overreach and the selective policing of grief. Insist on equal protection for every voice in our streets, from Gaza’s dead to Tehran’s tortured.

This nation, so proudly independent in myth yet obedient in reality, must call the fraud for what it is, and pause before joining empire’s chorus. Before the closing bell rings. Or the Emperor turns on us.