The Islamic Republic's useful idiots
How TV personality Bushra Shaikh came to shill for the Iranian regime. Plus: some TV recommendations.
As long as there are despotic rulers and totalitarian regimes in this world, there will always be a steady supply of people prepared to defend them.
Iran is no exception. You don’t have to look far for these useful idiots. One of them is British-Pakistani Bushra Shaikh, who first found fame on the BBC reality TV show The Apprentice in 2017. Now she’s a self-styled “news” presenter who makes all sorts of incendiary remarks on social media.
In October 2024, during the ongoing war in Gaza, the TV personality posted on X: “One state solution. Palestine. And send this European problem back to fucking Europe.” After the assassination of Salwan Momika, an Iraqi Christian who publicly burned the Quran, she told her followers on X that such an act “should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”.
Shaikh was also forced to apologise for her comments on homosexuality, which she claimed was “unnatural” in Islam, before seemingly comparing it with paedophilia.
A right charmer. This time Shaikh has come under fire for parroting the Iranian regime’s propaganda.
In a video posted on her Instagram, “reporting” live from the Iranian capital of Tehran (I use the quote marks because this is an insult to actual reporters who risk their lives to bring us the truth), at an apparent pro-government rally, Shaikh said: “There are hundreds, thousands, millions of people here today, coming together to support their nation, the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Maths doesn’t seem to be Shaikh’s strong point. Was it hundreds or millions? It’s quite a big difference… No wonder she got fired on The Apprentice.
She went on to add that Iranians were “saying no to America, saying no to Israel”. Her hair billowing in the breeze, she remarked how free she was in Iran and didn’t have to cover her hair.
(Shaikh was later seen wearing a hijab as she appeared on the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV.)
This is nothing more than propaganda from the Islamic Republic, which is attempting to show women are not brutally oppressed on a daily basis in Iran. Yet the reality is that many women have lost their lives for protesting the mandatory hijab laws, most notably Mahsa Amini, whose death in 2022 ignited nationwide protests under the slogan Woman, Life, Freedom.
Ironically, Bushra once tweeted that many Muslims “want to live under a theocratic system, and many women support mandatory hijab.” This hypocrite removed her own hijab after wearing it for many years, but doesn’t seem to extend that same right to other Muslim women.
Is this really the best the Islamic Republic can do? They must be desperate for support if they’re resorting to paying mouthy grifters to shill for them.
More than a month after protests erupted in Iran, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency says that more than 7,000 people have been murdered by the regime. However, some believe the real figure could be much, much higher, at around 35,000, possibly more. With internet restrictions in place (after weeks of a blackout), it’s hard to verify these numbers.
But Shaikh has no sympathy with Iranians. In the post below, she not only mocked the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, she also joked about the number of Iranians killed simply for demanding basic rights from their government. Utterly nauseating.
I’m loathe to give this ghastly individual more publicity, but such people need to be named and shamed.
Another apologist for the regime is Calla Walsh, the co-founder of Palestine Action U.S. She was one of several handpicked delegates who was taken to Iran, where she expressed solidarity with the Islamic Republic following the 12-day war with Israel.
“It is the greatest honor of my life to be visiting the Islamic Republic of Iran right now, at this moment, while it is under genocidal siege by the United States and the Zionist entity,” said Walsh, standing at the IRGC aerospace expo, with missiles in the background.
She is currently inside Iran, where she tweeted about visiting a mosque that was “burned in the regime change riots”.
Walsh typifies the hard Left’s worldview: that the Iranian state is an anti-imperialist force standing up to Western aggression, and therefore must be defended. Meanwhile, the real losers are the people of Iran who are fighting hard against a sclerotic state incapable not only of meaningful change, but even providing a basic standard of living now that the economy has collapsed.
As long as there are tyrants, there will be people willing to sanitise them, whether it’s out of ideology, vanity or just to get thousands of clicks online.
Iran doesn’t need more useful idiots, and the Iranian people deserve better than moronic influencers posing as journalists while their compatriots are beaten, jailed or murdered.
What I’m watching this week
Speaking of idiots…
The Apprentice is back for series 20 on the BBC. Yes, two decades of bolshie wannabe businessmen and women who desperately try to convince Lord Sugar that he should part with his hard-earned £250,000 and invest it in their (usually rubbish) business idea.
We’re on week three, where the candidates had to make bespoke canapes for a corporate client, plus sell a dish to the public on a market stall. A few of them didn’t even know how to boil an egg! That’s the calibre of this year’s cohorts.
The candidates get progressively worse. Some of the most cringeworthy moments have included creating a toxic face cream that turned skin green, a “pantsman” superhero, a “turd-shaped” cruise logo, and a baby food label that read “First Time Dies”.
My personal favourite was during a task in Morocco, when one hopeless candidate, Michael Sophocles, bought a kosher chicken from… a halal butcher. On his CV, Sophocles described himself as a “good Jewish boy”, probably to curry favour with Lord Sugar. It obviously didn’t work.
For some reason, the programme attracts a disproportionate number of imbeciles or narcissists. I refer you to the aforementioned Bushra Shaikh. Then there’s the disgraced doctor Asif Munaf, who was recently struck off from the medical register after a tribunal found he posted antisemitic, racist and sexist posts on social media.
It’s still fairly entertaining and, most importantly, makes you realise that there are stupider people out there in the world.
I’ve also been bingeing on The Lincoln Lawyer, a gripping courtroom drama about Mickey Haller, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln car. It’s based on a book of the same name.
Season 4 dropped earlier this month and I’m all over it because season 3 ended on a cliff-hanger, and this time Haller isn’t defending a client but himself! Dum dum duuummm.