Respect to the Ayatollah: Mick Wallace and the Logic of Campism

On Sunday evening, while watching Torino v Lazio, a former left MEP posted his solidarity with the Supreme Leader of a state that had just killed seven thousand of its own citizens. This is what campism looks like when it stops pretending. Mick Wallace, until 2024 an Irish MEP from the United European Left, posted the following to Facebook on the evening of 2 March 2026, apparently from a football stadium in Turin: “Respect to Iran. Respect to Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Shame on the Political Class + Media who refuse to call out the lawless Terrorism of Western Imperialism + Zionism.” The hashtag was #TorinoLazio. Let us be precise about what has been said here. Not “oppose the bombing.” Not “solidarity with the Iranian people.” Respect to Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, personally. Khamenei was the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran: the state whose security forces killed over seven thousand protesters between December 2025 and February 2026, whose judiciary sentenced dozens to death for participation in demonstrations, whose internet blackout lasted twenty consecutive days across a country of 92 million people, whose IRGC tortures political prisoners, and which executed Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab incorrectly in 2022 and triggered a generation-defining uprising. That is the man Wallace is paying his respects to. From a football stadium. Between halves. This is not a slip. It is the campist logic reaching its terminus. Wallace has been consistent: oppose whatever Washington supports, endorse whatever Washington opposes. The structural consequence of that position, followed to its conclusion, is personal solidarity with the head of a theocratic dictatorship.