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How Iranian Protests Are Reported by the Mainstream Media
According to the New York Times, the mass protests in Iran that the world has been witnessing over the past few weeks represent citizens “demanding an end to the regime”, which has responded by violently trying to quash demonstrations.
“Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have been killed,” the Times reports, citing “rights groups and an Iranian health official.”
About 3,000 people have been killed across Iran, according to the anonymous health official, who “sought to shift the blame to ‘terrorists’ fomenting unrest”, the Times adds.
What the demonstrations show, according to the Times, is “that many Iranians may now believe that the Islamic Revolution in 1979 has failed to address their everyday economic needs and has instead focused on extending its military might through its nuclear enrichment and proxy forces in the region.”
The newspaper thus characterizes Iran’s nuclear program as military in nature, despite Iran’s insistence that it is for energy only and the absence of evidence for an active weapons program.
If one reads far enough down the page, one can also learn from the Times that the economic despair in Iran is a consequence of “harsh sanctions imposed by much of the world over its nuclear program.”
Near the end, the Times also acknowledges “radicalism among the protesters”, with the situation having “turned violent on both sides”.
That’s quoting Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who added, “The regime and the security services see this as an extension of the U.S.-Israeli war and feel they must go full force to get the terrorists.”
The Times thus tacitly concedes that there are terrorists operating in Iran during the mass protests.
A vague reference is then made to the “June war”—meaning the twelve days last summer of US and Israeli airstrikes in Iran, including on three nuclear facilities. According to Iran’s Foundation for Martyrs and Veterans Affairs, as reported by Amnesty International, the joint strikes killed at least 1,100 Iranians, including at least 132 women and 45 children.
Among the protesters “aspiring leaders”, the Times continues, is Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The Shah, or king, was overthrown during the 1979 Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was succeeded by Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
US President Donald Trump has made “threats to intervene”, the Times reports, which “appear to have only solidified the government’s conviction that the demonstrations are a danger that needs to be extinguished.”
That’s a glimpse of the nature of Western mainstream media reporting on the situation in Iran. But as always, there’s much more to the story.
While the Times acknowledges the sanctions and leaves readers to believe Trump’s aim in any intervention would be to help the Iranian people, it omits how the sanctions have been intended to collectively punish Iran’s civilian population in the hopes of sparking a mass uprising.
And while the Times acknowledges that the protests have not remained entirely peaceful, it treats the idea of the US and Israel fomenting the internal violence as a mere pretext for the regime’s harsh crackdown.
Yet, indications are that foreign meddling in Iran has indeed sought to foment violence—including on-the-ground operations by Israel’s intelligence agency the Mossad.
Far from merely expressing rhetorical support for peaceful protests, the transparent aim of this scarcely concealed foreign interference has been to provoke a harsher crackdown, which Trump has already cited as a pretext for another possible military assault on Iran aimed at toppling its government.
Background Context
As is typical for US media reporting, there’s no mention by the Times of how the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s MI6 backed a coup in 1953 to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and reinstall Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as Shah.
The Shah’s increasingly brutal autocracy, including torture and arbitrary detention by the secret police force SAVAK, was a major contributing factor to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
I have also previously reported on the US government’s role in the 2009 “Green Revolution” in Iran, in which authentic grassroots protests were co-opted to foment greater unrest and harsher crackdowns, including by propagating the dubious claim that the presidential election that year was stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
There were also reports at the time, including from investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, that the US and Israel were backing terrorist groups in Iran, including Jundallah, the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), and the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK).
The MEK was at the time on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and was delisted in 2012.
Referring to the joint US-Israeli war on Iran last summer, the Jerusalem Post has reported how, “In June, the Mossad had hundreds of agents involved in Israel’s 12-day war, which set back Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile program, air defense systems, and killed dozens of its top military and intelligence officials.”
Afterward, Mossad Director David Barnea indicated the agency’s presence in Iran would continue by saying Israel “will be there, like we have been there.”
In October, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on an Israeli psychological operation on social media advocating for the installment of exile Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran.
The influence campaign involved fake online personas posing as Iranian citizens.
Pahlavi himself self-contradictorily advocated “nonviolent civil resistance” as a means for change “without outside interference”, while justifying a trip to Israel on the grounds of needing “some international support”.
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“Americans should remember the lessons of past wars, including the war on Iraq, and not be deceived into consenting to yet more criminal violence perpetrated by their own government.”
The question is, those of us do remember – what can we do?
I remember, Jeremy, you had a conversation with Bretigne Shaffer on her podcast about the genocide in Gaza. At the end of the podcast, Bretigne asked you what do you think we should do, and you said, if memory serves, that we should put pressure on our government to stop supporting Israel. Sounds awesome, but – how?
We also should pressure our government to NOT start a war with Iran and to end all sanctions. But again – how? How do we pressure our government to replace the insane foreign policy with the sane one?
Polls have consistently showed that the majority of Americans did not want the US to intervene in Venezuela, and yet we know what happened. Curiously, AFTER the US did intervene, “team Red” people became busy inventing reasons to justify it. At least some of them must be the same people who answered the polls. But what is the most important to them is to defend “their president”.
According to the polls today, 70% of Americans do not want the US to intervene in Iran, either. And yet, IF Trump intervenes regardless, I predict that the usual suspects will immediately tie themselves into pretzels to justify his actions.
Perhaps that’s the root of the problem. But how do we change that?
I wish I had the answer, but the closest approximation to one I can offer is that people need to stop consenting to the madness. I haven’t seen such a poll, but take the 70% of Americans not wanting the US to intervene in Iran. That’s the sensible position, but most who express that view won’t actually do anything to stop it from happening. They won’t speak out publicly against it. It’s just one of those things that may or may not happen, and they may not want it to, but if it does, that’s life, and they just need to deal with their own problems. They aren’t willing to exert any energy toward ensuring it doesn’t happen.
And then you have people who opposed the genocide in Gaza but voted for Trump anyway, even though it was obvious he would continue supporting it just like Biden did.
I did a reader survey a couple years ago and was surprised to learn that even among my own audience, nearly 40% of people did NOT consider themselves as taking an active role in working to make the world a better place.
Please seem generally interested in acquiring information, trying to understand what’s happening in the world, but a big problem is people seek out information that conforms to their pre-existing beliefs. Few seriously challenge their own perspectives. And even among introspective truth seekers, the question of what to DO with knowledge once acquired remains.
I think one of the WORST possible things that Americans can do is to vote every four years for either a Democrat or Republican presidential candidate. People view this action is doing SOMETHING, but all it really does is legitimize the criminal organization in Washington. But that seems to be most people’s idea of taking action to make a difference.
Back when I got started on the path leading me to independent journalism, I was speaking out against the war in Iraq, warning how the government was lying about Iraq having stockpiles of WMDs and active weapons programs. But nobody seemed to want to hear it. Even family and friends were unreachable. They were either totally apathetic, like one college friend saying nobody cares about any of that stuff, or actually supportive of the war.
A loved one went so far as to finally agree that no credible evidence had been presented, but he was SURE that the government must have secret intelligence about Iraq having WMDs that they just can’t share. It was an expression of FAITH in the government.
I couldn’t understand it and struggled with it for a long time, until I finally realized what it was: people have belief systems, and they are unwilling to challenge those beliefs. In this case, the belief was that the government of the USA was generally good and would never LIE to start a war! And no matter how much information I provided that directly contradicted that belief and PROVED it to be false, they just refused to believe the truth because the reality was too uncomfortable for them. They didn’t know how to reconcile it with the belief they’d been indoctrinated into since childhood that, while there are sometimes bad actors in government, the system itself is good. Not just good, but the best. As though the USA were the absolute pinnacle of what human civilization can achieve.
I call it “the state religion”. I think the best thing we can do is help awaken people from that delusion. Until we succeed in that endeavor, the criminal organization in Washington will just go on robbing us and wreaking havoc around the globe. People need to become aware that a better world is possible, but to achieve it requires action that aligns with the goal of eliminating the very institution of statehood.
Organizing society around the principle of non-aggression instead of around the threat or use of force to attain ends as determined by clueless or corrupt bureaucrats is what we need to be working toward.