Debunking Western atrocity propaganda against Iran to manufacture consent for war
The revolution will not be tweeted.
Originally posted on my Facebook on February 9, 2023:
I don't hear a peep from all those "leftists" calling for regime change in Iran because of their alleged targeted killings and abuse of women and girls, stories amplified by Western mainstream and social media with zero verification or correction, some of them clearly fabricated out of whole cloth, and loudly virtue-signalling their "solidarity" with CIA/MI6/Saudi intelligence/Mossad-manufactured "revolutions" ignoring the terrorist attacks and violent riots killing innocent, unarmed people, burning ambulances, etc.
I guess "No War with Iran" is not as sexy for the New Left as "Women, Life, Freedom" even though Israeli and US bombing of Iran - the "obliteration" promised by Hillary Clinton, the "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" promised by John McCain - would deprive Iranian women of both life and freedom. But does that matter when Western and Westernised US-worshipping liberals have a chance to signal how virtuous, feminist, and pro-Iranian women they are?! Bomb liberation into them as usual (after the policy of starving them into liberation through brutal sanctions failed), you "leftists" and "feminists". It worked so well for Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Somali, Pakistani and Yemeni women.
The fact that "No War With Iran" is mutually exclusive with "Women, Life, Freedom" suggests that the latter is an exercise to manufacture consent for war. It is not politically possible to say the former, if you've been shouting the latter for months; if you disagree with the war now, you are pro-Hitler 3.0. Noam Chomsky showed us how manufacturing consent works; we've seen it happen again and again - you could not oppose the Iraq War or you were pro-Saddam, who ordered his army to pull babies out of incubators, according to a story cooked up by a Western PR firm. You could not oppose the Libyan war or you were pro-Gaddafi, who was the Hitler of his time; you cannot question the NATO proxy war in Ukraine because Putin is Hitler 2.0. And yet Western and Westernised liberals fall for it so eagerly, without question, without critical thought, eager to serve empire because the propaganda and demonisation of an enemy country is right this time. So much racism, Orientalism, othering and White/Western supremacy and exceptionalism had to go into creating this population of gullible war-cheerleading drum-beating jingoistic liberals.
See the following links for sources, facts and information.
"Western media coverage of events in Iran since September has been misleading at best and intelligence agency disinformation at worst (more often than not it has been the latter). Unfortunately this is par for the course when it comes to British and American media coverage of official enemy states like Iran. The coverage is so distorted as to be worse than useless.
Almost entirely missing from the misleading narrative of a brave national protest movement crying “woman, life, freedom,” is one simple fact — the same Western intelligence agencies setting so much of the media narrative are also leading a low-intensity proxy war against Iran.
The protest movement, such as it is, has been used as a cover by the armed terrorist groups currently attacking the country. In essence, this is an attempt by the CIA, MI6 and Israel’s Mossad to repeat the same strategy of proxy war that they carried out in Syria beginning in 2011."
"Introduction
The Trouble with Tehran: U.S. Policy Options toward Iran
Part II Disarming Tehran: The Military Options
Chapter 3: Going all the Way: Invasion
Chapter 4: The Osiraq Option: Airstrikes
Chapter 5: Leave it to Bibi: allowing or encouraging an Israeli Military strike
Part III Toppling Tehran: Regime Change
Chapter 6: The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising
Chapter 7: Inspiring an Insurgency: supporting Iranian Minority and opposition Groups
Chapter 8: The Coup: supporting a Military Move against the Regime
Conclusion
Crafting an Integrated Iran Policy: Connecting the Options"
"Which Path to Persia? Options for a new American strategy toward Iran", 2009, from the Brookings Institute, Democrat thinktank that crafts US government strategy on imperialist war
On the authors:
"The aim of this exercise was to highlight the challenges of all the options and to allow readers to decide for themselves which they believe to be best. ... This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
Kenneth Pollack ... served as Director for Persian Gulf affairs and Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council, senior research Professor at National Defense University, and Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA.
Martin Indyk ... served in several senior positions in the U.S. government, most recently as ambassador to Israel and before that as assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs and as special assistant to President Clinton and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian affairs in the National Security Council.
Daniel Byman ... has held positions with the National Commission on terrorist attacks on the United states (the “9/11 commission”), the Joint 9/11 inquiry and senate intelligence committees, the RAND corporation, and the U.S. government.
Suzanne Maloney ... has worked on the state Department’s Policy Planning staff where she provided policy analysis and recommendations on Iran, Iraq, the Gulf states, and broader Middle East issues. Before joining the government, she was the Middle East adviser at ExxonMobil corporation and served as project director of the task Force on U.S.-Iran relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Michael E. O’Hanlon is ... a former defense budget analyst who advised Members of Congress on military spending, he specializes in Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan, Homeland Security, Nuclear Strategy, the use of military force, and other defense issues.
Bruce Riedel ... served as chairman of President Obama’s strategic review of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. in 2006, he retired after 30 years service at the CIA including postings overseas in the Middle East and Europe. He was a senior adviser on the region to the last four presidents of the United States as a staff member of the National Security Council at the White House. He was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Near East and South Asia at the Pentagon and a senior adviser at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels."
https://wikispooks.com/w/images/9/94/Which_Path_to_Persia.pdf
"Western leftists who go out of their way to amplify protests that are part of an ongoing imperial propaganda operation have an irresponsible relationship with that reality. They're not doing anything that actually helps the people in those countries, but they are absolutely doing something that could end up hurting them. And if they're really honest with themselves they know this. But they do it anyway because it looks good in front of their propaganda-addled leftish friends and followers.
Before they drop bombs, they drop narratives. Before they launch missiles, they launch propaganda campaigns. Before they roll out sanctions, they roll out perception management. If you choose to help them do this by participating in their propaganda campaigns, then you are just as complicit in their consequences as the military personnel who carry them out. Regardless of whatever leftist-sounding justifications you might spin for yourself about why you did it."
“Symbolic slogans, banners and props are a staple of western-styled ‘color revolutions.’ Iran saw the full impact of these tools in the ‘Green’ movement during the 2009 elections. The use of visual tools (a picture is worth a thousand words) to sum up a theme or aspiration that is instantly understandable to a wide audience – this is basic marketing. People do this in elections all the time, but now these concepts are being effectively utilized in information warfare at a geopolitical level.
The use of the green colonial-era flag in Syria was an easy way to quickly draw a larger number of the Syrian population into the ‘opposition’ tent. Basically anyone who had a grievance with the government – whether political, economic, social, religious – was urged to identify with the protest movement under the banner of this new flag. Syrian activists began to mobilize masses by ‘naming’ Friday protests, using language that sought to craft the opposition’s direction and to slowly Islamize it.
Slogans and props are easy propaganda tricks to employ to draw ‘uncommitted’ members of the population into embracing an anti-government position. Identity tools are an essential component of regime-change operations. You have to delegitimize the existing national symbols in order to craft new ones.
In Iran, the image of the young woman without her hijab swiftly became one of the symbols of the protests on social media. Ironically, the hijab could potentially be viewed as an ‘identity prop’ for the 1979 Islamic Revolution – an easily identifiable symbol which immediately identified a distinct political or religious outlook. As a result, in foreign-backed propaganda assaults on Iran, the hijab will almost always be a target to delegitimize or mock.”
https://thecradle.co/article-view/19259
"Decoding the Pentagon’s online war against Iran
From a click of a button in the US to violence on the streets of Tehran, the latest protests in Iran are being engineered and provoked from outside
The civil unrest in Iran in response to the recent death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was waiting at a Tehran police station, although rooted in legitimate grievances, also bears the hallmark of a western-sponsored covert war, covering multiple fronts.
Mere days after the protests erupted on 16 September, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had initiated a wide-ranging audit of all its online psyops efforts, after a number of bot and troll accounts operated by its Central Command (CENTCOM) division – which covers all US military actions in West Asia, North Africa and South and Central Asia – were exposed, and subsequently banned by major social networks and online spaces.
The accounts were busted in a joint investigation carried out by social media research firm Graphika, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which evaluated “five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.”
Published in late August, it attracted minimal English-language press coverage at the time, but evidently was noticed, raising concerns at the highest levels of the US government, prompting the audit.
While the Washington Post ludicrously suggested the government’s umbrage stemmed from CENTCOM’s egregious, manipulative activities which could compromise US “values” and its “moral high ground,” it is abundantly clear that the real problem was CENTCOM being exposed.
CENTCOM’s geographical purview includes Iran, and given the Islamic Republic’s longstanding status as a key US enemy state, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a significant proportion of the unit’s online disinformation and psychological warfare efforts were directed there.
A key strategy employed by US military psyops specialists is the creation of multiple sham media outlets publishing content in Farsi. Numerous online channels were maintained for these platforms, spanning Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Telegram.
In some cases too, fake journalists and pundits, with numerous “followers” on those platforms emerged, along with profile photos created via artificial intelligence.
...
Their respective YouTube channels pumped out numerous short-form videos, presumably in the hope they would be mistaken for organic content, and go viral on other social networks. The researchers identified one instance in which media outlets elsewhere had embedded Dariche News content into articles.
An army of bots and trolls
Some of the fake news organizations published original material, but much of their output was recycled content from US government-funded propaganda outfits such as Radio Farda and Voice of America Farsi.
They also repurposed and shared articles from the British-based Iran International, which appears to receive arm’s length funding from Saudi Arabia, as did several fake personas attached to these outlets.
These personas frequently posted non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in order to increase their authenticity. They also engaged with real Iranians on Twitter, often joking with them about internet memes.
Pentagon bots and trolls used different narrative techniques and approaches in an attempt to influence perceptions and engender engagement. A handful promoted “hardliner” views, criticizing the Iranian government for insufficiently hawkish foreign policy while being excessively reformist and liberal domestically.
...
Orchestrated opposition
Overwhelmingly though, Pentagon-linked accounts were viciously critical of the Iranian government, and the IRGC. Numerous Pentagon bots and trolls sought to blame food and medicine shortages on the latter, which was likened to ISIS, and posting videos of Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu.
...
Scattershot fury
There were also cloak-and-dagger initiatives intended to damage Iran’s standing in neighboring countries, and undermine its regional influence. Much of this work seems to have been concerned with spreading panic and alarm, and creating a hostile environment for Iranians abroad.
For instance, accounts targeting audiences in Afghanistan claimed that Quds Force personnel were infiltrating Kabul posing as journalists in order to crush opposition to the Taliban. They also published articles from a US military-linked website that claimed on the basis of zero evidence that the bodies of dead refugees who’d fled to Iran were being returned to their families back home with missing organs.
...
Iraq was a country of particular interest to the Pentagon’s cyber warriors, with memes widely shared throughout Baghdad and beyond depicting IRGC influence in the country as a destructive disease, and content claiming Iraqi militias, and elements of the government, were effective tools of Tehran, fighting to further Iran’s imperial designs over the wider West Asia.
...
Laying the ground
Other CENTCOM psychological warfare (psywar) narratives have direct relevance to the protests that have engulfed Iran.
There was a particular focus among one group of bots and trolls on women’s rights. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women’s opportunities abroad with those in Iran – one meme on this theme contrasted photos of an astronaut with a victim of violent spousal abuse – while others promoted protests against the hijab.
Alleged government corruption and rising living costs were also recurrently emphasized, particularly in respect of food and medicine – production of which in Iran is controlled by the IRGC, a fact CENTCOM’s online operatives repeatedly drew attention to.
Women’s rights, corruption, and the cost of living – the latter of which directly results from suffocating US sanctions – are all key stated motivating factors for the protesters.
Despite the rioters’ widespread acts of violence and vandalism, targeted at civilians and authorities alike, such as the destruction of an ambulance ferrying police officers away from the scene of a riot, they also claim to be motivated by human rights concerns.
Establishment and fringe journalists and pundits have dismissed as conspiracy theories, any suggestions that protests in Iran and beyond are anything other than organic and grassroots in nature.
Yet, clear proof of foreign direction and sponsorship abounds, not least in the very public face of the anti-hijab movement, Masih Alinejad, who for many years has encouraged Iranian women to ceremonially burn their headscarves from the confines of an FBI safehouse in New York City, then publicizes the images online, which travel round the world and back via social media and mainstream news outlets.
A regime-change war by other means
Alinejad’s activities have generated a vast amount of fawning and credulous media coverage, without a single journalist or outlet questioning whether her prominent role in the supposedly grassroots, locally-initiated protest movement is affiliated with foreign hostile interference.
This is despite Alinejad posing for photos with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, and receiving a staggering $628,000 in US federal government contracts since 2015.
Much of these funds flowed from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency that oversees propaganda platforms such as Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, the latter of which has produced a Farsi-language show fronted by Alinejad for seven years.
These clusters of social media posts may appear innocuous and authentic in an age of click-bait and viral fake news, yet when aggregated and analysed, they form a potent and potentially dangerous weapon which it turns out is one of many in the Pentagon’s regime-change arsenal."
https://thecradle.co/article-view/16372
"Setareh Sadeghi, an Esfahan, Iran-based scholar and teacher, provides Max Blumenthal with a view of Iran’s protests against the country’s morality police and the death of Mahsa Amini never heard in US mainstream. Sadeghi explains that while many Iranians oppose the morality police, the protests have failed to spread far outside Tehran, and have relied heavily on social media amplification from the outside - including from neoconservative elements hell bent on regime change - to magnify the impact of the protests. Sadeghi also addresses the impact of US sanctions on Iranian women, and details civil disobedience by Iranian women that has never registered in Western media."
"Iran’s protests have been more enduring than previous waves. Some call it a CIA-backed color revolution while others say it is a popular movement. There have been significant incidents of armed violence. And there is no doubt that Iran’s enemies will take advantage of any sign of weakness as they do in all countries deemed rogue.
To better understand what's going on and what we can expect, Rania Khalek was joined by Mohammad Marandi, professor of english literature and orientalism at the University of Tehran."
"Navid Zarrinnal, a Columbia Univ. PhD and Iranian scholar at Stanford University, joined Rania Khalek to help make sense of the unrest in Iran over the morality police or guidance patrol amid the death of Mahsa Amini and the way Western governments are using a legitimate grievance to promote instability in Iran. They also discuss the way the protests have been exaggerated by Western anti-Iran media, the role of hawkish exiles in promoting false narratives about a “revolution” and the actual conversation about the hijab mandate taking place inside Iran."
"The Biden administration has walked so far away from the negotiations that another senior US official recently said that because of Iran’s response to protests and because of its support for Russia in the war in Ukraine, "even if Iran came back to the table today and said it wanted a nuclear deal, the U.S. was unlikely to move forward."
That senior Biden official went on to say that the US is virtually considering the deal dead and is "taking steps to ensure the US has a ready military option."
...
On October 27, after a long delay, the US Department of Defense finally released its Nuclear Posture Review. The review contained a bombshell that failed to explode in the media because it was understandably lost in the glare of three other bombshells that the Secretary of Defense dropped.
The US insistence that it would use a nuclear weapon in a first strike, that it would use a nuclear weapon in the face of a conventional threat and that it would use a nuclear weapon, not only to defend itself, but to defend an ally were colossal enough to draw all the attention.
But that meant that what went unnoticed was the colossal admission that Iran is not even building a nuclear weapon nor has it even made a decision to pursue one. The Nuclear Posture Review makes that admission, not once, but twice. And the admission is made again in the National Defense Strategy in which it is included.
The Nuclear Posture Review first says that "Iran does not currently pose a nuclear threat but continues to develop capabilities that would enable it to produce a nuclear weapon should it make the decision to do so." It then formulates the truth about Iran in the greatest clarity: "Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.""
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2022/11/03/us-admits-iran-is-not-building-a-bomb/
Yes, the blood will be on the hands of those who participate in manufacturing consent for this war, and who fail to oppose the annihilation of yet another country for US empire's hegemonic goals. Especially those in the West who have the power to pressure their governments. Act now to stop the war against Iran.
"Top United Nations experts wrote a letter to the United States government, emphasizing that its illegal unilateral sanctions on Iran violate the human rights of the Iranian people, calling for them to “be eased or lifted completely.”"
"There is a long history of Western countries fuelling public unrest in Iran. Regime change agenda must be there in the Western calculus but, curiously, Washington is also signalling interest in reaching an accommodation with Tehran under certain conditions relating to the regime’s foreign and security policies in the present international milieu.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian stated explicitly on Monday that the US and a number of other Western countries have incited riots, because “one of the US’ objectives was to force Iran to make big concessions at the negotiating table” for the revival of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Amirabdollahian’s remark followed some megaphone diplomacy by Rob Malley, the US special envoy on Iran last weekend.
Speaking in Rome, Malley connected the dots and outlined the linkages in the matrix. He said: “The more Iran represses, the more there will be sanctions; the more there are sanctions, the more Iran feels isolated. The more isolated they feel [isolated], the more they turn to Russia; the more they turn to Russia, the more sanctions there will be, the more the climate deteriorates, the less likely there will be nuclear diplomacy. So, it is true right now the vicious cycles are all self-reinforcing. The repression of the protests and Iran’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is where our focus is because that is where things are happening, and where we want to make a difference.”
In effect, Malley admitted that the Joe Biden Administration is a stakeholder in the ongoing protests in Iran. Importantly, he also hinted that although Iran has taken a series of fateful decisions that make a full revival of the nuclear deal and a lifting of some economic sanctions a political impossibility for now, the door to diplomacy is not shut if only Iran’s leadership changed course on relations with Russia.
In further remarks to Bloomberg on Saturday, Malley said that “Right now we can make a difference in trying to deter and disrupt the provision of weapons to Russia and trying to support the fundamental aspirations of the Iranian people.”
As he put it, Washington now aims to “disrupt, delay, deter and sanction” Iran’s weapon deliveries to Russia, and any supplies of missiles or assistance in the construction of military production facilities in Russia “would be crossing new lines.”
In sum, Malley has linked the US approach toward Iran’s protests with Tehran’s foreign and security policies in regard of Russia and its war in Ukraine.
...
Clearly, Malley’s remarks hinted that amidst the US’ support for protests in Iran, it still remains open to doing business with Tehran if the latter rolls back its deepening strategic partnership with Moscow and refrains from any involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.
In fact, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi (who holds Washington’s brief) also chipped in with a remark on Monday that the UN watchdog has no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon programme, implying that the resumption of negotiations in Vienna faces no “systemic” block.
...
The bottom line is that the protests in Iran are assuming the proportions of a casus belli. The US has internationalised Iran’s internal upheaval.”
https://www.newsclick.in/US-internationalises-iran-unrest
"I frankly think that crisis initation is really tough. And it's very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran. Which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming, that the traditional way that America gets to war is what would be best for US interests. Some people might think that Mr Roosevelt wanted to get us into World War 2, you may recall he had to wait for Pearl Harbour. Some people might think that Mr Wilson wanted to get us into World War 1, you may recall he had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam, you may recall they had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn't go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded, and may I point out that Mr Lincoln did not feel that he could call out the Federal Army until Fort Sumpter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumpter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians said would cause an attack - so if in fact, the Iranians aren't going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war."
<laughter>
"One can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Someday one of them might not come up. Who would know why? We could do a variety of things if we wish to increase the pressure. I'm not advocating that, but I'm just suggesting that this is not a either-or proposition of you know, just the sanctions has to succeed or other things. We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier than that."
- Complete, unedited video of Patrick Clawson's responses to questions regarding U.S. policy toward Iran at a Policy Forum in Washington, DC, on September 21, 2012.