While a potential war between Iran and Israel threatens to drag in the United States, in addition to its NATO allies, the Western corporate media is attempting to whip up a storm of anti-Iran stories to demonize the country’s government.
(The Last American Vagabond) In the latest saga of media coverage that intends to paint the Iranian government as uniquely violent and oppressive, the corporate media is failing to do its job of looking at even the most basic of facts surrounding the cases they use to demonize Tehran. Although there are certainly issues inside Iran, socially and otherwise, these reports leave out key information and seek only to serve the interests of state-propaganda.
In late October the German government decided to shut down all of its Iranian consulates, located in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich. Berlin’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock also announced that she would seek EU-wide sanctions against Tehran, specifically targeting to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This came in reaction to Iran’s execution of a prisoner named Jamshid Sharmahd, who they accused of leading a terrorist group and of ordering the 2008 bombing of a Mosque that killed 14 innocent people and injured 200 others.
The Islamic Republic of Iran officially put out a red notice for Sharmahd and demanded he be extradited for helping to orchestrate terrorist attacks inside Iranian territory, which was ignored. In 2020, Sharmahd — who was living in California at the time — was traveling for around 3 months and went missing while stopping in Dubai, from which it is alleged he was taken captive by the Iranian security services. Iran later announced that he had been arrested inside Iran in a complex operation, while his phone was tracked to Oman days after his disappearance. It is still unclear whether he had covertly traveled to Iran or was taken captive in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as is being widely reported.
If you look at the reporting on this issue, Sharmahd is portrayed both by his family members and the corporate media as an independent journalist, while the claim of his innocence is also professed. However, there are interviews with Sharmahd on Persian media platforms where he admits to not only being part of a terrorist group, but also appears to brag about his groups involvement in terrorist attacks against civilians.
Iran’s foreign ministry put together a video compilation in which the man is speaking about the 2008 attack, featuring Sharmahd’s admissions to terrorist activity and footage from the mosque explosion. While this is clearly from a biased source and should not be simply taken as evidence at face value, other Farsi speakers have pointed out that other such admissions were captured on video. For instance, an interview conducted on an anti-Iranian government media outlet, featured similar admissions where Sharmahd even advocated a declaration of war on the IRGC, while the presenter appeared boastful about his involvement in the 2008 mosque attack.
This information, which contradicts the narrative of Iran randomly kidnapping an innocent journalists and sentencing him to death for no reason, appears nowhere in the articles and broadcast media coverage of events in Western media.
In reaction to Germany’s decisions, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned the German charge d’affaires in Tehran and called their decision to close the missions of the Islamic Republic “irrational”, as this deprives Iranians of consular services. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, commented on X [Formerly Twitter] that “in support of a terrorist who took 14 innocent lives and injured more than 200 others, the German government is sanctioning tens of thousands of other Iranians holding German passport. Anyone can see the wisdom in this decision”.
Putting aside the morality of the death penalty, which is also present in 27 American States, the refusal to acknowledge the publicly available information implicating Jamshid Sharmahd in the terrorist activities for which he was sentenced demonstrates that this story is being weaponized as anti-Iran propaganda. As for Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s sense of morality, she recently defended Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian civilians by stating that “I made it clear at the United Nations that civilian sites could lose their protected status if terrorists abuse this status”, which triggered a protest letter signed by over 300 academics that called on her to retract her statement.
Rendering a judgement in this case, about whether Sharmahd was guilty or innocent, is not possible without access to further information, due to a lack of access to evidence, which is exactly what Western media has done. The automatic assumption is that this individual had no involvement in terrorist activities whatsoever, a narrative which is contradicted by the publicly available information at hand.
Then we have the more recent case of an Iranian female student who was praised across social media by Iranian opposition figures for “defying a regime that constantly controls women’s bodies“. The video of the young woman pacing back and forth in her underwear went viral on social media, while corporate media outlets jumped to say her actions were a protest. Amnesty International also made this claim, without stating the woman’s name, or having access to further details, calling for an independent investigation into the issue.
There was also the allegation of sexual assault and harassment by the newsletter Amir Kabir, which appears to be based upon an anonymous source claiming that the female student was harassed by members of Iran’s volunteer paramilitary force called the Basij.
The Islamic Azad University, where the woman is said to be a student, later released a statement in which they said their student had suffered from mental illness and had previously sought help for it. Iranian media then produced the claim that the young woman had in fact had a mental breakdown.
What has happened here is again a reflection of how anti-Iranian propagandists weaponize any incident they can, without any regard for what may have truly occurred. According to the anonymous bystander, who is cited as the one behind the claim that this was an act of protest, gave a statement in which the incident does not fit into the framing of a protest, but rather an act of defiance after suffering harassment. If true, and the student was actually harassed and had her hijab torn during a confrontation with volunteer paramilitary members, this would be an example of a serious act of assault resulting in the woman having her jumper torn off and acting against the men in defiance.
However, if she was indeed suffering a mental breakdown, making her a viral example of defiance against her government may severely impact her personal life and cause even greater mental health issues.
CNN admitted in its broadcast report that it could not independently verify the circumstance behind the incident, while continuing to paint the incident in the context of historic abuses against women for violating Iran’s headscarf policy.
So far, the solid facts come in the form of two videos: one which shows the woman walking around in her underwear as fellow students seem to be ignoring her, the second that shows the woman being put into a civilian vehicle by a group of men. Then we have the University’s statement and the reports that the woman had been hospitalized, with no reports that she is being charged with an offense or is imprisoned.
At this point, there is no evidence of abuse from the State, although there are serious allegations against members of Iran’s volunteer force known as the Basij. We don’t know the woman’s name, we have no details other than what has been mentioned here, and this whole incident requires further investigation in order to get to the bottom of it.
There can be no doubt that in Iran there are domestic issues, yet the way these kinds of stories are presented in Western corporate media makes the agenda clear. The US government has imposed, through legislation, many repressive measures against the fundamental freedoms of their citizenry. In addition to this, American police officers carry out rights abuses on a daily basis and there are countless people who have been unjustly executed in several States.
Despite this, the US is not presented as illegitimate, primitive, and uncivilized. So why then are even unverified cases of State abuse highlighted in Iran, used regardless to paint the country in such an incredibly poor light? The answer is that Washington seeks to overthrow the government of Iran and the first step towards doing this is delegitimizing its existence. The US does not care about Iranian women or political dissidents, they seek only to use these causes to achieve their own aims. At the end of the day, if the bombs are dropping on Tehran, they won’t discriminate between man and woman, a monarchist, socialist or Islamist.
In the escalating regional conflict, it appears that Israel and Iran could soon be at war, which may drag the United States into an un-winnable catastrophic conflict. Reports about the “Iranian regime” and its alleged abuses, used only to justify acts of aggression against the nation, are continuous and very often baseless.