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WaPo Laments Loss Of News From Iran Which Is Not From Iran
Here is a funny incident in which a mainstream media headline is debunked by the sub-headline following it.
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U.S. foreign aid cuts threaten to choke off information from Iran (archived) – Washington Post
The reduction in funding for Iranian groups, based largely outside Iran, is affecting the work of human rights monitors, news outlets and civic activists.
The piece laments that certain propaganda groups run by Iranian exiles have, under the Trump administration, lost the funds they need to run propaganda campaigns against Iran.
The cut-off of U.S. funds for these groups does not choke off information from Iran. There is plenty out there from the Iranian government as well as from people of all kind who are living in Iran. What is choked off is the distribution of highly selected (or even made up) (dis-)information by anti-Iranian groups in London or Los Angeles.
The piece itself admits this:
The organizations supported by the United States are largely based outside Iran and fall under the umbrella of “democracy promotion.” They include news organizations, programs supporting civil society and monitors collecting information on human rights abuses.
Most of the U.S. support for these groups comes from the State Department’s Near East Regional Democracy fund, known by the acronym NERD, which set up in the aftermath of the 2009 protests by Iranians against their government. In 2024, the Biden administration requested $65 million for NERD, including at least $16.75 million for internet freedom, according to the Congressional Research Service.
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Most organizations that receive U.S. support operate entirely outside Iran. “Most of their work was collecting the statistics and data from other organizations. They don’t have their own sources inside Iran,” said Arsalan Yarahmadi, a founder of the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, one of the most prominent Iranian human rights organizations, which operates with a network of sources inside the country. He said his group does not get U.S. funding.
Yarahmadi said some of the groups that receive U.S. funding do important work but others do little. “Some, all they have is an Instagram page,” he said.
Arsalan Yarahmadi is an Iranian of Kurdish heritage who has left Iran eight years ago and now lives in Erbil in the Kurdish region of Iraq. He seems to dislike the U.S. financed competition to his own propaganda outlet. His Hengaw organization is registered in Norway. Its website gives no hint on who finances it.
The WaPo writer, Susannah George, also laments that the lack of information from outside Iran is effecting the work of "news outlets" which write about Iran.
Is she admitting that part of her job as a Washington Post writer in the Middle East is to copy-paste the press releases by anti-Iranian groups which were financed by the U.S. government? How else could one interpret that?
Salaam to all.
So now we’ll have an analysis of Washington Post’s “article”. Your intelligence will not be insulted in this reading.
First thing to note, before we get started is that only careless readers take Washington Post’s ‘missives’ on face value. After all, have we forgotten that WaPo is one of CIA’s mouthpieces, where American democracy went to languish and then finally die an inglorious death?
Second thing to note is that only fools believe what’s in the funny pages of America’s official democracy undertakers aka “journals of record”.
So CIA is sending a message to stakeholders of Islamic Republic “of Iran”. This is part of the “deal” that is on the table. I’ll decode it for you, it’s e-z-p-z:
(1) CIA offers to stop funding its sock puppets. They exist, this is obviously true. Every one of the major and middle powers have them. IRI has them. Russia has them. USA has them. UK invented the very idea and they have a whole stable of them.
(2) Ominously for genuine Iranian dissidents, CIA promises that there will also be suppression of information space activities that could discomfit the regime in IRI. This is the subtext.
Now to round the picture and see the more important aspect of the “deal” on offer, we need to look what is being offered on the policy level. That’s not Washington Post / CIA’s department.
That is the job of Conuncil of Foreign Relations, CFR, and they too have an official mouthpiece, and it is called Foreign Affairs. Let’s see what’s on offer on the policy level:
This article, What Iran Wants (read: What we’re offering) is a good read. Just like the WaPo variant, it obviously is not going to come out and say: “Let’s make a deal”, so it too ‘paints a picture’. The article basically claims that the West has entirely misunderstood IRI’s extraterritorial behavior. It is not about some metaphysically motivated desire to ‘hasten the coming of the Mahdi’.
No, all this time IRI has been suffering from a sort of PTSD because of the Iran-Iraq war. The “resistance” is not due to estachological and ideological motivations, rather it is just a disguised mechanism for traumatized “Iranians”. A certain Mr. Nasr — father and son have an affinity to graviates to courts of power (they are “spiritual” you see) — is relied on by the author to assure the reader that this is indeed the case. As to the readership in IRI central, the message is: “We’re gonna go along with this narrative if you are willing, bygones be bygones”. Naturally, the “tramatized” ones are implicitly offered security guarantees.
But the kicker comes in the end, this is like famous “Cake” from back in the day to ‘sweeten’ the “deal”. Let’s quote this at lenght:
There is no straightforward way for Iran to recover from the setbacks of the last year. “Today, even if the Islamic Republic chose to abandon forward defense, it would not be easy to do so,” Nasr writes—and that was before Assad’s fall in December. The nuclear dilemma makes Tehran’s position all the more fraught, by likely forcing it into a headlong confrontation with the Trump White House. And unlike in the years after the Iran-Iraq War, when Iran had the advantage of a comparatively youthful leadership, Khamenei and his inner circle have become a gerontocracy, and a new generation is increasingly impatient with clerical rule.
But it may not be the end yet. For all the Islamic Republic’s exhaustion and brittleness, and the readiness of millions of Iranians to take to the streets to express their disdain for it, the people are fiercely protective of their country, and outside attacks tend to bring them together. Increasing the uncertainty is the question of the Iranian succession. Khamenei’s preferred choice to follow him as supreme leader seems to be his second son, Mojtaba, who is 56 and whom Nasr describes as his “principal adviser.” In a recent interview, Abbas Palizdar, a close associate of Mojtaba, referred to widespread corruption in the “ruling circles” of the Islamic Republic and expressed his confidence that should Mojtaba take over from his father, he would not only “break the neck of the corrupt” but also increase social freedoms and release political prisoners. That would put him in the same category of reforming modernizer as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
And yet Mojtaba spent the Iran-Iraq War serving in a battalion of the IRGC that was known for its ideological purity and, according to Nasr, wishes to “perpetuate the strategies of resistance and forward defense born during the war.” He has also shown no sign of being any less committed to the nuclear program than was his father. If Mojtaba does indeed become supreme leader, not only will the Islamic Republic come closer to becoming a hereditary monarchy, but the forward defense may get a second wind.
CFR forcasts fair weather for the future of IRI. “But it may not be the end yet”. Indeed, CFR also signals it is OK with IRI becoming a “hereditary monarchy” [sic]. (They mean hereditary theocracy. Ahl al-Bait? They are not here, you are! It’s not “the end times yet!”. Let’s make a deal. CFR is OK with Mojtaba assuming the ‘mantle’ and he could join the ‘big boys’ club with MBS.
As to the CFR’s “partners” and the geopolitical parameters of the “deal”, well, the ‘partners’ are having meetings in KSA and hashing things out.
I hope you now understand why I flared up earlier.
& Salaam.
Posted by: sunof27 | Mar 9 2025 1:48 utc | 90
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