Oh hey blatant Hasbara made by a UK website that justified the UK’s slave trade as a positive thing for the slaves. What a surprise.
And posted by a UK account that justified killing journalists and children.
I wonder what their dual nationality is.
Omg some of the responses here are so disregulated. Guys, it’s not that difficult, two things are true at once:
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The Iranian regime is horrible, it violates human rights, it stifles the legitimate aspirations for freedom and democracy of progressive Iranian people using brutal methods. The people at the business end of Iranian state violence deserve our sympathy and solidarity.
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The US and Israel should be defeated out of their illegal murderous war against Iran, and should be made to pay reparations for the horrible crimes they inflicted on the country.
In fact, motherfucker, the US and Israel are strengthening the Iranian regime’s political position. They are literally making it impossible for Iranian patriotic progressives to fight for a better Iran.
So yea, if we’re talking about the Iranian army kicking American and Israeli asses? Good on them. If we’re talking about the Iranian police and guard busting Iranian skulls? Fuck them to hell.
Don’t be campists kids, just don’t.
You forgot about the third thing that is most true: Iran is defending the entire region against genocide and imperialism from terrorist attacks by the West.
And if you truly think that the start of another Western genocide is the time to criticize the government of the genocided then you are fully on board with it.
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Cool. Now do Israel and the US
If it helps I had no idea which country it was until competing the sentence.
Honey wake up time for your daily portion anti-Iran propaganda by TheGuardian
The Iran regime sucks, it’s authoritarian and brutal.
Yet I can’t help but having a nagging feeling that the reason we are hearing these stories, is to help justify the next move of Israel/USA.There is no doubt that USA is a huge part of the reason it is as bad as it is now in Iran, because half a century of sanctions against Iran has undermined their economy, and bad economy is a major factor of the internal problems of Iran. Life threatening poverty has a strong tendency to lead to violence.
Iran might have been on a path to a more civil society when moderates were at power. However this was against Israels plan to picture the local rival as force of evil… so Trump singlehandedly ended the nuclear deal Iran was kept word in and proved to the Iraninan leaders that ‘the West’ can’t be trusted. Next election saw a switch to more conservativism and repression, just as intended.
I’d say you’re right.
It is like condemning Hamas for violent resistance after Israel completely shot up the peaceful Hamas peaceful march of return against occupation in 2017 with full backing of the West, and so many other Palestinian attempts at a peaceful resolution which were met with bloody massacres from their oppressors.
Yeah oppressed people are going to learn a lesson. They will become “hardliners” who “no longer trust the West”. And they should be praised not falling for it again.
No doubt the sanctions and theft of Iranian assets have radicalized the country, both the regime and following that the opposition too.
The international community that participated in this are all guilty of crimes against humanity.
Deepa Parent at The Guardian has been churning these articles out at a steady pace, often pushing out inflated death tolls of Iranian civilians and citing unconfirmed sources. Any story from her should be considered highly suspect at best and consent-manufacturing propaganda at worst.
https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/01/guardian-iranian-death-toll-concocted-monarchist-doctors/amp/
The Grayzone is a disinformation blog that exists to defend authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, al-Assad’s Syria, and China. They specifically e.g. whitewash China’s ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang, deny al-Assad’s chemical attack on Douma, and support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
You surely know this, of course, if you’re citing them. I’m just clarifying for others.
You may not be a fan of the source, but the facts in the article speak for themselves
- Parent went from being a fashion journalist to an Iran “expert” in a suspiciously short space of time
- She has published multiple articles making bold claims about the violence perpetrated by the Iranian regime that no other outlet has verified
- She has pushed 30,000 death toll figure based on little to no evidence
- Her articles often cite unknown or unverified sources, e.g. “a student in Tehran said …”
Other outlets that challenge the alleged death toll numbers, include Zeteo [link], just FYI.
You may not be a fan of the source
That’s an odd way to say that the source is uncredible and a mouthpiece for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity of authoritarian regimes. You know, like the kinds of crimes being discussed here.
And outlets like The Guardian and The BBC are responsible for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity committed by Israel and its Western allies.
Does that make every article written for them fundamentally untrue?
Okay, so you just fundamentally don’t understand or care about how source credibility, bias, or anything outside of a black-and-white binary works. Taken in the extreme, I can’t say “Hey guys, check out this InfoWars source*” and then claim “but mainstream outlets are biased and lie too!!” when I’m rightly called out for it.
Yeah, sources like BBC News are biased for e.g. Israel’s genocide in Palestine. That’s why we normally treat them with a grain of skepticism when they report on things like that; for BBC News specifically, I’d probably just find a better source if I want reporting on Israel in Palestine or Lebanon. Nonetheless, it’s not ridden with unhinged conspiracy theories about how e.g. al-Assad never carried out an illegal chemical attack on his own people or AI-hallucinated disinformation about Alexei Navalny.
The Grayzone is a quintessential mouthpiece that exists effectively solely for that purpose.
* Edit: I guess I actually can cite them now and it’d be kind of funny. God bless you, Tesseract.
China’s ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang
What is rarely mentioned in Western reports is the international support China has received on its Xinjiang policies. In July 2019, ambassadors from thirty-seven countries sent a joint letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council commending China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” and noting that “safety and security has returned to Xinjiang” with “not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang” in three consecutive years. The signatories included Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as well as others from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.14 By June 2021, this number had grown to sixty-nine countries issuing a statement in defense of China’s policies, with twenty-eight of these being members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), founded in 1969 to bring Muslim-majority countries into conversation with each other.15 This organization itself, after sending delegations to Xinjiang, issued a report in March 2019 praising China for “providing care to its Muslim citizens.”16
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-idea-of-the-uyghur-genocide-and-the-realities-of-xinjiang/
The International Association of Genocide Scholars has condemned the Chinese policies in Xinjiang as genocide.
One can’t in good conscience cite the IAGS as an authority when they condemn the genocide in Gaza and then ignore them when they condemn the genocide in Xinjiang.
One can’t in good conscience cite the IAGS as an authority when they condemn the genocide in Gaza and then ignore them when they condemn the genocide in Xinjiang.
Then it’s a good thing I’m not doing that.
Is there a genocide happening in Gaza? And if your answer is yes, on what basis are you saying that?
Yes, there is. Based of a plethora of sources - some more reputable than others.
The signatories included Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates
Wow, I’m so impressed that bastions of human rights like checks notes Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, and Qatar found China’s cultural-genocidal “achievements” “remarkable”.
Was this actually meant to sway anyone, or were you just hoping copy–pasting this would get people to zone out, not read it, and just passively agree you’d said something convincing?
Edit: Anyway, here’s a good debunk of that article by Modern Chinese historian and socialist David Brophy. I disagree with Brophy on the subject of “genocide” because it’s very clearly a cultural one (whereas he’s using the one about killing off etc. of a group), but he nonetheless compellingly points out that the article you linked is a crock of shit. Even disregarding that they used AI to write it and provably hallucinated sources, it’s still a sloppy piece of propaganda.
Wow, I’m so impressed that bastions of human rights like
Right back atcha
Oh, okay, so you’re pulling a disingenuous whataboutism for someone who wasn’t even being discussed.
I didn’t offer Adrian Zenz’s opinion for the same reason I wouldn’t have offered Saudi Arabia’s. You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia which is why I criticized you for doing so. I instead offered the opinion of David Brophy excoriating that piece of AI slopaganda but who you completely sidestepped because his article competently and credibly drags the Monthly Review one into the street and puts it out of its misery.
It’s actually kind of hilarious that you’re (unsurprisingly) doing one of the main things Brophy criticizes Prashad and Chak for in the debunk I seriously doubt you cared to read.
Edit: And by the way, just because I didn’t even think to earlier because I was more frustrated with your invoking someone never discussed here than I was with what he said: here’s the full context.
He was replying to Michael D. Swaine, who wrote:
Other than the fact that “he” alone did not do this, that many CN actually like greater surveillance, and that the camps are a gross overreaction to a real problem, no. But I was thinking more of the BRI nonsense, “quasi-emperor for life,” “play by its own rules,” MIC 2025, etc.
Zenz replied:
Many Germans liked Hitler’s control mechanisms. They reduced crime and rid society of unpopular minorities. @Dalzell60
You deliberately took this out of context. He’s literally using Hitler to describe how many people liking bigoted authoritarian measures doesn’t make it a good thing.
He’s still part of an expressly right-wing think tank, so I’m not suddenly endorsing things he’s written about China’s cultural genocide. What I am saying is that this is the dumbest possible way you could’ve smeared his credibility – by picking out a quote where he’s obviously and fully criticizing Hitler.
Coming into a comment thread that is calling out the manufacturing consent against Iran, and bleating “but Xinjiang!” is whataboutism if I’ve ever seen it.
And yes, you are parroting Zenz. He is the source of this myth - via countless western sources regurgitating the same claims he’s been making since 2018.
In March 2017, the Jamestown Foundation (Washington DC) published a three thousand-word report on “Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State” written by Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.1 A few months later, the same writers published another report, this one slightly longer at nearly five thousand words, with the more aggressive title, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang.”2 At that time, there was not much interest in these stories. Zenz came from the Victims of Communism Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the U.S. Congress in 1993 and funded by various right-wing sources, including the Heritage Foundation.
You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia
And, ya know, a plethora of others that you decided to ignore for some reason… Associating a large swath of Muslim and Arab nations with human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia really lets your racism show.
They are showing evidence that the leading Muslim countries in the world support China’s policies in Xinjiang.
Disagreeing is one thing but you should at least demonstrate reading comprehension.
you should at least demonstrate reading comprehension
I did comprehend, and I’m not falling for it; citing e.g. Saudi Arabia on any matter of human rights is patently ridiculous. The fact the Uyghurs are predominantly Muslim doesn’t automatically mean nakedly corrupt predominantly Muslim nations with extreme records of human rights abuses are going to stick up for them, and dressing it up that way to give it a veil of credibility is frankly disgusting.
Well presumably these nations care about Muslim culture. Are you saying they dont actually care about the Muslim people in Xinjiang? Thats a lot of Muslim countries listed, and you cherry picked a few out of them. Are they all wrong? Why would they defend the genocide of a Muslim group?
Nah, the kind of violence we are talking about here has nothing to do with sanctions/Israel/USA. It’s the regime against the people, not people against each other. And this is 100% the regime’s responsibility. Israeli and US leadership is bad, but it has nothing to with the regime’s brutality. Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them. Plus they run a very corrupt and inefficient economy anyway.
“Corrupt and inefficient economy” they are able to fight the world’s most expensive army while still actively selling munitions to Russia while also at a food surplus while also managing to punish a dozen US allies that picked sides poorly. Even the CIA admits they could keep this up for YEARS.
They have a far more efficient economy than any country in the west – all developing countries do by necessity.
Ok, this is just blatant propaganda. Everything you just wrote is hilariously false or a misrepresentation of the issue at hand. But by all means, continue believing that fucking Iran’s economy is superior to that of the “western world”…
Calling everything that disagrees with your owners’ world view “propaganda” is just pure slavebrained behavior.
Yes, the fact they are able to feed themselves while under crushing sanctions and even have a fucking space program means they have a more efficient economy than say, the US with it’s 1% hunger rate or the UK which is starting to kick people out of housing because they ‘can’t afford it.’ They are able to accomplish the same thing every society has as a goal – taking care of its people better than if they were on their own – with 1/10,000th of the resources.
Developing countries that aren’t in famine are indeed better economies than developed countries, because they don’t have developing countries to exploit to prop up their economy.
Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them.
They had already agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons, and let international observers in to verify, in the talks that ended apruptly when the US and Israel started bombing them.
And before that, there had already been a deal in place, which the US unilaterally pulled out of.True. But only one part of a bigger picture.
So do you complain in stories about Trump doing stupid and evil things with “a nagging feeling that it’s just to help justify the next move of Iran?”
You admit the Iranian government “sucks” yet news of them doing bad things surely must be American propaganda? Even from a British paper?
Conspiracy thinking does us all no good.
The British with help by the Americans are pretty much the reason why the current regime is in charge
Yes - conspiracy theorists are great at finding any and all possible supporting evidence no matter how poor. Just vague general “relationships” is sufficient.
They’ve worked together in the past != The guardian ran this to support Trump.
WTF? This is in no way a conspiracy, this has been known for decades, USA instated the Shah to get control of the Iranian oil.
And your false equivalence is outright stupid.That isn’t the conspiracy. The conspiracy is therefore this article is propaganda.
No you are way off, the nationality of the outlet has very little bearing on whether it might be American propaganda or not.
Claiming that because it’s a British outlet it can’t be American propaganda is outright moronic.That’s not what I’m claiming. Thanks for playing.
It can be true but also propaganda, or just coincidentally the kind of news Zionists would like to see (truthfully). It’s hard to tell.
I think it’s worth including this meta context when discussing the article.
It can also just be an article about an objectively totalitarian regime doing horrible things.
Sometimes a banana is just a banana.
Straw man argument.
Trying so hard to manifacture consent.
I didn’t read the headline fully and only midway through the article i realized it was about Iran, not Israel.
It is written by a notorious Zionist as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFdDoez4Is4
I was going to post a satirical comment about how the Mossad must be involved in this. Never mind. No need to highlight how warped many of the viewpoints here are.
