[News] Iran: The Revolution That Never Was

[Anti-Imperialist News]

popularresistance.org
<https://popularresistance.org/iran-the-revolution-that-never-was/>
Iran: The Revolution That Never Was
By Asa Winstanley, Palestine Is Still The Issue - October 16, 2022
------------------------------

[image: image.png] Above Photo: Self-proclaimed leader of the Iran protests
Masih Alinejad meeting with former CIA director Mike Pompeo in 2019. US
State Department.
Don’t Be Fooled: The CIA, MI6 And Mossad Are All Out To Impose Regime
Change.

Iran has been in Western media headlines a lot recently — and as usual,
it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Despite the media
<https://www.channel4.com/news/iran-unrest-when-does-a-protest-become-a-revolution>
 hype about
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/13/revolution-iranian-women-uk-believe-protests-will-bring-freedom>
a
“revolution” coming to Iran, events over the last month have a distinctly
counter-revolutionary whiff about them. This is clearly the case, despite
the fact that there are no doubt legitimate grievances with the Iranian
government to be had.

But the Western media, almosUS t without exception, always follows the line
of Western governments and intelligence agencies.

The very same agencies that have been working to overthrow the Iranian
government for decades (and which carried out a successful coup
<https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2003-11-01/all-shahs-men-american-coup-and-roots-middle-eastern-terror>
against
the elected prime minister of Iran in 1953 so that they could to steal
Iran’s oil).

The Western media never mentions the fact that there is a death toll on the
Iranian government side of the current disturbances — killed by rioters and
shadowy armed elements.

Professor Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran pointed out in an
(extremely hostile, and unfavourably
<https://twitter.com/s_m_marandi/status/1580263810895872002> edited) interview
with CNN this week
<https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2022/10/12/amanpour-iran-protests-mohammad-marandi.cnn>
that
24 Iranian police and members of the Basij militia have been killed to date.

This inconvenient little fact does not exactly chime with the line about a
democratic uprising for women’s rights.

Marandi has also pointed to the fact that these killings began very soon
after the protests, which died down after a few days, as riots and even
armed attacks became more common.

On 30 September, a group of rioters attacked a police station in the
eastern city of Zahedan, in an apparent attempt to seize the arms cache.
Video footage clearly shows some of the protesters were armed.

As the brilliant researcher David Miller recently put it
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/pressing-the-riot-button-in-iran:-the-us-and-zionist-role>,
the CIA has pushed the riot button in the country

US-backed terrorist group the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, has also been
active. Marandi says it has been posting instructions online of how to make
Molotov cocktails and how to use firearms.

The MEK is a bizarre violent cult
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/29/fabricated-nuclear-documents-netanyahu-war-iran/>,
led by its own little dictator, Maryam Rajavi, an Iranian exile in France.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the MEK was a proxy of Saddam Hussein, and
carried out terrorist attacks against Iran from its base across the border.

Until 2012, even the US outlawed it as a terrorist group. Yet it is now
supported by the very same US as a way to punish Iran for its independent,
anti-imperialist foreign policy.

The MEK has also worked in alliance with Israel
<https://truthout.org/articles/how-mossad-justified-its-murder-of-an-innocent-iranian-electrical-engineer/>
to
assassinate Iranian scientists. Recent reports in the Israeli press
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/shalom-from-tehran-israeli-tv-airs-footage-taken-covertly-from-street-protests/>
confirm
that alleged Israeli “journalists” are currently working undercover in Iran
in order to publicise the riots.

Anti-government Iranian exile groups in Western capitals seem to be leading
a lot of the disorder.

One such mob in London attempted to break into the Iranian embassy in South
Kensington a few weeks ago. When their attempts were foiled, they attacked
people on the streets with masonry and bottles — including even police,
several of whom were treated in hospital as a result. The mob also smashed
up a mosque.

The Metropolitan Police released the images of 11 men
<https://news.met.police.uk/news/images-issued-of-protesters-sought-following-disorder-454513>
wanted
in connection with what it described as violent disorder.


For all the talk of “democracy” and “women’s rights,” the Iranian exile
groups’ protests seem to be led by a motley crew of monarchists,
reactionaries, cultists, counter-revolutionaries and imperialists.

I myself saw one of these protests in London last weekend, shortly after
the “human chain” around Parliament for Julian Assange
<https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/assange-supporters-form-human-chain-uk-parliament-2022-10-08/>,
which I had attended that day. It was led by people waving the shah-era
flag of Iran — ironic, considering the fact that they were also chanting
for “democracy.” The shah was anything but democratic — his monarchy
was a brutal
US-UK-backed torture regime
<https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180427-front-companies-and-israels-global-terrorist-network/>
.

The wannabe Iranian politicians in the West are even more disturbing.

The most high profile of them is Masih Alinejad. She claimed in a recent *New
Yorker* profile to be “leading this movement” against the Iranian government
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-exiled-dissident-fuelling-the-hijab-protests-in-iran>.
She has more than 9.1 million “followers” across her three main social
media platforms (although many are likely to be inauthentic bot accounts
<https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/09/25/689814/Murky-web-of-online-and-offline-%E2%80%98regime-change%E2%80%99-plotters-targeting-Iran->
).

In another recent interview
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001ccyh/hardtalk-masih-alinejad-journalist-and-campaigner>,
the BBC put to her the characterisation that she was a “tool of a United
States government which of course has a long standing enmity with Iran”.

She did not deny it, instead responding that “I do not care who funds me.”

In the same interview, Alinejad conceded the fact that she is an employee
of the Voice of America Persian, a US government-funded media outlet. Voice
of America is openly described by mainstream
<https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/24/voice-of-america-donald-trump-propaganda-338790>
 US media
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/10/twitter-us-state-media-ads-voa-persian/> as
a CIA propaganda outlet.

Predictability, as an enemy of a government that has steadfastly supported
Palestinian resistance since 1979, Alinejad is also rabidly pro-Israel. In
June she gave a talk for an Israel lobby group in the US, calling for a
future “democratic” Iran to normalise relations with Israel.

Government documents show
<https://govtribe.com/vendors/masih-alinejad-7dek1> that Alinejad has been
the recipient of more than $628,000 in US federal funding since 2015. But
this is no doubt the tip of the iceberg of US largesse to Iranian exiles
groups.

The death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody was clearly a tragedy. But
it very much appears to me that it is being exploited and misrepresented.

CCTV footage released by the government (see the video below) shows no
evidence of Amini being brutalised by police. But it does show her
collapsing, apparently after a conversation with a policewoman.

CT scans of Amini’s head, released by Iranian doctors, reportedly
<https://twitter.com/snarwani/status/1573033746525462528> show no evidence
of trauma or beating, but do show evidence of previous surgery.

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px;
overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;"
class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>

Be that as it may, I am not ruling out the possibility protesters in Iran
have legitimate grievances against the government.

Yet exactly the same could have been said about Syrians a decade ago.
Reform and legitimate grievances are one thing, but regime change and
terrorism are another.

When there were some protests for reform of the Syrian government back in
2011, they were swiftly co-opted by foreign-backed terrorist groups who
were out to completely destroy the state — especially al-Qaida and ISIS.

I wrote about that in a then-controversial 2013 article
<https://jacobin.com/2013/11/syria-the-revolution-that-never-was/> titled
“Syria: The Revolution That Never Was.”

The title was intended to be attention-grabbing. Re-reading the article in
2022 is interesting. Not only has almost everything I wrote been totally
vindicated, but in comparison
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/syria-rebels-and-regime-share-blame-yarmouk-catastrophe>
 to what has
<https://thegrayzone.com/2016/10/02/syria-campaign-pr-firm-lobbying-regime-change/>
 actually happened
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n08/seymour-m.-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line>
over
the last decade in Syria, the article was, if anything, overly cautious
(indeed, the only thing I got wrong was to miss the possibly that the
“rebels” had obtained chemical weapons. It’s now very clear that they did
<https://thegrayzone.com/2022/09/09/syrian-white-helmets-opcw/>, as the
outstanding reporting of Aaron Maté has shown).

Just as the CIA later admitted to pumping at least $1 billion
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html>
into
its secret war against Syria, no doubt we will learn in the years to come a
lot more about the cash currently being dished out to Iranian exile groups.

Syria was all-but destroyed by a US-led proxy war and only very narrowly
avoided a regime change disaster (similar to the ones that happened in Iraq
and Libya) after Hizballah, Iran and Russia led counter-interventions in
the country, at the request of the Syrian government. As President Donald
Trump put it <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U10p3Tn9V5Y>: “We’re keeping
the oil … We left troops behind only for the oil.”

A massive swathe of north-eastern Syria is still illegally occupied by US
troops
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/how-the-us-occupied-the-30-of-syria-containing-most-of-its-oil-water-and-gas/240601/>
(in
alliance with allegedly “leftist” and “democratic” local Kurdish militias
<https://www.reuters.com/article/syria-oil-usa-idUSL8N2F406U>, who are, in
fact, facilitating the theft of Syrian oil by the US empire
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEMWcHtqWyU>).

It would be a crime to allow the same thing to happen in Iran today.

There’s a lot of similarities between what happened in Syria then and what
is happening in Iran now. In both cases, there have been massive western
propaganda campaigns
<https://thegrayzone.com/2016/10/02/white-helmets-us-military-intervention-regime-change-syria/>
 and online psy-ops <https://thecradle.co/Article/Analysis/16372> to push
for regime change and whitewash the riots as a “democratic uprising.”

Don’t be fooled.
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