Originally published at TMJ News Network – republished with permission of the author
Without awaiting any investigation presenting evidence for the cause of Mahsa Amini’s death, which took place shortly after she was arrested by the authorities for not complying with the state’s defined dress code, Western media outlets were quick to blow the trumpet of hysteria. These included claims that, “women are waving their headscarves in the air and lighting them on fire as crowds chanted “women, life, freedom,” “death to the dictator,” and “Iran’s demonstrations quickly began to call for regime change.”
2.1 million tweets in the past day from Israel alone hash-tagged “Mahsa Amini” – the entity whose “defence” forces murdered American-Palestinian Journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh in cold blood, under the watchful eyes of the world. This received no uproar from mainstream media outlets and is the same entity that incites violence and terrorism against Iran, such as murdering Iranian nuclear scientists. Israel’s solidarity with “oppressed Iranians” then falls short.
The generated media hysteria is not concerned with the Hijab, nor the notion of freedom of expression, nor the freedom of women at all or the death of an innocent girl. If this was truly the case, Zainab Essam Al-Khazali, a young Iraqi student who was shot and killed by American soldiers in Baghdad on 20 September would have received the same mainstream media coverage. However, there was not a single peep.
The real issue here is defacing the image of Iran and dictating the narrative for public opinion, especially the populations in neighboring countries. The real subject is the ongoing war against Iran for more than forty years that has taken many different shapes and forms, and this ‘soft war’ of deception, to twist realities and influence hearts and minds, comes after the inability of assassinations, the siege and embargo policies to successfully besiege the nation.
The objective has never been to seek the truth behind Mahsa’s death and call for potential justice, but to use this event to attack Iran as a system of governance and to wage a war against its own people.
Iran is an entity monitored and followed up for every potential lapse in violation of law so it may be amplified to the world, and this case study is an added proof that Iran is not a state where abuses of law are systemic within the authorities, given the magnitude of surveillance that seeks to tug at any incident and blow it out of proportion. What is left at the end is an alleged case of authority violation which has yet to be proven.
The magnitude of systematic and programmed noise to smear Iran cannot be justified, except as a cover for a wider agenda. Isn’t the whole matter anticipating the truth? In that case, isn’t it sensible to wait for an investigation before reaching definitive conclusions?
The reality is that there is no country in the world where violation of law doesn’t take place, there are those who break the law, those whose bad intentions push them to act criminally – in the case of Iran particularly, there are those who want to smear the system, those who are agents and collaborators, those who may carry out such acts they know can be weaponized against the system.
However, especially in Iran where its state enemies have their collaborator networks well established—who go to the extent of carrying out assassinations—are they not able to come up with such acts to smear the Islamic Republic? Otherwise, such an incident is bound to occur, as it is in any other country, and there is a criminal justice system in Iran that deals harshly with perpetrators and is known to punish criminals of violence and killings severely, when convicted.
The reality is that there has been no record of mass systematic violation of the law in Iran for authority violence against a helpless woman to be the default conclusion, therefore, could there be a possibility of her death occurring due to some health reasons or a state of panic, as shown in the widely circulated CCTV footage of her immediate collapse before being hospitalized? There could have been a deliberate security breach or a simple case of abuse in the application of the law. Could it not also be the result of intolerance or ignorance?
The questions we should be asking are why is there so much hype and attention on Iran? What is the proportion of this type of incident among the total arrests in Iran? How many similar legal violations by the security services occur in many other countries and get overshadowed by bigger issues? Are there no abuses or violations of law all over the world? Haven’t complex criminal security assassinations been carried out inside Iran, in which nuclear scientists were killed for this to be a point worth considering? Isn’t there the added possibility of purposeful criminal activity to harm their state, given the sleeping cells of terrorist and foreign agents within their security services?
The reality is that the systematic global campaign magnifying this incident is not interested in targeting the specific alleged crime, rather it is a political trajectory that intends to focus on the legal lapses and goes to the extent of even fabricating them.
American and Israeli mainstream media outlets need to look at what is happening in their own backyards, whether its officers pressing their knees on the necks of its black citizens during arrests, or the daily atrocities committed against indigenous Palestinians, rather than focus on committing soft war against Iran.
As they focus on amplifying and then parroting such incidents as case studies of an ‘oppressive Iranian regime,’ they do not realize that without presenting evidence, they have already lost the argument.
