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A Massacre in Mashhad. "The government announced that people who have Starlink disks need to hand them over. If you keep it hidden, if you don't report it and they discover it in your home, they will arrest you. The sentence is two years. But, if they discover that I am speaking to foreigners, they will execute me. I have no doubt about that.
Still, if I don't speak about it, it will be as if it didn't happen."
"The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has verified more than forty-five hundred deaths, including over seven hundred in Mashhad. Witnesses, including one emergency doctor, who spoke with the Center for Human Rights in Iran, estimate that the death toll in Mashhad could exceed two thousand."
posted by storybored on Jan 24, 2026 at 5:28 PM
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Murderers. Horrifying on so many levels.
posted by lalochezia at 6:01 PM
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Non-paywalled copy of the linked article.
posted by xedrik at 7:05 PM
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Please don't fall for regime change "color revolution" shenanigans for the umpteenth time.
Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI) » Introduction
HRAI's News Agency Is Known As HRANA.
Before March 2011, The Organization Received Donations Only From Members And Partners. But Since Then HRAI Has Also Been Accepting Donations From National Endowment For Democracy, A Non-Profit, Non-Governmental Organization In The United States Of America.
Except the NED isn't really an NGO, but a CIA cut-out tasked with manufacturing our consent for regime change. Wikipedia:
"In a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, NED founder Allen Weinstein said: 'A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.'"
Citations Needed podcast: The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex
"The conceit that the U.S. has been a dedicated and earnest promoter of 'freedom', 'democracy,' and 'human rights' throughout the world—even if, at times, a 'flawed' one—is a defining narrative, largely taken for granted by major media. But how accurate is this assumption? What do we mean when we talk about human rights? What abuses are highlighted and which aren't? Where do labor rights fit into the broader discussion of human rights?"
The blueprint of regime change operations » How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
Mint Press News: Revealed: The CIA-Backed NGOs Fueling The Iran Protests
posted by davel at 7:15 PM
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↑ jfc what's the equivalent for tankie for theocratic authoritarians?
posted by lalochezia at 7:27 PM
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It can be (and is) true both that the Iranian people legitimately want freedom from tyranny and that the US is meddling, again, in order to ensure that any "freedom" that results from the protests is friendly to US interests.
(A third thing is also true: the tyranny in Iran is the United States' fault to start with.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:48 PM
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If the US is precipitating the overthrow of repressive, murderous authoritarian regimes, I can only hope the favour is returned if its current administration continues to succeed at their own domestic policy goals.
posted by Panthalassa at 8:00 PM
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that article is just devastating. And M's belief that Trump is a man of his word, and he could believe that the US would stand up for the protestors! My heart hurts.
posted by suelac at 8:07 PM
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↑ jfc what's the equivalent for tankie for theocratic authoritarians?
Not to paint the Iran "regime" (yet another loaded word that's used on the US' enemies almost exclusively) as utopian, it's much, much better for Iranians than the US plundering & destroying Iran like it did to Libya & Iraq. And that's why Iranians came out to the streets by the millions to support of their imperfect government. But of course Western media didn't report on that story; they're busy reporting bullshit narratives in support of the imperial hegemon.
Citations Needed podcast: The Banality of CIA-Curated Definitions of 'Democracy':
Few words elicit such warm feelings as the term "Democracy." Wars are supposedly fought for it, foreign policies are built around it, protecting and advancing it is considered the United States' highest moral order.
Democracy's alleged opposite - broadly called "authoritarianism," "autocracy" or "tyranny" - is cast as the ultimate evil. The stifling, oppressive boot of the state that curtails liberties and must be fought at all costs. This is the world in which we operate and the one where the United States and its satellite media and NGO allies fight to preserve and defend democracy.
So how is "democracy" defined and how are those definitions used to justify American exceptionalism? Where do positive and negative rights come into play, and how do societal choices like illiteracy, poverty, and hunger factor into our notions of freedom?
posted by davel at 8:08 PM
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And that's why Iranians came out to the streets by the millions to support of their imperfect government.
u wot?
posted by lalochezia at 8:19 PM
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But of course Western media didn't report on that story; they're busy reporting bullshit narratives in support of the imperial hegemon.
So what do you make of the actual article that's supposed to be at the centre of discussion here? Do you believe, as it reports using eyewitness testimony and footage, that hundreds of defenceless anti-government demonstrators were killed by state forces? And is that a good or a bad thing to you?
posted by Panthalassa at 8:24 PM
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Metafilter literally has an Islamic Republic of Iran stan account. We truly contain multitudes.
posted by gwint at 8:31 PM
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Do you believe, as it reports using eyewitness testimony and footage, that hundreds of defenceless anti-government demonstrators were killed by state forces? And is that a good or a bad thing to you?
I don't believe these "eyewitness" testimonies to the Western press.
The "defenseless" demonstrators were in fact armed, trained, and funded by US, UK, and Israeli governments. I think they in fact did the majority of the killing. Their task was to create as much violence as possible, which is what they did, until they lost communication with their handlers and each other when the Starlink equipment they were given stopped functioning. They would start some mayhem until police/military arrived, and then their snipers would take out those agents of government. They were also told to take over or destroy government buildings, which they did. It's already been admitted that a few were Mossad agents.
The goal was to make the government collapse, but it failed, and instead Iranians have rallied around their government all the more, the opposite of the intended effect.
posted by davel at 8:52 PM
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Okay great. And is it fair to suppose that if you had even the faintest shred of evidence for that, you would have led with it, instead of just linking to some podcasts about the definition of democracy or whatever?
posted by Panthalassa at 8:56 PM
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Mosaddegh, again. The other 5 eyes need poking. I believe this is beyond recent and past foreign intervention but part of its yearning, to hope or expect trump or Israel? The shahs son? Its as though many people are past history.
Why Mashhad. Aside from the populous region. Part of its name conotes cemetery. A holy place and one of past revolutionary activity when foreign forces where on the ground.
1912, Mashdad. A person records the massacre and writes:
آنانکه گشتهاند گرفتار نیک ببین
ای روزگار نیست کسی غیر مفلسی
با آنکه جمله بی گنه و در دعای خیر
اندر حریم شاه شدندی اسیر کین
"In the early 1900's various uprisings were occurring in Iran as part of the larger Constitutional Revolution which sought to reestablish Iranian sovereignty over the country. Revolutionaries connected to the constitutional uprising movements had made the shrine of Imam Reza their refuge and Russians fearing the possibility of uprising in Mashhad and loss of their influence there, wanted to suppress any uprising in Mashhad and solidify their control over the city."
From:
The Tsarist Massacre of Mashhad 1912.
I here the same tone of dispare from the 1912 account to the author of the linked article.
So how is "democracy" defined and how are those definitions used to justify American exceptionalism
Really? I mean sure the glossy company pamphlets are always circulating, royalty in the wings. Past that, past that US imperialistic bulletin and bulletin is true but does anyone think Iranians, as a whole have a us flag dart board. The haunting of the 80s Iran/Iraq war are strongest war memories were most of the big dogs backed saddam and we're down the rabbit hole with propaganda and candy wrapper company capers WHILE PEOPLE GETTING KILLED BY THIER OWN GOVERNMENT.
But no, it's trump, it yankee kinovezda.
The united states has done a lot to drown Iran, that's revenge and petrol politics.
It needs to end.
I have no doubt people counter demonstrated, its called survival apparatus or, the call of a true believer. I believe the Iranian people know what they need and its not a need for a lack of want.
posted by clavdivs at 9:03 PM
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.
posted by mersen at 9:07 PM
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Mossad, well maybe a few masquerade, as Ba"hai?
Your thinking Sayeret Matkal and ya don't see them.
posted by clavdivs at 9:09 PM
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And is it fair to suppose that if you had even the faintest shred of evidence for that, you would have led with it
The Times of Israel: Mossad deployed over 100 foreign agents in Iran war, its largest ever mission
Western media whitewashes deadly riots in Iran, relying on US govt-funded regime change NGOs
Katie Halper "Show the Footage": Dr. Marandi FIRES BACK At Media Lies About Iran Protests
John Mearsheimer: The Tag Team Fails in Iran
Did you also believe the "eyewitness" testimonies of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or of Iraqis throwing babies from incubators, or of Gaddafi giving his soldiers Viagra and telling them to go on a raping spree, or of Screams Without Words, or that Maduro was a dictator and narco-terrorist?
If you want evidence from Media Bias/Fact Check-blessed Western media, you're of course SOL, which is no surprise to people who've learned some actual media literacy.
I created my MF account in 2009 after years of lurking. The reason I don't hang out here much anymore is because the people who do are still just as clueless as I was 20 years ago. They never learn, or else the ones who do eventually leave.
posted by davel at 9:58 PM
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Metafilter literally has an Islamic Republic of Iran stan account. We truly contain multitudes.
No, it doesn't: critical support for something in the face of imperial aggression isn't the same thing as "staning" it.
Mostly MeFi has imperial core liberals who don't understand neocolonialism. They don't understand why externally-imposed imperialist aggressions are the primary concern for a people, above and beyond those of their own government's flaws. They're often on board with the garden vs. the jungle and democracy vs. autocracy framings.
posted by davel at 11:01 PM
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Max Blumenthal's Grayzone as a source? Oh dear.
posted by johngoren at 11:16 PM
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If you want evidence from Media Bias/Fact Check-blessed Western media
I want evidence that supports one's claims.
Your claims:
(1) Demonstrators were armed, trained and funded by US, UK and Israeli governments
(2) Demonstrators did the majority of the killing
(3) Demonstrators were tasked by their foreign handlers with creating as much violence as possible
(4) The failure of Starlink disrupted communications between demonstrators and their foreign handlers
(5) Demonstrators committed violence to lure state security forces into situations where they could kill them with snipers
(6) Demonstrators were told by their foreign handlers to take over or destroy government buildings, and they did
(7) Some demonstrators were Mossad agents
Your links substantiate (7) and, to the extent that (7) is true, (1). Can you provide the outstanding evidence?
posted by Panthalassa at 12:55 AM
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This thread made me recall this old joke:
A Soviet and an American are seated next to each other on a plane traveling from Moscow to Washington DC. The American says, I have to hand it to you, your propaganda is very impressive. The Soviet smiles and thanks him but replies that it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Confused, the American tells him, "but we don't have propaganda."
The Soviet smiles and says "exactly"
posted by kmt at 1:30 AM
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yes the fact that the west has been meddling in iran for decades means "Iranians came out to the streets by the millions to support of their imperfect government. ".
davel: that is a despicable lie.
we're all such sheep blinded by the hegemonic media! as if we haven't read chomsky and seen the iraq war disinfo! as if we don't know the meaning of neocolonialism and need 101-lectures on democracy vs autocracy!
you confuse the existence of conspiracies in the west - by some nasty hegemons!! - to topple iran's government with the incontrovertible fact that Irans government is one of the most oppressive in the world - and that is a pretty high bar!
don't ask me, ask amnesty international, human rights watch - not exactly friends of the hegemons - or any of the thousands of testimonies of real iranians who have survived torture, imprisonment or reported back on the actions of the government.
one can be against a dying hegemon's actions without excusing and actively supporting a bloodthirsty regime. and they ARE a regime. one can wish for an actual color revolution without excusing the meddling of other actors.
there was an old expression "neither washington nor moscow". you are siding with moscow - and you are a tankie.
posted by lalochezia at 6:16 AM
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"A Society Exhausted by Repetition," ‘A writer living in Iran,’ Equator, 24 January 2026
posted by ob1quixote at 7:04 AM
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Davel is filling this thread with chronic repeaters of Russian propaganda. Katie Halper, Glenn Greenwald John Mearsheimer. So much I can't be bothered to call them all out specifically.
Don't fall for it.
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:20 AM
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Mods, Davel's comments are such bad faith parrotings of Islamic Republic propaganda that I suggest banning the account. If someone went that hard defending ICE it would violate MeFi's TOS.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:09 AM
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Are we that fragile?
posted by Reverend John at 8:34 AM
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A thread timeout seems more reasonable. I have a tankie IRL friend like this and there's no rational debate to be had. I would guess that the majority of Metafilter users are well acquainted with the history of the CIA, corporate media bias, US support for democracy groups, and the paradoxes of promoting democracy and capitalism at the same time. My friend sends tons of links the trace back to RT or the Chinese government and has no problem taking those at face value. He claims the Uighur issue is made up.
It's not that we should be more critical of media, it's that we need to discount anything that doesn't support the ideology that America is the cause of everything bad, no matter how well sourced, and should accept anything we see on X or RT, no matter how obviously bullshit. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
posted by caviar2d2 at 8:48 AM
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Fuck, specifically, you davel, you atrocious fucking ghoul. These days, Iran is across a narrow span of water for me, and I work with people who have experienced the unconscionable blood-lust of both Iranian and American proxy wars in this region - people who still want to be creative, make stories, and share art. Don't you dare minimise the extraordinary pain and resilience of others by parroting grotesque lies and distortions, you utter cunt.
And I will take a ban for that. If the mods protect tankies getting their precious feefees hurt by swears, I'll happily take the ban for life.
And 'we' are not fragile, Reverend John. 'We' need to take a stand for actual truth and holding people accountable for words and actions, something Americans have seemed incapable of since 1777. The only thing your idiot, primitive First Amendment should give to this astonishingly cruel bullshit is the opportunity to be hurled directly into the goddamned sun.
posted by prismatic7 at 9:02 AM
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The Iranian government decided to destroy a popular revolt with such vicousness that they turned off the internet and phone service for the entire country to try to hide their crimes. And then when witnesses risk their lives by sharing evidence of said crimes, you put their names in scare quotes? What the actual fuck.
A repressive state just perpetuated a series of massacres on par with Tiananmen Square and some of y'all are like "teach the controversy" jfc
posted by gwint at 9:15 AM
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It's one thing to deny events that happened in 2014, or 2001. That's surprisingly easy to imprint on people, and we have a few MeFi here who peddle this type of material consistently (one of whom recently PMd me to ask me to stop linking to their comments).
But when the denial happens for something that just happened (and that's how brazen authoritarians are now, that's how confident they are in their bamboozling) it really makes the depth and intensity of the disinfo effort obvious. This is the very thing I have been beating the bush about for the last few years.
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:41 AM
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posted by CynicalKnight at 11:20 AM
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- Mods, Davel's comments are such bad faith parrotings of Islamic Republic propaganda
- Davel is filling this thread with chronic repeaters of Russian propaganda
What's bad faith is smearing things as [enemy du jour] "talking points" or "propaganda." If Hitler said the sky is blue, that doesn't make it "Nazi propaganda," nor does it make it necessarily false.
posted by davel at 11:54 AM
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davel, I suggest you take your poor, unfortunate, smeared comments and print them nicely on some good paper. Then roll them up ever so neatly, tie the little bundle up with a lovely bow, and shove them so far up your hideous jacksy that you can taste wood pulp.
posted by prismatic7 at 12:15 PM
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To be fair, I was agreeing with some of the sentiment in those comments (though relatively unsubstantiated, not a total stretch based on the outside interests in Iran) until "Max Blumenthal's Grayzone as a source? Oh dear." - which led me down a short rabbit hole of discovering who that is and what his weird journey has been. And I do think that it's worth questioning primary sources and major news outlets' capacity for laundering potentially weak primary sources in an echo chamber. In this case, I'm still not sure there's enough evidence as to what really is happening because of the overall information vacuum, and I say this as someone with family inside the country who we haven't really been in much contact with. On balance I'll remain skeptical of actors, but it's clear that people are dying and need help, and historically that's been the regime's fault.
posted by blendor at 1:13 PM
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I sent 10 minutes picking your links apart davel, just oblique and mossad, your proof is in a 6 month old OP. I'm a son of bitch, people know that but dam, not even any dot connecting.
�for prismatic7.
posted by clavdivs at 1:14 PM
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Just to be clear, the Iranian government gave the number of people killed as 3,117. So that's the floor. That's the absolute minimum.
posted by gwint at 1:30 PM
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Iran. Venezuela, Syria, and before that, Iraq.
You own and operate a profitable shop in a busy and productive retail neighborhood. However, this region is bedeviled by a shoplifter, a pickpocket and a mugger. Local police seem unable or unwilling to stop them.
Then, over the course of a week, all three are found dead. The man who takes credit for this starts a chamber of commerce snd asks every business in the area for $200 a month to "help maintain security". Any business who refuses strangely suffers a fire within a week.
Is this an improvement, or a monkey paw?
Neither, for there is a third way.
posted by CynicalKnight at 1:41 PM
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[Folks, the fighting and back and forth needs to stop now. Nothing deleted yet, please stop commenting if you've commented several times already.]
posted by travelingthyme at 1:58 PM
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I've just been hoping the Iranian people would not be so naive as to believe anything from the united states - and it makes me wonder about the real nature of such statements by Iranian protestors as the Iranians are not a stupid people.
The Gulf War One US egging on and encouraging of Iraqi resistance and then the complete lack of support from the US when they showed themselves should have served as a final warning even then to the entire world that no American statement (or signed treaty) can be trusted. Trump's terrible language (and support of from others) in the last few days describing US allies is yet another affront, apologies for which should not be accepted by any nation. It is time for the World as a whole to ignore, blacklist and otherwise refuse to deal with America - in whatever way we can.
posted by unearthed at 2:25 PM
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If Hitler said the sky is blue, that doesn't make it "Nazi propaganda," nor does it make it necessarily false.
As the old canard goes, if Hitler said the sky was blue, I'd go outside for independent confirmation.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:27 PM
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40%+ of the US is copacetic with our current leadership actively shitting on Canada FFS.
But this story is not, and should not, be about the USA.
Notionally every society has the government they deserve. Good luck, Iranians.
posted by Aman Aplan at 3:04 PM
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With the bicentennial + 50 going on now I got into a recent Revolutionary War kick; I was too young in 1976 to catch the deets of what when down for real, and sorta skipped that history until recently (Mel Gibson's The Patriot had a moving shot of the French navy twisting the knife at Yorktown but I missed that movie) . . . anyhoo without the French military aid for our nascent "break-away republic" vibe we'd probably be speaking the King's English still, like our poor compatriots up north.
So my above notional thing about revolutions etc. doesn't quite hold when the asymmetrical reality of power intrudes. See China 1989-now for another case.
posted by Aman Aplan at 3:11 PM
---------------------------