Aletho News

How An Atrocity Propaganda Campaign Led To The U.S. And Israel Committing Real Atrocities In Iran

The Dissident | March 8, 2026

In their war on Iran, the U.S. and Israel have already committed an endless slew of atrocities against Iranian civilians.

The Iranian Red Crescent has documented that the U.S. and Israel have targeted “9,669 civilian structures, including 7,943 residential homes and 1,617 commercial buildings” along with “several medical and educational facilities”.

Along with this, the U.S. and Israel have so far killed at least 1,332 Iranian civilians.

The U.S. and Israel have not hidden the fact that they are slaughtering civilians in Iran.

Benjamin Netanyahu, at the site of an Iranian missile attack, said , “Remember what Amalek did to you. We remember, and we act” in reference to the Hebrew bible verse, “go and destroy Amalek. Destroy all they have, and do not let them live. Kill both man and woman, child and baby.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live” and boasted about unleashing “Death and destruction from the sky all day long”, on Iran.

This war of “Death and destruction” on Iranian civilians and civilian infrastructure, with the goal of destroying Iran as a nation, was only made possible thanks to an atrocity propaganda campaign, designed to portray this criminal war as an act of protecting Iranians from atrocities.

This first began with the U.S. and Israel engineering riots in the country in an attempt to instigate violence that could be used to justify the war.

When protests in Iran broke out before the war due to economic concerns, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was not shy about the fact that the protests were the intended result of U.S. sanctions on the country, saying:

What we can do at treasury, and what we have done, is created a dollar shortage in the country, at a speech at the Economic club in New York in March I outlined the strategy, it came to a swift -and I would say grand- culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under, there was a run in the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.

And:

If you look at a speech I gave at the economic club of New York last March, I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranain citizen, I would take my money out.

President Trump ordered treasury and our OFAC division, (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed, we saw a major bank go under, the central bank has started to print money, there is a dollar shortage, they are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the streets.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Israel were pushing propaganda in Iran in an attempt to spur on protests.

The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab uncovered an Israeli bot network in Persian on social media which pushed “content related to the country’s ongoing water and energy crisis” and “energy shortage” in a “likely attempt to continue to escalate tensions between Iranian citizens and their government”.

Damon Wilson, the head of the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, boasted that the U.S was doing a similar thing, saying:

the endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks, other means, file casting that allowed information to go both in and out of the country (Iran) at a time when the regime tried to hide its brutal crackdown

Part of what we see manifesting is a response that our partners have helped tell the Iranian people the story that the regime has squandered their own resources on supporting proxies throughout the Middle East to the point where they cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran. And these stories have not just emerged, they are ones that have been covered, documented, and shared with the Iranian people consistently through our work.

We’ve been investing in communication tools over the years that allow for information to be sent into Iran even when internet connectivity is blocked. We specifically began supporting the deployment, the operation of about 200 Starlinks early on

After this, Israeli intelligence infiltrated the protests, which at the beginning were peaceful, in an attempt to turn them violent.

When the protests began, the Persian-language account of the Israeli Mossad wrote, “Let’s all come out to the streets. The time has come. We are with you. Not just from afar and verbally. We are also with you in the field.”

Soon after, Israel’s Channel 14 reported that, “We reported tonight on Channel 14: foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.”

After the U.S. and Israel (by their own admission) helped engineer protests and infiltrated them to instigate violence, the mainstream media ran an atrocity propaganda campaign, massively over-inflating the death toll and fabricating a narrative of the Iranian government killing tens of thousands of peaceful protesters.

The atrocity propaganda claims first came from the outlet “Iran International,” which the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid said, “ the Mossad is using quite regularly for its information war”.

The atrocity propaganda was eventually amplified by Time Magazine, which wrote an article claiming that “As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone”.

As I previously uncovered, the only named source for the atrocity propaganda claim was Amir Parasta, a German-Iranian eye surgeon and lobbyist for the son of the former U.S. backed Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who was clamouring for a U.S. war on Iran to restore the monarchy.

The evidence-free claim was soon amplified by Deepa Parent, a writer at the Guardian, who boasted that the claims were influencing politicians towards war with Iran, saying, “We don’t need to convince anyone about the massacre the IR has carried out on innocent civilians in Iran. I have trolls in my DMs and replies. Ignore them and don’t give any attention. Decision makers don’t see trolls’ tweets, they see verified accounts and reports.”

Parent soon after published an article in the Guardian amplifying the claim that Iran killed 30,000 protestors in two days- this time citing entirely unnamed sources and not providing a shred of verifiable evidence.

Digging further into Parent, journalists Wyatt Reed and Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone uncovered that she was previously a fashion blogger with no experience on Iran who began to present herself as an expert on the country after getting funding from the CIA-connected, pro regime change billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

They documented:

Before adopting the surname Parent around 2019, The Guardian’s go-to Iran reporter wrote under the name Deepa Kalukuri. Her journalistic output was largely limited to fashion reviews in Indian media. A typical piece published in India’s Just For Women magazine in 2016 was headlined: “Samantha Is Setting Some Serious Fashion Goals! Check Them Out!”

“What’s better than a Little Black Dress for a weekend party? Samantha pairs her LBD with these killer stilettos! We are loving it!!! Have a fashionable weekend!!!!”

Elsewhere, in an article informing Indian housewives that “understanding stocks is not [as] difficult as the news shows” suggested, she explained that investing was actually quite simple: “like a playing a video game but only your favorite batman is replaced with that stock broker who gives you the right advice to invest at the end of the bell.

They added:

When the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests kicked off in September 2022 following the death of a young woman in Iranian custody, the improbable Parent suddenly materialized as The Guardian’s point woman on civic unrest in a nation with which she had no apparent professional or personal experience.

Much of Parent’s work at The Guardian’s so-called “Rights and Freedom” section has been funded by an NGO called Humanity United, which was founded by tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.

As the Grayzone noted, “Omidyar has partnered with US intelligence cutouts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy to promote regime change from Ukraine to the Philippines, while advancing various ‘counter-disinformation’ efforts aimed at suppressing anti-establishment viewpoints”.

This propaganda campaign – as should now be clear – was a coordinated effort to spread atrocity propaganda about the Iranian government, in order to give the impression that a war with Iran is “liberating” the people of Iran, paving the way to the mass bombing of Iranian civilians and civilian infrastructure currently unfolding.

March 8, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, United States, Zionism