Tehran: World grown thoroughly exhausted with US-Israeli ‘false flag storylines’
Press TV – March 23, 2026
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman says the world has grown thoroughly exhausted with the US-Israeli “false flag storylines.”
In a post on his X account on Monday, Esmaeil Baghaei reacted to the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s stance, which rejected the recent claims by Israeli regime officials regarding Iran’s missile program posing a threat to Europe.
“That even the NATO Secretary General (who is infamously pressing Alliance members to appease the US and support their illegal war on Iran) declines to endorse Israel’s most recent disinformation, speaks volumes: the world has grown thoroughly exhausted with these tired and discredited “false flag” storylines,” he noted.
Israeli officials, over the past two days, claimed the interception of an Iranian missile targeting a British military base in Diego Garcia.
They presented Iran’s missile program as a threat to continental Europe.
The event reportedly happened between Thursday night and Friday morning, according to US media.
The Wall Street Journal and CNN reported that one of the missiles failed mid-flight while the other was hit by a US interceptor fired from a warship.
This comes amid heightened US and Israeli aggression against Iran, where the United States and the Israeli regime launched an unprovoked war of aggression on Iran on February 28, assassinating the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, as well as several top military commanders.
Iran immediately began to retaliate against the aggression by launching barrages of missiles and drone attacks on the Israeli-occupied territories as well as on US bases in regional countries.
Iran has repeatedly warned against US-Israeli “false flag” operations.
The US fell for its own Iran propaganda
By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | March 13, 2026
The US government’s mistake with Iran has been that it clearly fell into believing its own lies. Think tanks, donors, paid advisors, lobby groups, and establishment analysts are all responsible for the catastrophic mistakes that have been made in attacking the Islamic Republic.
What was supposed to be a war, destined to be all over in four days, quickly turned into weeks, months, and now, in US President Donald Trump’s own words, a “forever” war. In order to understand why, we have to assess the way the political system in Washington works.
As we now know, US politicians are oftentimes chosen by the donor class. Most of the US Congress and Senate take considerable sums from AIPAC and affiliated pro-Israeli, pro-war donors. The Israeli Lobby not only pays its chosen politicians, but also hands them materials to run through, so that they skip to the Zionist script and position themselves as attack dogs against anyone who stands up to the lobby.
Hiding underneath this, we have think tanks, which are the policy expert wing of the lobbyists. These think tank “experts” are brought in as the brains behind the operation. They shift around between holding positions within different administrations, sitting on boards, and writing briefs or analyses for think tanks.
Then you have the mainstream media, which is owned by many of the same people funding the think tanks and lobby groups, employing articulate individuals to parrot their propaganda. The media itself is a bubble, where the so-called “reputable” outlets rely on each other for validity and help to police the boundaries of the “acceptable” discourse, meaning the likes of the New York Times, BBC, and others.
When it comes to broadcast media in specific, the top suppliers of stories, soundbites, on-the-ground footage, and leads are Reuters, AFP, and the Associated Press. Oftentimes, broadcast media channels will simply copy and paste the leads or descriptions from what these suppliers provide, altering them ever so slightly to suit their channel’s bias. That is why they often use very similar language and report the same stories for their news bulletins. Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows this to be the case.
This trio of information control, which often intersects and enjoys some crossover, is what pollutes the minds of the masses on a daily basis. This is important to understand in order for the rest of this article to make sense.
Falling for their own lies
In the lead-up to the illegal attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Western ruling class constantly repeated the idea that Iran and its allies were severely weakened. Revelling in what will likely prove to be a pyrrhic victory in Syria, with the installation of a pro-US Zionist collaborator regime in Damascus, the annihilation of Gaza’s infrastructure, along with the severe blows to Hezbollah’s leadership, all three elements of the Zionist information control system began to grow arrogant.
Think Tanks like the Zionist Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) held a series of conferences about the disarmament of Hezbollah and discussed how the so-called Gaza ceasefire was supposed to be weaponized in “Israel’s” favour, while discussing war on Iran as if it was like putting down a once dominant racehorse with a broken leg.
Still, today, if you look at WINEP’s homepage, there are analysis pieces, written by Zionists salivating over a victory over Iran and envisaging how the future will pan out in a West Asia dominated by the Israelis. “The Middle East’s 1919 Moment” and “A Levant Without Militias” discuss the downfall of Iran and Hezbollah, respectively. Even at a time of great crisis for the Zionist entity, they cannot help but fantasize about how they will dominate in the future.
The trio of information control has created a parallel universe for themselves, one which they continue to cling to, for fear of shattering their entire view of reality.
When Donald Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have greatly degraded Iran, it wasn’t just them speaking; they were in lockstep with the think tanks, lobbyists, and donors. Just as was the case when former US envoy to Lebanon, Morgan Ortagus, confidently asserted that Hezbollah was defeated.
For them, assessing the realities on the ground was no longer a priority; what was important was bolstering a narrative that would lead to the war that the Zionist entity desired. In essence, what they had done was fall for their own nonsense.
All of this stems from the psychological blow the Zionist regime and its loyal supremacist backers suffered on October 7, 2023. When a few thousand Palestinian Resistance fighters, armed with light weapons, tore down the illusion of the Israeli surveillance regime and collapsed its southern command within hours, the Zionists went into a kind of mental hysteria.
Suddenly, on that day, it was proven that the theory of Hezbollah’s late Secretary General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, was correct: “Israel” is indeed weaker than a spider’s web. This meant for them that two things had to be achieved: the first was that their so-called “deterrence capacity” had to be re-established, which they believed would be achieved through committing the world’s first live-streamed genocide.
The second imperative was that the Zionist project had to be rapidly accelerated. At first, this appeared unlikely, yet their perceived successes in Lebanon and Syria appeared to give them the impression that it was possible.
Along comes the second Trump Presidency, which was bought and paid for by the Zionist billionaire class.
Donald Trump, a man with a vocabulary no greater than that of a 10-year-old, is their perfect puppet. Not only this, his entire administration is staffed with ultra-Zionists or paid shills who lack basic intelligence. Therefore, the Zionists saw that this was the perfect time for them to hatch the last phase of their so-called master plan to expand their regime and rule the entire region.
In the process of doing this, the Zionists dismantled the United Nations and the notion of International Law, instead ushering in “the law of the jungle.” There are no longer international norms or red lines, just total chaos.
Meanwhile, as this was going on, the Zionists adopted the attitude toward the global population that they should be scared into submission; should they dare stand up to oppose the tyranny everyone has watched unfold before their very eyes. When they are surprised because things aren’t going their way, they cry victim and, in a fit of rage, attempt to punish you. This is a reflection of their unstable mental state.
All of this is relevant because it explains how we have gotten to this point and why this trio of information control has bought into their own nonsense. The war on Iran was evidently going to be a catastrophe, but they did it anyway. Those of us who have been monitoring the situation could also tell that Lebanese Hezbollah was far from militarily finished, which the Israeli media are now beginning to come to terms with.
What do they do now that the situation is getting out of hand? They censor and desperately lie to cover their tracks. They censor their deaths, lie about the destruction and missile hits, fake air defense victories, and claim tactical and operational military victories that don’t exist. One example of this is the US Trump administration, which claimed to have destroyed Iran’s navy during the first days of the war and still brags about sinking new ships.
The Israelis take things even further: with dozens of military vehicles hit and their soldiers falling into ambush after ambush in Lebanon, only two soldiers have died, according to them. They have even banned the filming of Iranian and Hezbollah missile strikes, threatening their own population with fines and jail time for doing so. Sometimes, they will claim to have intercepted all incoming projectiles or say they fell in open spaces, yet not too long after, published videos show direct hits. It’s getting so bad there, in terms of censorship, that their own people are getting agitated.
These people lived in a “reality” where Hezbollah was weak and Iran was weak, claiming that it had only a few thousand missiles and a handful of launchers; a “reality” in which killing Iran’s leader, Sayyed Ali Khamenei, would instantly lead to regime change, where the Iranian people would suddenly fight against their government because Netanyahu told them so. Perhaps the only thing they don’t believe is their laughable lies about Iranian protester deaths; that nonsense is reserved for the Pahlavist cult.
As the entire planet is witnessing, Iran and the Axis of Resistance that it backs are far from weak. Their determination is strong, and their capabilities are clearly greater than the Zionists expected. The longer this insane arrogance continues, the worse things are going to get, because just as we saw in the Gaza Strip, nobody is about to back down and become the slaves of the terrorist entity occupying Palestine.
Sorry, The New Republic, Climate Change Isn’t Causing Somali Migration. Blame Civil Strife and Poverty.
By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | March 10, 2026
The New Republic (TNR) posted an article titled “Somali Immigrants Fled Climate Change. Now They’re Facing ICE,” claiming that Somali migrants in the United States have been driven out of their country by climate-change caused drought. This is false, or at least incomplete. Drought is a natural part of the region, even multi-year drought, and the present one is no different than the region has experienced with some regularity historically. It is civil strife and government corruption, resulting in continued poverty, that is leading Somalis to flee their homeland. With present governing institutions and security, they have been unable to improve water handling practices. Climate change has nothing to do with Somali emigration elsewhere in the region or to the United States, as even those interviewed for the article acknowledge.
TNR undermines its titular claim that unprecedented man-made climate change has forced Somalians to migrate by admitting that Somalian culture has “deep-rooted traditions of movement and migration.” TNR goes on to say that “Somalis have been caught in civil war and unrest for decades, and many have migrated to Kenya, Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States.”
Somehow not noticing the actual central point of that statement, that Somalians often move and that political strife has kept them destabilized, TNR says that climate change plays a “pervasive role” in the migration.
TNR claims that a multi-year drought “made a hundred times more likely due to warming caused by fossil fuel emissions—is affecting Somali people’s decisions to either relocate internally or migrate across international borders.”
Incredibly, later in the article, TNR refutes its own suggestion that this drought is worse, and pushing unprecedented migration, by explaining that this is how farmers have long dealt with drought in Somalia:
Traditionally, Somali pastoralists had resilient ways to deal with changes in rainfall and drought patterns, where families migrated and moved on a regular basis, even crossing borders in the process. But the nature of climatic changes—and conflict—overwhelmed their traditional capacities, leading to more rural-urban migration within the country and in East Africa.
That’s right, severe drought is something Somalians have dealt with for ages, long enough to have known traditions regarding adaptation to the dry periods.
There is no evidence that this drought is worse than those that drove historic migration.
The cited claim that recent drought in Somalia was made “a hundred times more likely” by climate change is not based on sound science. It comes from an attribution study from World Weather Attribution that specifically seeks to tie various weather conditions to human-caused climate change, they do not come to any other conclusions. Climate Realism has gone into the specifics of how unscientific World Weather Attribution studies are here, here, and here.
The TNR piece says that “[f]rom 2020 to 2023, the East Africa region had five failed rainy seasons, an unprecedented drought and climatic episode not seen in 40 years, which led to 70 percent crop loss, three million livestock deaths, and the displacement of about 2.9 million people in Somalia, according to some estimates.”
Admitting that a weather event also happened 40 years ago should tell a writer that their argument about something being “unprecedented” – meaning, without precedent, or never happened before—is faulty.
In fact, studies and data show a long history of swings between severe drought and monsoon floods in the region, and they show that nothing about modern drought is unprecedented. Paleo studies, including one published in Science, show that “intervals of severe drought lasting for periods ranging from decades to centuries are characteristic of the monsoon and are linked to natural variations in Atlantic temperatures.”
Climate Realism has covered this very claim before: In Anthony Watts’ “No, CBS News, Drought in Somalia is Not Being Driven by Climate Change,” he compared natural weather-driving patterns like the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO) and recent drought in Somalia and found repeated patterns of drought that were similarly severe.
Somalia is part of the Sahel region, and Watts shared this graphic of the region’s rainfall index since 1900, which shows that the rainfall in the Sahel varies widely over time:
Figure 1: More than a century of rainfall data in the Sahel show an unusually wet period from 1950 until 1970 (positive index values), followed by extremely dry years from 1970 to 1991. (negative index values). From 1990 until present rainfall returned to levels slightly below the 1898–1993 average, but year-to-year variability was high. Source: Benedikt Seidl – based on JISAO data
Additionally, comparing crop production data between Somalia and neighboring countries like Ethiopia and Kenya reveals that even when drought impacts East Africa, Somalia is uniquely incapable of maintaining agricultural production. During the same period in which Ethiopia and Kenya saw increasing production in vital cereal crops, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data show Somalia declining. (See figure below)
Is climate change not hitting Kenya and Ethiopia? What is the difference?
While Somalia has a long history of severe, recurring droughts, the worst drought in the past 50 years was the “Long-tailed Drought” from 1973 to 1975. That drought, and a subsequent similarly deadly drought in the early 1980s, occurred when the Earth was in a cooling spell and atmospheric carbon dioxide was much lower than today.
Somalia’s civil war and resulting destruction and corruption is the prime force behind Somalia’s emigration. Ironically, one of the interviewees in the TNR piece says as much:
Drought does not necessarily lead to famine and does not always lead to migration,” said Abdi Samatar, a Somali scholar and geographer at the University of Minnesota […] Somalis were unable to “put Humpty Dumpty back together in their country,” and in the absence of government support, “people have to do what they can for themselves,” Samatar added.
We at Climate Realism could not have said it better ourselves, though we have explained as much in past articles where mainstream outlets tried to link climate change and Somalia’s migration issue.
The New Republic’s effort to tie Somalians fleeing their country for the United States to climate change was a flawed, agenda-driven effort from the start. Even when those interviewed by TNR link the mass exodus of residents from Somali to other factors, TNR persists in pushing the narrative that climate change is playing a “pervasive role.”
It is true that Somalia is suffering through a severe, life threatening drought. It is also true that such droughts are not unprecedented but have been common throughout the region’s history. The nation’s unstable government and the ongoing, long-standing, civil war bear far more of the blame than climate change, especially since there is little or no evidence that Somalia’s climate has changed much over the past century.
The current drought is hitting Somalia’s populace worse than those of nearby countries in the region because of the political instability there. The New Republic was told this by the experts they interviewed but chose to ignore it to advance a climate scare story. Evidently, it’s too much to hope for honest journalism at The New Republic.
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.
Iran War Supporters Invent a New and Absurd Justification: It Is All About China
By Cole Crystal – SYSTEM UPDATE – March 9, 2026
Before Operation Epic Fury began, the Trump administration spent very little energy trying to justify the looming war with Iran. The few defenses they did offer were banal platitudes, just echoes of the case for the Iraq War from more than twenty years ago: that Iran was weeks away from obtaining a nuclear device, that their ballistic missile program posed a significant threat to American assets and allies in the region, and that the Iranian people deserved liberation via regime change.
But not long after the bombing began, a new (admittedly more creative) justification emerged online and in the pro-Israel media that war supporters assume will be more persuasive to those doubting the wisdom of yet another Middle East conflict. The war with Iran, we are now told by many, is not really about Iran at all. It is, instead, all about China.
“Some argue Israel dragged the U.S. into war,” a post from The Free Press reads, “But this conflict is bigger than Israel and Iran — it’s about China.” Another article from The Spectator, a British conservative outlet, sang the same tune: “Trump’s ultimate target in this war is China.” Glenn Beck, on March 2, unveiled C.R.I.N.K., or “the new Axis Powers of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” as a way to “understand why Trump attacked Iran.” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told his audience last week that “we are killing two birds with one stone: we stop the number-one sponsor of terror, and we checkmate the Chinese.”
A viral graphic circulated by the Free Press about the motivations for the American-Israeli war against Iran.
At the very least, if China were really the motive, one would have expected the Trump administration to offer this theory — “this is the chance to counter America’s greatest geopolitical rival” — as a major justification to the American people. One would think they would be particularly motivated to do so, given the consensus of polling data showing that public support for this war is far weaker than for any American war in decades.
But Trump officials never mentioned China as a core motive. In fact, even now, the administration and its backers have hardly mentioned China. This is a theory invented out of whole cloth by Iran-war supporters and/or Trump supporters, grasping for some cogent reason why this new war is in Americans’ interests.
Late last week, Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that this conflict is “a religious war” waged by “radical Islamic terrorists.” On March 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson explained to a group of reporters that the United States “determined, because of the exquisite intelligence that [it] had, that if Israel fired on Iran,” then “[Iran] would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.” Therefore, the House Speaker insisted, because the U.S. would be attacked either way, it had to hit Iran with Israel. President Trump announced on Friday that the U.S. intends to select “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” for the Iranian people, in order to make their country “economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”
These politicians, and many more inside and around the administration, are not talking about China. It has not been cited as a significant motivator for starting this war. Yet if China is really the reason, did the most prominent war supporters simply forget why they went to war, or did they decide it was best to present a false, pretextual case to the American people about why this war was necessary?
Admittedly, this new justification is, at least on the surface, cogent, even if pretextual. China is the most powerful geopolitical competitor to the U.S. No other country buys more sanctioned crude oil from the Iranians, and only Russia has worked more closely with Iran to beef up its military. In 2021, Iran signed a 25-year partnership with China that would reportedly bring $400 billion to Iran’s energy industry. Various weapons deals between the two countries have been reported in recent years, including one to purchase Chinese supersonic missiles that can sink American ships.
Still, none of these events really pertain to, let alone prove, this new claim — that this war with Iran is somehow really about China. At most, they suggest that China may be negatively affected, losing access to cheap oil and its investments. If simply being negatively impacted by this war is the standard for it being “about” another country, then this war is also about Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the rest of the Middle East.
Indeed, many countries could be harmed by the Trump-Netanyahu war in Iran. Japan’s economy could face severe consequences if oil is trapped in the Strait of Hormuz. The South Korean economy last week erased nearly half a trillion dollars, marking the largest drop in their stock market’s 46-year history. Is the war about both of these East Asian countries as well?
Further complicating this point is that China has not exclusively invested in or done business with Iran. Indeed, the People’s Republic has, at least publicly, invested more in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. (That aforementioned $400 billion agreement between Beijing and Tehran still has not materialized.)
Nor is China the largest buyer only of Iran’s oil. It is also often the leading export destination for Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Omani, Saudi, and Qatari crude. Chinese money, in all its forms, is present across the Middle East, from port construction to the telecommunications industry. What’s more, the Chinese are filling gaps that have opened as a result of American reluctance or negligence.
American foreign policy in the Middle East, including wars, has far more often boosted Chinese interests than undermined them. When the United States in the mid-2010s refused to sell MQ-9 Reaper drones to the Saudis and Emiratis, China filled the gap by selling its CH-4 Rainbow and GJ-1 Wing Loong II models. After the United States invaded Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people, the Chinese were still the first to secure foreign contracts. (To this day, the Chinese are a dominant player in Iraq’s oil industry.) President Biden’s poor relations with the Saudis reportedly played a role in their consideration of settling contracts in Chinese yuan.
One would be forgiven for thinking that many of China’s relationships exist not because of an ideological competition with the U.S., but because capricious or draconian American policy often creates the conditions for Chinese success. This is no less true with Iran, as even the articles proffering this all-about-China theory acknowledge.
“Squeezed by decades of American sanctions and increasingly isolated,” the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur writes in The Free Press, “Iran turned to China as its economic lifeline.” This lifeline, moreover, “[is] the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt,” according to the conservative Hudson Institute, which is also pushing this about-China theory for the Iran war (see, for instance, its article titled, “The Iran Strike Is All About China”). In other words, the U.S. — not the Chinese — created the conditions for a competitor’s presence in the Middle East.
Theories like this one raise another problem. All of these arguments struggle to provide a comprehensive explanation of how China will be “devastated” by regime change in Iran, but they paint a fairly clear picture of how Iran became dependent on the People’s Republic. Of course, the U.S. gaining total control of the Middle East has implications for Chinese commerce and strategy, as these articles acknowledge. But no serious journalists or scholars have argued that China can currently project military power across the globe, with or without Iran.
Is that not why many of these ideologically aligned institutions warn about China’s nascent, but developing, blue-water navy? If one believes China will one day ‘imperialize’ like the U.S., Americans can wrest the Panama Canal from Chinese companies, attack China’s allies, and encircle the Chinese mainland — for now. Those kinds of actions could very well devastate China. (It would not be the first time Western powers have done something like it.) But Iran is hardly a necessary component of said devastation. If the U.S. really wants to wreck China, it does not need to pulverize Persia.
On top of all this, many of the videos and articles that have virally promoted this claim — that this war is about China, not Iran — seem to ignore the very foreign policy establishment that gave them this war. Mainstream American scholarship on China has been fairly clear: from a strategic perspective, the Chinese are perfectly happy to allow the United States to remain entangled in the Middle East because, by definition, it delays an American “pivot to Asia.” Bizarrely, some of these articles acknowledge this, making the Orwellian argument that the U.S. has to go to war with Iran in order to stop going to war in the Middle East.
And, of course, it would be difficult to ignore the lowest-hanging fruit. Far and away the most common thread that exists between those promoting this all-about-China theory is a devotion to Israel: the Free Press, the Hudson Institute, the Spectator, Fox News, etc. All of these institutions constitute the pro-Israel establishment in the U.S. and U.K. So, when Haviv Rettig Gur writes that Marco Rubio “struggled to explain” why the U.S. was at war with Iran, it is not because Rubio denied that Israel forced America’s hand. He, in fact, confirmed that Israel had compelled an American strike.
Apart from various reports that confirm Rubio’s initial account, such as in the New York Times and the Financial Times, Antony Blinken (his predecessor) recently described an identical story: that the Israelis tried to pressure former President Obama into war with Iran by claiming that if he failed to act, they would strike Iran alone. But, according to Rettig Gur, “It’s hard to take [Rubio’s] explanation at face value,” so the Secretary of State’s candor can be disregarded for another, entirely dreamed up claim. Rettig Gur continues, “If the trigger was simply an Israeli strike, America could have told the Israelis to sit tight. … Goodness knows the U.S. has the leverage to do it again.” That statement seems highly accurate. Unfortunately, some unclear entity — most likely China — prevented the United States from doing that.
Altogether, the claim that Trump went to war with Iran to fight China is more sensational than substantive. It entertains theories of 4D Chess when Yahtzee is a more apt comparison. The Trump administration is rolling the dice for Israel: it has already financed their genocide in Gaza, vaporized prayer circles in Yemen, destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, granted Benjamin Netanyahu’s wildest wishes, and is now officially at war with Iran. For any hawks eager to embroil the United States in a head-to-head clash with the People’s Republic, the question is not if this latest war was about China — it is whether any of them will be.
Cole Crystal (@colecrystal) was producer and editor for SYSTEM UPDATE with Glenn Greenwald and now has the same title for this Substack. Before joining, he worked for media outlets in the United States. He graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in government and online social movements.
Iran’s latest move in the GCC countries was a stroke of genius
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 9, 2026
After just a week into Donald Trump’s war, there is very little to report which should or could please the U.S. president. Much of America’s infrastructure in the Middle East has been destroyed with U.S. soldiers now housed by hotels in GCC countries as there is nothing left of their bases. The stocks that these countries have as part of their air defence systems is almost depleted as military chiefs argue about how quickly they can be replaced (some THAAD and Patriot systems are being shipped from Japan and South Korea) and Iran is hitting Israel harder and harder each day.
Of course, due to the new draconian rules which Israel has imposed — that no military strikes that Iran succeeds in carrying out can be ‘reported’ on by journalists or even citizens who wish to post it on social media — as well as the comically corrupt, partisan way U.S. news outlets are covering the war, very little bad news gets seen by the public, if any.
Under this set up, it is hardly surprising that Trump went to war, given that he must have factored in a great deal of support from U.S. media, whom he claims to despise. In this regard, we can conclude that media itself is complicit in war crimes, given that it has played a huge role in the decision to go to war and also the day to day reporting of events on the ground.
A good example of the few points of the war which are reported, but done in such a distorted way, is the news that Iran has stopped its bombing of GCC Gulf states. This has been presented as a victory by the U.S. and a climb down by Iran. The truth though is that it is a considerable victory for Tehran as what is not being reported or even examined is the deal that Iran has struck with those countries. None of those countries will allow any kind of military activity now by U.S. forces there, which means the thousands of U.S. soldiers in hotels in these GCC countries might as well head back home as their role there is redundant. Of course it’s unlikely that Trump will move them out as such an event will be captured by many on social media and will look like a great defeat. But some analysts are going further and speculating that there is more bad news for Israel and the U.S. with this latest move. Not only has Iran insisted on no activity at all in these countries by U.S. forces but they have also said that when the war is over, all the bases must be completely shut down.
Sadly, the gesture didn’t hold for long as it is rumoured that Iran’s elite guard was angered by Trump’s response and so the missile attack on the GCC countries continued.
Against a backdrop of rumours spreading throughout the middle east that Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar were considering jointly to completely pull out their investment in the U.S., this move, even as a gesture, couldn’t have come at a worse time for Trump.
His media machine is working overtime in spewing out so many fake news reports, like the recent one that the U.S. has total air superiority over Iran, that it will be interesting to see how this is spun in the coming days. But there is nothing but lies from the Trump camp and as a complicit western media scrum is happy to pump out these lies, people are obviously turning to social media or international news channels in the global south, like CGTN and Russia Today. For many Americans, they are simply too dumb to know how to even question the narrative. Where is the video footage to support these preposterous claims that American has air superiority over Iran? Within 24 hours of Trumps B2 bombers hitting nuclear sites in Iran last year in June, media were given video clips of the satellite imagery. So far, the claims by Trump’s people about air superiority, have not been matched with any evidence. None the less U.S. media reports it more or less like it is fact.
It’s a similar story with the claims about the U.S. navy sinking 20 Iranian vessels. Where’s the evidence? If we are to take into account completely defenceless ships like the unarmed frigate that was sunk in international waters after it returned from a joint exercise with India, it would seem that America is on the losing side. Not even Japanese naval strikes in the WWII would blow up enemies’ ships and not then pick up survivors. The Americans left 80 sailors to drown, the same seamen who posed with photos days earlier with Prime Minister Modi, who, it should be pointed out often claims that India is the “guardian of the Indian ocean”, a patently absurd claim. Many believe Modi sold the Iranians out and disclosed its position to the Americans, leaving many to question just how much he can be trusted with his present allies. Will Russia still sell its oil to India after such a betrayal?
It’s clear that the Iran war is already WWIII in many respects. Certainly each side has its partners and media have made much of Russia’s intelligence support to Iran pointing out American positions, while China has given Iran considerable military support both in state of the art radar systems and ground to air missile systems. The sinking of the Iranian ship shows us all the depth of the desperation of America, that it needs to go as far as hunting for Iranian ships thousands of miles away and sinking them, even if they are unarmed as this ship was. Does that look like the act of a confident aggressor on a victory role? Hardly.
It isn’t just that America can barely hold the high moral ground for even a brief, ephemeral media moment, but more that the number of shocking tactical errors by Trump are piling up and having an impact. The failure to see that killing the supreme leader, who has been replaced by a hard liner who has always wanted Iran to have a nuclear deterrent, was a major act of stupidity. Nearly all U.S. wars follow the same pattern of America underestimating its enemy and overestimating its own capabilities and this one is no exception. The move to bring GCC states closer to Iran and turn them against the U.S. is smart and what we could expect from Iran who has had years to prepare for this attack and has been given so many free lessons by America’s blunders — the best one being the June attack which resulted in Iran upping its game and identifying all the weak spots which needed work. The biggest miscalculation probably of all is going to war in the first place believing that regime change would be inevitable in days and therefore no longer-term plans, in terms of military stocks, need to be addressed. America is about to run out of ammo. For the GCC countries, it’s quite possible that the deal might be reinstated in the coming days as a new truth emerges from the war. While Donald Trump tells reporters on Air Force one that Iran was responsible for bombing its own school, GCC leaders will have to wake up to a new reality which is summed up by Henry Kissinger. “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
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.
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.
Witkoff undermined Iran talks by peddling lies to build case for military aggression: Report
Press TV – March 4, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to West Asia, Steve Witkoff, undermined the negotiations with Iran by peddling lies to build a case for military aggression, according to a report citing regional diplomats.
“In that first meeting, both the Iranian negotiators said to us directly, […], that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60%,” Witkoff said Monday in a Fox interview, referring to the uranium’s level of enrichment.
“And they’re aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance,” he claimed.
“They were proud of it,” Witkoff further claimed. “They were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”
However, a Persian Gulf diplomat with direct knowledge of the talks told MS NOW that Witkoff’s description of the conversation was false.
The Iranians told Witkoff that Iran was willing to give up the enriched uranium as part of a new agreement with Trump, according to the unnamed Persian Gulf diplomat.
The Iranians also told Witkoff that Iran enriched the uranium after Trump pulled out of a 2015 nuclear agreement brokered by the Obama administration.
“I can categorically state that this is inaccurate,” said the diplomat, referring to Witkoff’s account. “He was explaining that all of this material can all go away should we have a deal and Iran can be relieved from sanctions.”
A second person with knowledge of the talks confirmed that Iranian officials declined to discuss their country’s ballistic missiles and the resistance groups with Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and said those issues could be discussed in regional talks.
While Iran was engaged in the negotiations, on Saturday, the US and Israel, similar to previous times, started their unprovoked military assault, launching attacks on multiple cities across the country.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei Khamenei was assassinated in the terrorist US-Israeli attacks.
Iran began to swiftly retaliate against the criminal aggression by launching barrages of missile and drone attacks on the Israeli-occupied territories as well as on the US bases in regional countries.
Iran security chief says ‘no negotiations with US,’ confirms readiness for ‘long war’
The Cradle | March 2, 2026
The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, declared on 2 March that the Islamic Republic “will not negotiate with the United States” as the regional war rages on for a third straight day.
“Trump’s wishful thinking has dragged the whole region into an unnecessary war and now he is rightly worried about more American casualties. It is indeed very sad that he is sacrificing American treasure and blood to advance Netanyahu’s illegitimate expansionist ambitions,” Larijani said in a social media post.
The declaration came as a refutation to a Wall Street Journal report claiming that, hours after US-Israeli strikes halted negotiations, Larijani had pushed to resume nuclear talks with Washington through Omani mediators.
In a separate post, Larijani said Iran is prepared for a prolonged war, unlike the US.
Following the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes on 28 February, Larijani emerged as a central figure in Iran’s security and military leadership.
While Larijani has been managing Iran’s retaliation to the attack, he is not part of the three-person interim council established to lead the country until a successor is elected.
The council met for the first time on 1 March, shortly after the killing of Khamenei, to ensure government continuity as the country declared a 40-day mourning period.
The supreme leader was killed alongside a number of Iran’s top military and security leaders, including IRGC Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, and Armed Forces Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, as well as several of Khamenei’s family members – his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchild.
The unprovoked US-Israeli attacks that began on 28 February have so far resulted in the killing of at least 555 people across Iran.
That number includes at least 180 killed in a single Israeli strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, with the vast majority being students aged 7-12.
UNESCO condemned the massacre as a grave violation of international humanitarian law, stressing the protections granted to civilians, especially children.
The joint US-Israeli aggression – dubbed ‘Operation Epic Fury’ by the US, and ‘Operation Roaring Lion’ by Israel – has carried out roughly 2,000 strikes across 131 locations in Iran, targeting key political, military, economic, and civilian infrastructure.
Following Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announcement of Operation True Promise 4 – targeting US bases in the Persian Gulf region – Gulf states condemned Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on US bases within their territory, calling them violations of sovereignty, with all Gulf states reporting the interception of Iranian missiles.
Oman warned the US-Israeli assault had undermined diplomacy just as a nuclear deal was “within our reach,” urging Washington not to escalate further, as Russia denounced the US-Israeli attack as “unprovoked.”
No, Al-Jazeera, Climate Change Hasn’t Altered African Flood and Drought Patterns
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | February 3, 2026
Al Jazeera (AJ) recently published an article titled “Drought in the east, floods in the south: Africa battered by climate change” by Haru Mutasa, in which the reporter details recent experiences of drought in East Africa and flooding in southern Africa, asserting that those weather events are proof that climate change is battering the continent. This is false. The article relies on flimsy content such as personal observation, interviews, and evocative imagery to imply causation, ignoring data and trends that show no appreciable changes in flood or drought patterns over time.
Mutasa asserts that “rising seas and intensifying storms” and shifting rainfall patterns are already devastating livelihoods, citing the author’s personal field observations as evidence of a broader climate crisis. Readers are shown photos of dry riverbeds, dead livestock, submerged neighborhoods, and distressed residents, then invited to connect these scenes directly to global warming. The emotional impact is real, but emotion is not evidence.
Let us start with AJ’s most basic error: weather is not climate. Climate is defined by long-term patterns measured over decades, typically 30 years or more. A drought in one region followed by floods in another over a few weeks or months says nothing about a durable climate trend. Africa’s climate has always been highly variable, with sharp swings driven by ocean–atmosphere cycles such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole. Short-term extremes—sometimes back-to-back—are a known feature of the region, not a recently discovered diagnostical proof of climate change.
The historical record bears this out. Southern and eastern Africa experienced severe droughts and catastrophic floods long before modern greenhouse gas emissions rose. Mozambique’s Limpopo River basin, featured prominently in the article’s flood imagery. The area has a long history of major inundations, including the devastating 2000 Mozambique floods, which displaced hundreds of thousands and occurred during a strong El Niño year. East Africa’s Horn has likewise seen repeated, multi-year droughts throughout the twentieth century, interspersed with episodes of extreme rainfall. These precedents matter because they show that today’s events are consistent with a long pattern of variability rather than proving a novel climate regime.
In fact, science has shown a 50-year seasonal variability across centuries in East African droughts and floods recorded in lake sediments.
When measured data are consulted instead of anecdotes, the alarm bells fade. Climate at a Glance summarizes the global evidence in “Floods” and “Drought,” explaining that there is low confidence in any increasing trend of global flood frequency or magnitude and that drought trends are regionally mixed, not universally worsening. These conclusions align with the cautious language used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which emphasizes uncertainty and regional variability rather than blanket claims of intensification.
The AJ article substitutes interviews for analysis. Quoting local residents and aid workers about hardship may document suffering, but it does not diagnose cause. Infrastructure deficits, land-use changes, deforestation, river management, dam releases upstream, population growth in floodplains, and limited early-warning systems all play decisive roles in disaster outcomes across Africa. Climate Realism has repeatedly shown how media coverage overlooks these factors while attributing complex events to climate change by default, as catalogued in its Africa-related reporting and extreme-weather analyses accessible via Climate Realism’s search on floods and droughts and Climate Realism’s coverage of drought claims.
Even within the article’s narrative, local management issues loom large. Mutasa notes dam releases in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province sent additional water downstream into Mozambique—an operational decision with immediate hydrological consequences that has nothing to do with global temperature or climate change. Treating such factors as footnotes while elevating climate change as the primary driver of flooding misinforms readers about where real risk reduction lies.
Serious climate reporting distinguishes between events and trends, and between personal experiences and measured evidence.
By presenting interviews and moment-in-time scenes as confirmation of a continent-wide climate verdict, Al Jazeera is misleading its audience by making a causal connection where data show none. Africa’s vulnerability to climate and weather extremes is real, but the causes are multifaceted and long-standing. Ignoring historical precedents and measured trends in favor of an alarming narrative certainty does not inform the public; it misleads it with false headlines.
Iran riots 2026: How the Erfan Soltani “execution” story went viral – and fell apart
By Yousef Ramazani | Press TV | February 3, 2026
The release on bail of Erfan Soltani, an Iranian national detained during recent riots in the country, on Sunday did more than conclude a domestic legal episode.
It also dismantled a carefully constructed and extremely flawed international narrative that, for weeks, had weaponized misinformation to portray his “execution” as an imminent certainty.
In mid-January 2026, a wave of alarming headlines rippled across global media, claiming without evidence that Iran was preparing to execute a young man named Erfan Soltani.
Major outlets – including the BBC, Euronews, The Guardian, and Sky News – reported his supposed “sentence” as fact, citing scandalous Western-based “human rights groups,” and triggering diplomatic warnings and an avalanche of political reactions.
“Iran set to execute protester days after arrest as Tehran speeds up death sentences,” declared Euronews. ABC News ran with: “Relative speaks out on plight of arrested Iranian protester Erfan Soltani, who had faced execution.” The Hill asked: “Who is Erfan Soltani, Iranian protester Trump mentioned facing execution?”
As the initial fog of propaganda began to lift, the narrative quietly shifted. The Guardian, which had earlier warned of Soltani’s “imminent execution,” later revised its framing: “Execution of condemned Iranian protester postponed, family told.” The BBC followed suit with: “Who is Erfan Soltani, Iranian protester who reportedly had execution postponed?”
The storyline consistently casts Iran’s judiciary as carrying out summary executions – a familiar script deployed in previous cycles of engineered unrest.
Yet on February 1, Soltani was released on bail. His case remains open, but without any death sentence outcome, Iranian judicial authorities had already signaled weeks earlier.
For charges against him, the provision of execution does not exist; they had made it clear.
The stark gap between the initial global coverage and the eventual reality revealed more than a routine correction. It exposed a complex ecosystem in which unverified activist claims, geopolitical pressure, and coordinated digital disinformation converged to shape a predetermined narrative against the Islamic Republic.
This investigation traces how the story was constructed, amplified, and sustained amid foreign-backed riots across Iran. It focuses in particular on the systematic manipulation of Wikipedia by a network of accounts linked to the exiled Mujahedin-e Khalq (MKO) cult, designated as a terrorist organization.
It also shows how contemporary information warfare is waged not only through headlines and breaking news, but through the quiet, strategic curation of what is presented as the world’s most trusted knowledge repository.
How a legal case became a global human rights flashpoint
The international narrative surrounding Soltani ignited with striking speed and uniformity in the second week of January 2026, while riots and terrorism were at their peak across Iran.
The initial spark did not originate in mainstream newsrooms, but rather from organizations operating outside Iran. Among the first to circulate claims were the Norway-based, Kurdish-focused Hengaw Organization for Human Rights and the Iran Human Rights (IHR) group.
Both organizations reported that Soltani had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to death within an extraordinarily compressed timeframe – allegedly in a matter of days. These assertions were disseminated through their own platforms and amplified across social media.
Hengaw and IHR have a documented record of promoting anti-Iranian narratives and of repeatedly circulating unverified or later-debunked claims in high-profile cases, including those of Armita Geravand and Mahsa Amini.
Their statements contained severe allegations: that Soltani had been denied access to legal counsel, informed of a death sentence almost immediately after his arrest, and was facing imminent execution.
These claims were framed within a broader warning that Iran was embarking on a new wave of summary executions aimed at suppressing the “protest movement.”
The framing was particularly effective from their standpoint. It cast Soltani not as an individual defendant in an ongoing legal process, but as an early signal of an escalated phase of state repression.
Presented under the moral authority of human rights reporting, the narrative offered international media outlets a ready-made, emotionally charged storyline – one that aligned seamlessly with prevailing coverage of unrest and political tension in Iran.
Western media machine and the rush to judgment
Major Western media outlets swiftly amplified these unsubstantiated claims, often with little independent verification of the underlying judicial details.
Headlines quickly shifted from cautious phrasing to declarative assertions presented as fact. The Independent, for example, ran a story titled, “Iran set to execute first protester after ‘no trial and no due process’,” unequivocally treating the allegations as established reality.
The Guardian’s live coverage included an entry stating, “Execution of condemned Iranian protester postponed, family told,” reinforcing the impression that an execution date had already been set and merely delayed.
Broadcast and digital video platforms adopted even more sensational framing. On YouTube, outlets such as NewsX Live ran segments headlined: “Iran Protests Day 17: Iran Set to Execute Protester Erfan Soltani (26) After Fast-Tracked Trial.”
Across media outlets, the narrative structure was remarkably uniform: an innocent protester, a sham judicial process, and an impending state-sanctioned killing.
This coverage was frequently interwoven with statements from Western politicians, most notably reports that US President Donald Trump had warned his administration would take “strong action” should such executions proceed.
The result was a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Media reports appeared to justify political pressure, while political statements in turn validated and amplified the media’s gravest framing.
On social media, the story rapidly achieved viral status under hashtags such as #ErfanSoltani, where it was often stripped of nuance and circulated as categorical proof of Iranian “barbarity.”
At this stage, the narrative’s momentum became self-sustaining. The sheer volume of coverage by respected international outlets lent it an air of inevitability, crowding out a critical component: the perspective of Iran’s judiciary and state institutions.
Iranian counterpoint: Legal clarifications and a different frame
At the same time, from the earliest moments of the international media surge around this particular case, Iranian officials issued firm and detailed denials, grounded in logic.
The Judiciary Media Center described the reports as a coordinated rumor campaign driven by what it termed “media supporters of street terrorists.” Beyond dismissing the allegations, authorities sought to ground their response in legal specifics.
Officials stated that Soltani was arrested on January 10, 2026, during the deadly foreign-backed riots on Bahar Street in Karaj, and charged with “gathering and colluding against the country’s internal security” and “propaganda activities against the state.”
Crucially, they emphasized that these charges – under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code – carry penalties of imprisonment, not execution.
Authorities further stated unequivocally that no death sentence had been issued and that no final verdict had been reached in Soltani’s case, dismissing the media trial.
Some international wire services, including Agence France-Presse (AFP), as well as outlets such as Euronews and CBS News, did report these denials, resulting in a fragmented media landscape of competing claims.
However, these reports often appeared as secondary updates or were framed with distancing language – “Iran claims” or “Iran denies” – subtly casting doubt on the official statements while preserving the primacy of the original allegations.
As a result, the Iranian position struggled to gain equal footing. It was presented less as a substantive legal clarification and more as a predictable rebuttal from an accused state.
This imbalance allowed the execution narrative to remain the dominant global understanding of the case for weeks, despite the absence of any confirmed death sentence.
Digital battleground: Wikipedia’s vulnerability to coordinated influence
While the media storm raged with a familiar viciousness, a more subtle and insidious battle unfolded on Wikipedia – a platform whose content shapes the work of most Western journalists, researchers, and public perception.
Wikipedia’s open-editing model, a cornerstone of its success, also makes it uniquely vulnerable to coordinated influence campaigns orchestrated by well-resourced political actors.
The case of Soltani did not arise in isolation on the platform; rather, it was planted into a digital landscape already carefully cultivated by partisan forces.
For years, Wikipedia administrators have waged a silent war against a network of user accounts dedicated to advancing the agenda of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MKO) terror cult.
This cult, which fought alongside Saddam Hussein during the Holy Defense War in the 1980s and is designated a terrorist group by Iran, has long sought international legitimacy and crafted a narrative of popular resistance against the Iranian government.
Its digital strategy includes systematic infiltration of Wikipedia to whitewash its own controversial history and amplify content critical of the Islamic Republic.
From whitewashing to newsjacking: Soltani case as a target
The emergence in early January 2026 of a new Wikipedia user, PatriceON, exemplifies how this disinformation apparatus exploits breaking news to shape and distort narratives.
Created in July 2025, the account initially gained credibility through minor, low-profile edits before dramatically ramping up activity at the exact moment the Soltani story broke internationally.
PatriceON focused intensively on creating and editing biographies of individuals portrayed as “victims” of unrest, applying a formulaic narrative that emphasized their innocence and state brutality. The account’s sources consistently included exile media outlets and the same human rights groups driving the Soltani narrative.
When the Soltani story erupted, accounts like PatriceON were ready to embed it into Wikipedia’s permanent record with a dual purpose: to frame Soltani’s case through the now-debunked execution narrative, thereby enshrining it as historical fact, and to connect this content within a broader web of articles depicting systemic state violence.
This activity produces a self-referential information loop. For example, an article on “Human rights in Iran” cites the Soltani case, which in turn relies on sources from the very same partisan entities. This cycle creates an illusion of independent verification, effectively “source-washing” activist claims into encyclopedic knowledge.
Unmasking the network: A persistent playbook of deception
The tactics employed by PatriceON were far from novel, following a well-established playbook honed by a network of earlier accounts linked to MKO advocacy.
Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators have repeatedly documented this exact modus operandi across accounts such as Stefka Bulgaria, ParadaJulio, and TheDreamBoat – created between late 2016 and 2017 and eventually exposed and blocked in 2023.
Each account began with a “gnoming” phase, making hundreds of benign edits to non-controversial topics to build edit counts, avoid suspicion, and gain editorial privileges.
Once legitimacy was established, they abruptly pivoted to intense editing of articles on Iranian politics – whitewashing the MKO and promoting opposition biographies.
The sophistication and coordination of this network were revealed through behavioral forensics, including distinctive technical quirks like consistent template misuse that acted as a digital fingerprint. In one telling incident, a user accidentally pasted part of an external email containing instructions, exposing off-platform direction.
The MKO link was further confirmed when the Stefka Bulgaria account petitioned to remove Wikimedia Commons photos of paid non-Iranian (African) protesters at an MKO rally in Paris, an effort documented by journalists as crowd manipulation.
Wikipedia officials concluded these accounts were part of a “complex and multi-person operation” designed to subvert editorial guidelines and promote a singular viewpoint.
The campaign exhibited persistence; blocking one account was quickly followed by the emergence of another, indicating an organized, long-term strategy rather than sporadic activism.
How Wikipedia and media fuel each other
The interplay between covert Wikipedia editing and mainstream media is symbiotic, often indirect but mutually reinforcing.
Journalists working under tight deadlines frequently rely on Wikipedia for quick background. Articles citing reports from organizations like Hengaw or IHR, framed around an alleged impending execution—reinforce the story’s perceived legitimacy.
Conversely, after major outlets like the BBC or The Guardian publish stories, Wikipedia editors, including those linked to influence networks, swiftly cite these articles as “reliable sources,” leveraging mainstream media’s authority to legitimize the narrative within the encyclopedia.
This creates a closed informational loop: activist claims → media amplification → Wikipedia codification → further media citation.
Though initial sourcing traces back to a handful of partisan actors, the journey through respected media intermediaries obscures this provenance.
In the Soltani case, this feedback loop operated with remarkable speed, cementing the execution narrative as accepted fact well before judicial clarifications could surface.
Unraveling: Bail and the narrative’s collapse
The factual cornerstone of the entire international narrative collapsed on February 1, 2026, when Soltani was released from Karaj Central Penitentiary on bail of two billion tomans.
His lawyer, Musa Khani, publicly confirmed the release, and Iranian media reported the news straightforwardly. This outcome was irreconcilable with the widely circulated story of a man on death row facing imminent execution.
Some Western outlets, such as Sky News, acknowledged the release but continued to frame it with headlines like “Iranian protester Erfan Soltani released after death sentence threat,” perpetuating the discredited execution claim as a foundational part of the story.
The contrast was stark: a judiciary accused of summary executions had, in reality, processed a bail application and released the defendant pending trial, standard procedure in legal systems worldwide.
Soltani’s own mother revealed she first learned of the alleged death sentence not from Iranian authorities, but from the BBC, underscoring how the family became collateral in the international media battle.
Aftermath and lingering damage
Despite the resolution, the damage to accurate public understanding was profound. The initial false narrative had already reached global saturation, and diplomatic capital had been expended.
The hashtag #ErfanSoltani remained indelibly linked to “state execution” within the digital ecosystem of social media. On Wikipedia, correcting the record became a difficult and contested process.
Editors seeking to update Soltani’s entry to reflect the bail release faced resistance from those invested in maintaining the earlier narrative. The MKO-linked networks, despite periodic disruptions, showed resilience, the blocking of PatriceON in January 2026 being merely one episode in an ongoing campaign.
Their strategy is long-term and systemic. It does not hinge on winning a single edit battle over Soltani’s case but on persistently shaping hundreds of articles to construct an overarching meta-narrative of Iranian illegitimacy and oppression, into which individual cases like Soltani’s are seamlessly woven as examples.
The protest article as a propaganda platform
The systemic nature of this influence campaign is perhaps most starkly revealed in the ongoing manipulation of Wikipedia’s main article covering the 2025-2026 Iranian protests-turned-riots.
Far from serving as a neutral encyclopedic record, this entry functions as a curated propaganda platform, actively shaped by a coalition of interest groups – including MKO advocates, monarchist partisans, and pro-Israeli editors.
Its foundation is critically compromised by heavy reliance on sources such as the Saudi-funded, Israeli-linked outlet Iran International – a propaganda channel widely documented as a disinformation platform. Yet, its own Wikipedia article is systematically whitewashed by the very same network of editors who promote its narratives.
The result is a narrative rife with blatant falsehoods presented as fact: the article claims an unverified figure of “5 million protesters,” despite independent analysis indicating that, at the peak of the unrest on January 8 and 9, fewer than 20,000 people were on the streets.
It elevates the Israeli-aligned Reza Pahlavi as a principal leader of the “protests” and inflates casualty counts by an order of magnitude, attributing all deaths solely to state forces.
This curated version deliberately omits documented counter-evidence, including forensic proof of terrorist infiltration and shootings, video footage of armed violence against police, extensive damage to infrastructure, and the scale of pro-government counter-demonstrations.
Instead of portraying the complex on-the-ground reality, the article foregrounds imagery from diaspora monarchist rallies in Western capitals, effectively substituting actual events with an externally manufactured political narrative.
This distortion epitomizes the ultimate goal of the coordinated campaign: to entrench a partisan version of history within the world’s most trusted knowledge repository.
Manufacturing martyrdom: The west’s cynical use of Iranian protest figures
By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | January 28, 2026
Since the Islamic Republic of Iran imposed a nationwide internet blackout to crack down on what it branded as foreign intelligence-backed riots and a terrorist insurgency, unverifiable death tolls and casualty figures have spread rapidly.
These claims – none of which provide any credible evidence – continue to circulate in a coordinated fashion, amplified by Iranian opposition media and the mainstream western press alike.
Amid the wave of western coverage on Iranian protests, a Toronto-based NGO issued an outrageous claim that Iran had killed 43,000 protesters and wounded another 350,000. The group behind the figure, the International Center for Human Rights (ICHR), offered no footage, no forensic data, and no independently verifiable proof. Yet this statistic – dropped in a flimsy 900-word blog post – was catapulted into public discourse by British-Iranian comedian and opposition supporter, Omid Djalili, who pinned it to the top of his X profile.
As intended, the claim went viral. So did similar or even more extreme death tolls. They were echoed across social media by monarchist influencers, recycled by opposition outlets like Iran International, and eventually laundered into western corporate media coverage. The figures varied wildly – from 5,848 to 80,000 dead – and lacked even the pretense of substantiation. But they all served a clear political purpose: to build a case for regime change in the Islamic Republic.
The CIA fronts posing as human rights groups
The lowest estimate of Iran protest deaths – 5,848 people – came from the US-based group, Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), which admits it is still “investigating” 17,000 additional cases. HRAI is no independent arbiter. It was partnered in 2021 with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US soft-power tool established under former US president Ronald Reagan to continue the CIA’s work under NGO cover.
Another frequent source for Iran’s death tolls is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, which is also funded by NED. One of its board members is Francis Fukuyama, a signatory to the infamous neoconservative blueprint for the “War on Terror,” the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
Then there is United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), which claimed 12,000 Iranians were killed in the latest protests. This lobbying outfit, which successfully pressured the World Economic Forum (WEF) to disinvite Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, counts among its ranks former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, current US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Dennis Ross of the Israel Lobby’s think-tank WINEP.
These entities feed a revolving door of narratives, all designed to delegitimize the Islamic Republic, decontextualize internal unrest, and greenlight foreign meddling.
Israel-backed outrage machines and war agitators
The ICHR – the group behind the 43,000 deaths claim – is based in Canada and almost solely focused on Iran. It openly celebrates Israeli assassinations of resistance leaders like the late Hezbollah secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, and praises the “growing friendship” between Israel and the Iranian opposition. Its executive director, Ardeshir Zarezadeh, has published photos of himself posing with Israeli and monarchist flags while toasting with wine.
The organization also employs extremely politically biased language, like labeling the Iranian government “the criminal regime occupying Iran” in official press releases.
Despite the bombast, the ICHR’s report offers no evidence. It relies on unverifiable “comparative investigative analysis” and anonymous sources, and falsely claims that 95 percent of killings occurred over just two days. There is no footage of anything approaching the numbers it alleges.
Meanwhile, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC), another US State Department-funded outfit, once promoted a bizarre claim that a protester faked his death and hid in a body bag for three days. Even the IHRDC admitted it could not verify the story – but opposition outlet Iran International broadcast it anyway, while omitting that it was fiction.
Far-right activists in the west, like Tommy Robinson, and monarchist influencers have pushed even more outlandish stories, including the allegation that Iran’s security forces suffocate protesters by zipping them alive into body bags. No evidence required. Just one anonymous voice note.
The IHRDC has also been consulted by the US government to guide its sanctions policy, including the creation of a blacklist targeting Iranian individuals. Its executive director, Shahin Milani, recently posted on X that US President Donald Trump’s overtures to Iranian protesters, if “not backed up by overwhelming American support to cripple the regime’s armed forces,” would “constitute the greatest betrayal of Iranians by the West.”
This is part of a broader US strategy whereby Washington has poured funding into dozens of NGOs focused solely on Iran, from women’s rights outfits to ethnic minority advocacy groups, all tasked with feeding the narrative architecture of regime change.
Manufacturing atrocity, laundering lies
The propaganda pipeline runs from online influencers to western media. Take online activist Sana Ebrahimi, who claimed 80,000 protesters had been killed, citing only a friend “in contact with sources inside the government.” Her post garnered over 370,000 views.
Soon after, British radio station LBC News quoted an “Iranian human rights activist” named Paul Smith, who upped the death toll to 45,000–80,000. Smith, it turns out, is a regime change agitator on social media who endorses US military intervention in Iran.
In October 2025, the Israeli daily Haaretz exposed how Tel Aviv funds Farsi-speaking bot farms to promote Reza Pahlavi – the exiled son of Iran’s former monarch – and spread anti-government propaganda. These same bots helped inflate Iran protest narratives back in 2022. It is a digital war campaign masked as grassroots outrage.
Time Magazine claimed 30,000 Iranians had been killed, citing two anonymous Health Ministry officials. Iran International topped that, citing its own unverifiable sources to allege over 36,000 deaths.
Only Amnesty International, despite its hostile posture toward Tehran, refrained from a specific number, saying only that “thousands” had died. That estimate roughly aligns with Tehran’s own figures: Iran’s Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs reports 3,117 deaths, including 2,427 civilians and security personnel.
When lies become ‘casus belli’
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of the Iranian state. But what we are seeing now is a coordinated misinformation offensive driven by Washington‑backed networks, Tel Aviv’s propaganda arms, monarchists and other oppositionists in exile, and compliant corporate press.
The grotesque death tolls and phantom atrocity stories being circulated follow a familiar imperial playbook: the bogus incubator babies in Kuwait in 1990, the forged WMD claims in Iraq in 2003, the invented Libyan “genocide” in 2011, and the endless chemical weapons fabrications in Syria. Each time, the purpose was the same: to build a ‘casus belli.’
The people who died in Iran’s protests have become props in another foreign-backed narrative war, laying the groundwork for selective intervention disguised as humanitarian concern.
The New Scientist Misses the Science on ‘Sinking Pacific Islands’
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | January 16, 2026
The New Scientist (NS) recently published “The Pacific Islanders fighting to save their homes from catastrophe” by Katie McQue and Sean Gallagher. The article claims that small Pacific island nations face an existential threat from rising seas and intensifying storms driven by climate change, with displacement already underway and submergence looming. This article is factually false and unsupported by real-world data. The piece relies on emotive anecdotes and dire projections while ignoring a substantial body of empirical research showing that many low-lying islands and atolls are stable or growing, keeping pace with sea-level rise rather than succumbing to it.
The article asserts that “rising seas are anything but a distant projection,” that high tides now regularly inundate areas that “used to stay dry,” and that island nations such as Tuvalu could be “almost completely submerged at high tide by the end of the century.” It further suggests that climate-driven sea-level rise is already forcing migration and poses an existential risk. These claims are presented as settled science, yet New Scientist fails to engage with the very studies that have directly measured island change over time.
Actual surveys of island nations tell a very different story. As summarized in Climate at a Glance’s evidence-based review “Islands and Sea Level Rise,” dozens of peer-reviewed studies using aerial photography, satellite imagery, and on-the-ground surveys show that the majority of low-lying coral islands have remained stable or increased in land area over recent decades. Research on atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans finds that sediment transport, reef dynamics, and natural island-building processes allow islands to adjust to gradual sea-level rise. In other words, these islands are not passive sand piles waiting to drown; they are dynamic landforms.
This is not a fringe view. Climate Realism has repeatedly documented how media outlets ignore these findings, including in its coverage collected under island and sea-level rise reporting, where studies showing island growth in places like Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and Kiribati are contrasted with alarmist headlines predicting imminent disappearance. Those empirical studies directly contradict New Scientist’s framing of inevitability and catastrophe. Further, sea level rise data from NOAA on the island of Kirbati is quite modest, just 0.77 feet per century.
Relative sea level trend is 2.34 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2.83 mm/yr based on monthly mean data from 1974 to 2022 which is equivalent to a change of 0.77 feet in 100 years
Equally telling is what is happening on the ground. Island nations supposedly facing near-term sea level submergence are investing heavily in long-term infrastructure. Tuvalu, the Maldives, Fiji, and other Pacific and Indian Ocean nations are expanding airports, reclaiming land, and approving major hotel and resort developments. These are capital-intensive projects with planning horizons measured in decades, not emergency stopgaps for populations about to flee. Governments and investors with real money at stake do not behave this way if these countries are about to vanish beneath the waves.
NS also conflates local flooding, erosion, and freshwater management problems with global sea-level rise. High tides washing into low areas, saltwater intrusion into wells, and coastal erosion are often driven by local factors such as land use, groundwater extraction, reef damage, and poor coastal management. Treating every such problem as proof of climate catastrophe is a classic case of confusing site-specific issues with global trends.
Perhaps most damning is what NS does not do.
It does not cite the extensive body of peer-reviewed literature documenting island stability and growth. It does not explain why measured island area changes contradict its narrative. It does not ask why nations allegedly facing “existential” risk are expanding infrastructure rather than abandoning it. Instead, it relies on selective anecdotes, speculative end-of-century projections, and emotionally charged language to imply a settled scientific conclusion that the data do not support.
If the New Scientist were actually doing science rather than regurgitating rhetoric, this article would not exist in its current form. A serious treatment would grapple with the observational record showing that many island nations are keeping up with sea-level rise, not disappearing beneath it. By failing to cite that science and by presenting a one-sided story of inevitable catastrophe, the New Scientist misleads readers and does a disservice to both the public and the people living on these islands, whose real challenges deserve honest, evidence-based discussion—not recycled counterfactual climate alarmism.
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Strike on Israel Shows US Bases Near Iran Are ‘Achilles Heel’
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 14.04.2024
Fears of a greater Middle East escalation were triggered after Iran launched a massive drone and missile attack against Israel, aided by Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. Iran said the attack was in response to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, which killed seven members of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran’s massive retaliatory attack on Israel from its own territory is a sign that the conflict could “escalate out of control.”
Michael Maloof, a former senior security analyst in the office of the US secretary of defense, told Sputnik that the first ever direct Iranian attack on Israel set a dangerous precedent.
“My concern is that this could easily escalate into something not only between Iran and Israel, but beyond the Middle East region,” he said.
Iran’s assault, which it stated was an act of “self-defense” after the Israeli strike on its consulate in Damascus, was originally intended to be a “limited” one, said Maloof.
Iran first sent in “swarms of drones with lights on as a sign of psychological warfare,” but sending in cruise and ballistic missiles by Tehran was a “distinct escalation,” said Maloof.
The scale of Iran’s attack on Israel suggests that Tehran was sending a message, demonstrating that it possesses “extraordinary capabilities,” said Maloof. … continue
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- Wake-up Call: Survey Shows Majority Of Germans Now Favor Postponing Climate Targets!
- Televised! Leading German Political Candidate Tells Schoolchildren CO2 Makes Sun Hotter!
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