Repeating baseless, meddlesome remarks won’t solve anything: Iran to Poland
Press TV | October 21, 2025
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has hit back at Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski over his “baseless claims and meddlesome remarks” against the Islamic Republic.
Araghchi made the comments in Polish on X, one day after Sikorski alleged that Iran was selling drones to Russia for use in the Ukraine war.
The top Iranian diplomat said that in an earlier X post, he had invited Sikorski to a substantive dialogue and exchange of documents to clarify facts following the display of a drone in the British Parliament, falsely and maliciously attributed to Iran.
“Avoiding responses, repeating baseless claims, and making meddlesome remarks will not solve the problem,” he added.
Araghchi also referred to Iran’s hospitality towards the Poles during the hard times of World War II, with the country providing shelter to over 100,000 Polish people and helping them form their own army.
“The friendship between the people of Iran and Poland was proven in challenging times, and it is our duty to protect this historical and cultural heritage,” he said.
He said the Iranian nation traces its roots to a glorious and significant past and that it will build its future on the path of progress and prosperity.
On October 14, Sikorski participated in an anti-Iran presentation at the UK Parliament in cooperation with a US-Israeli-affiliated group, displaying the wreckage of what they claimed to be an Iranian-made drone used by Russia in its war in Ukraine.
Iran summoned Poland’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran to protest Sikorski’s involvement in the anti-Iran event.
Araghchi also took to X to say that the “pathetic show” was staged by the Israel lobby and its supporters.
He said certain actors opposed to friendly Iran-Europe relations are creating fabricated narratives inconsistent with the long-standing ties between the two sides, including between Tehran and Warsaw.
Both Iran and Russia have repeatedly rejected allegations that Tehran supplied Moscow with drones, ballistic missiles, and related technology for use in the military campaign in Ukraine.
Russia has repeatedly warned against the flow of Western weapons to Ukraine, saying it prolongs the conflict.
Rick Sanchez: War Propaganda & Suffocating Censorship Weaken the West
Glenn Diesen | October 19, 2025
Award-winning journalist Rick Sanchez has worked for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and RT, which gives him a unique perspective on the Western and Russian media. Sanchez outlines how the war propaganda and rise of censorship across the West prevent us from pursuing rational policies.
Iran dismisses ‘baseless’ allegations of seeking to threaten Britain’s security
Press TV – October 18, 2025
Iran’s embassy in London has strongly rejected allegations by the head of Britain’s MI5 that Tehran seeks to threaten the United Kingdom’s security, calling the claims “baseless and irresponsible.”
The diplomatic mission, in a statement released late on Friday, repudiated the assertions made by Sir Ken McCallum on October 16, which accused Iran of involvement in so-called “deadly plots” and “cross-border hostile actions.”
“The Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran expresses its strong protest to and outright rejection of these unfounded and irresponsible statements,” the statement read.
“Such baseless accusations are part of a continued effort to distort Iran’s policies and undermine bilateral diplomatic relations.”
The embassy emphasized that Iran firmly denies any involvement in violent acts, abductions, or harassment of individuals in the UK or elsewhere.
It further stated that the claims were made “without credible evidence,” and contradict Iran’s ongoing commitment to international law, the principle of sovereign equality, as well as promotion of peaceful coexistence and international cooperation.
The statement came after the MI5 chief alleged that UK security forces had thwarted 20 operations linked to Iran on British soil over the past year — a claim Tehran has dismissed as part of an ongoing campaign of misinformation.
The Iranian embassy urged the British government to “refrain from making or escalating baseless accusations” and instead pursue a “responsible and constructive approach based on dialogue and mutual respect” to address shared security concerns through legal and diplomatic channels.
The mission finally reaffirmed Iran’s preparedness for dialogue, and its commitment to international norms and peaceful international relations.
Once Again, Jeremy Bowen Is Misleading the British Public About Gaza
By Jonathan Cook | October 15, 2025
Yet again the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen is misrepresenting a key issue in Gaza – and as always, he is doing so in a way that places Israel in the most flattering light possible.
The BBC’s international editor notes two reasons why Hamas will not wish to disarm, as stipulated by Israeli and US officials:
a) Because having weapons is “deep in their ideological DNA”.
b) Because Hamas are worried that, if they are not armed, “there are plenty of people out there in Gaza who would like to take revenge on them and will come after them”.
Notice two things here:
First, both of these claims are rooted in Israeli rationales for why Hamas needs disarming. Inadvertently or not, Bowen is subtly suggesting that the group is inherently bloodthirsty, and that it does not properly represent the people of Gaza (more on that in a moment).
Second, Bowen ignores the main reason why Hamas wants to keep its weapons, one so obvious that it is simply astounding that he forgot to mention it.
Hamas believes that, if it is not armed, Israel will have an even freer hand to carry out its genocidal policies in Gaza, to continue its decades-long, illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and to intensify its siege of the enclave. Hamas believes Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people should not be cost-free.
Whether or not one approves of Hamas’ approach – and to do so would be a violation of the UK’s Terrorism Act and could lead to a 14-year jail sentence – Bowen is required to report what the group actually thinks. Otherwise he is not a journalist, he is just another western propagandist.
Instead, he is actively misleading the British public both about Hamas’ worldview and about a core issue – Hamas’ disarmament – that could soon give Israel the excuse it seeks to trash the ceasefire agreement.
Like the rest of the BBC’s coverage, Bowen’s reporting refuses to address the elephant in the room: that Palestinians are caught in a trap crafted for them by the West. If they try to resist their illegal occupation by Israel, they are slaughtered and damned as terrorists. But if they don’t, they must live as permanent prisoners of an illegal, dehumanising occupation.
A further point: Bowen says Hamas are using their weapons to take on “armed clans who have weapons themselves – to reassert their power, to send a message to Gazans, ‘Don’t mess with us’.”
Bowen, of course, carefully ignores the part Israel has played in arming these criminal clans and letting them steal food aid. The clans sold that aid at inflated prices to a small section of Gaza’s population who could still afford to pay, while everyone else starved.
One doesn’t need to be a genius, or Hamas sympathiser, to imagine – contrary to Bowen’s implication that Hamas is widely feared by the population – that most people there may be relieved to see Hamas back and taking on the criminal gangs that extorted them and were central to the implementation of Israel’s genocidal starvation campaign.
The EU isn’t at war with Russia – it’s at war with the minds of its own citizens
European leaders are trying to gaslight their populations into believing that it’s Moscow that wants a fight, not them
By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | October 14, 2025
Among other things, this particular moment in history will be remembered – whether in whole books, mere chapters, or (if we are lucky) forgotten footnotes – as the Great European Drone Scare. For weeks now, the populations of NATO-EU Europe have been subjected to a barrage of vague but scary reports about drone sightings. The drones have appeared – seemingly – over various places and installations, prominently including airports in Denmark and Germany.
They are of unknown origin and unknown purpose. And, quite often, it is actually also unknown whether they are even real. Indeed, there is no proof of Russia being responsible for any of these incidents, as even Western media admit. We are once again asked to simply trust our politicians and “experts.”
That is, the same ones who took months to stop pretending that Russia – absurdly – blew up its own Nord Stream pipelines in 2022. As late as spring 2023, Germany’s Carlo Masala, for instance, who also believes “Girkin” and “Strelkov” are two different individuals (just like “Santa” and “Claus”), was still spreading groundless speculation – really, a conspiracy theory – about a “false flag attack” on Nord Stream, that is: Russia, Russia, Russia.
And – oh, coincidence! – also recently, Moscow, we are told, has had nothing better to do than oblige Western information warriors with three further sort-of incidents: a purported electronic-warfare attack on the plane of EU despot and de facto US proconsul Ursula von der Leyen over the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, an alleged incursion into Estonian airspace, and low fly-overs over the German frigate Hamburg during a recent NATO exercise.
In reality, those three stories share only one thing with the great drone saga: They don’t hold up to scrutiny. The case of the alleged Plovdiv GPS attack is so shoddy and cratered so badly so quickly that it’s been consigned to oblivion. The incursion into Estonian airspace did not happen either. Due to an agreement that Estonia itself signed in 1994, it cannot claim a 12-mile but only a 3-mile zone in the relevant area. Estonia’s case is hysterical to begin with; the 1994 agreement deprives it of even the flimsiest pretext of legality. Regarding the so-called buzzing of the Hamburg, finally, even Western military officials admit that it was not “imminently dangerous.” Instead, they complain, it was “unfriendly and provocative.” Frankly: Boohoo. What do you expect holding exercises on Russia’s doorstep while fighting an indirect war against it in Ukraine? A friendly chat among sailors over a stiff grog?
And yet everyone in NATO-EU establishment politics and its mainstream media has been singing the same old tired song, once again, sotto voce: Russia is coming, Russia is already here, Russia is everywhere. The new head of Germany’s spy agency – the Bundesnachrichtendienst – seems to believe that his job is not to do secret things quietly but to join the chorus of the panic-mongers: He also has sleepless visions of the Russians attacking just any day now. Maybe from right under his bed or out of his cupboard, one must suppose.
It is almost as if they were all reading from the same hymn sheet, that is, memo. And, of course, the new wave of self-induced hyper-ventilation has been milked for all it’s worth – a lot, as in billions of Euros – for yet more money to be spent on armaments, including but not limited to a “drone wall,” while ordinary people are subjected to ever more brutal austerity. Even more disturbingly, there is a clear drive to concentrate ever more powers with those same political establishments that can’t stop ruling by frightening and confusing their own citizens.
That the drone stories are already crumbling makes no difference: A dramatic French attempt – special forces and all – to pin nefarious drone activity on a tanker, for instance, has failed miserably. In Germany, a recent sighting has actually been cleared up quickly. The culprit? A hapless German drone amateur who must be living under a rock.
And perish the thought that Ukraine itself might have anything to do with those mystery drones! Its regime has plenty of motive, and, by now, even the West has been compelled to acknowledge that it is perfectly capable of massive sabotage operations and lies to manipulate its European backers. Because that is now even the official story of the Nord Stream terror attack. But: thinking logically – verboten!
Instead, let’s pretend that we know what we don’t know (Russia, Russia, Russia!) and start overreacting, again, based on our ignorance and panic at best, on a malevolent, deliberate strategy of cognitive warfare against our own countries at worst. In Germany, for instance, both Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius have made the bizarre claim that while the country is not (yet?) at war, it is also no longer at peace. And the-Russians-are-coming head of the BND? He feels the current peace is “icy” at best and – drum roll – “could turn into heated confrontation at any moment.”
What is that even supposed to mean? Is there a backhanded admission, finally, that Germany has made a deliberate and awfully self-harming choice to fight Russia through Ukraine? If so, thank you, Hauptmann Obvious: during last year’s Ukrainian Kamikaze offensive, German tanks got shredded once again in the vicinity of Kursk – at the 1943 site of the largest tank battle in history. (And guess who lost?) We have noticed that much. How about you, our supposed leaders, stop playing with fire?
Or are these fear-mongering statements meant to prepare the ground for a concrete power grab? That is what Roderich Kiesewetter, an ultra-Russophobe and war fantasist from Merz’s own center-right CDU party has already suggested explicitly: he wants the German parliament to declare the so-called “Spannungsfall,” literally “situation of tension.” In the mainstream media, for instance the important newspaper Welt, the usual information warriors are already amplifying Kiesewetter’s message. And – yet another striking coincidence – a recent military exercise called “Red Storm Bravo,” in Hamburg, one of Germany’s biggest cities, was dedicated to cosplaying the “Spannungsfall” – with maximum publicity.
The consequences of initiating a “Spannungsfall” – a kind of official pre-war – are complex and severe: Open-ended, compulsory, and universal military service is only one of them; the army can be used domestically; citizens can be drafted for work; civil rights are painfully restricted; those critical of government policy, NATO, or the “Spannungsfall” itself can be cajoled even worse than usual.
Last but not least, the “Spannungsfall” allows the government to postpone or otherwise influence elections. In Germany, it would be an ideal vehicle for the traditional parties to at least stall the consequences of their own failure, unpopularity and decline, on one side, and the rise of challengers on the so-called “populist” new right and left, on the other.
Carl Schmitt, Germany’s 20th-century version of Niccolo Machiavelli – brilliantly smart, ruthlessly realistic, and morally badly questionable – defined ultimate political power as the ability to declare a state of exception. In essence, Schmitt’s logic was simple: we live together by having rules; hence, the power that trumps all others is to decide when those rules do not apply.
Schmitt explained extremes. In reality, governments don’t raze all rules in one fell swoop. Why should they? To unshackle themselves and become even less accountable than usual they proceed stealthily and gradually. No need to trumpet a state of exception in its pure, all-or-nothing form. Why needlessly scare the subjects and, perhaps, provoke resistance?
Instead, what usually happens is the invocation of an emergency – either simply made-up or greatly exaggerated – to justify chipping away at citizens’ rights, first a little then a lot, while boosting the unchecked powers of the rulers and their bureaucrats. Call it the salami-slicing tactics of Western liberalism.
Dialing up the state of exception in handy instalments – that is also the most plausible explanation of the recent great drone scare in NATO-EU Europe. Yet another phase in the years-long Putin-is-gonna-get-you cognitive warfare campaign that Western establishments and mainstream media have been waging on their own fellow citizens, the great drone scare serves the general purpose to promote even more panic over an allegedly impending Russian attack on NATO states.
The techniques for escalating the war scare are dishonest and repetitive, but highly developed. As a high-ranking NATO general has told us, their aim is not simply to manipulate “what people think.” That, in NATO-speak, would be mere propaganda and just so old-hat. Rather, the state-of-the-art approach is to “exploit vulnerabilities of the human mind” to influence “the way” people think. Targeting “human capital” – yes, that’s us, all of us – “from the individual to states, to multinational organizations, across everyday life.”
Of course, the official pretense is that all of the above is what the enemy – read: Russia (and China) – does or, at worst, what NATO will do to that enemy. But is in the nature of the cognitive warfare shtick that it easily allows for turning the psychological disruption guns on the West’s own populations. Because – so the pretext – those populations are already under cognitive attack by the enemy. So what can you do, except fight back on the battlefield you claim is under attack: their minds? We have seen and experienced the results of this nifty little sleight of hand for years already.
But there also is something special. In the words of Jonas Togel, one of the few Western experts daring to notice Western information warfare, “it is worse than it has ever been.” Indeed, but there is no guarantee that things won’t get even worse again. The real question is how much longer our cognitive warriors-in-chief will have a free hand to drive us all mad with fear.
Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
No, Reuters, Climate Change is Not Threatening Europe’s Resources
By Anthony Watts | ClimateRealism | October 2, 2025
In the article, “Climate change and pollution threaten Europe’s resources, EU warns,” Reuters asserts that climate change poses a “direct threat” to Europe’s natural resources, citing an EU environment agency report, and warns of worsening droughts and extreme weather. These claims are patently false. History shows far worse droughts in the past with no appreciable trend of other types of extreme weather events becoming more common or severe. Europe’s resource problems are caused by humans, stemming from overuse and poor management, just not from human-caused climate change.
The article declares that “Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent and is experiencing worsening droughts and other extreme weather events.” It further states that more than 80 percent of protected habitats are in poor condition, blaming climate change and pollution.
“The window for meaningful action is narrowing, and the consequences of delay are becoming more tangible,” European Environment Agency executive director Leena Yla-Mononen told Reuters. “We are approaching tipping points – not only in ecosystems, but also in the social and economic systems that underpin our societies.”
The is political rhetoric couched in weak science.
The reality is far more mundane. The European Environment Agency’s own data show that water stress is primarily linked to intensive agriculture, industrial demand, and population growth. As the “Review of National Water Allocation Policies in Six European Countries” documents, many European countries continue to over-allocate water rights, creating artificial scarcity even in years with average rainfall. This is a governance problem, not a climate one. Similarly, biodiversity decline across Europe is overwhelmingly the result of land use change, habitat fragmentation, and invasive species—not a few tenths of a degree of warming over the last few decades.
When it comes to extreme weather, Reuters’ claims are directly contradicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report which notes there is little to no attribution of many types of severe weather to climate change. As Climate at a Glance: Extreme Weather summarizes, data do not support claims that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or severe worldwide.
Further, Europe’s worst droughts occurred long before today’s modest warming. The megadrought of 1540 lasted an entire year, with contemporaneous records describing riverbeds across central Europe running dry, widespread crop failure, and thousands of deaths. More recent severe droughts struck in the 1920s and 1940s, periods that cannot be blamed on modern greenhouse gas emissions. The paper “The 1921 European drought: impacts, reconstruction and drivers” describes the 1921 European drought as “the most severe and most widespread drought in Europe since the start of the 20th century.
In “A drought climatology for Europe,” decadal trends show “greater pan-European drought incidence in the 1940s, early 1950s … and lesser drought incidence in the 1910s, 1930s” over the 20th century.
And there are many more worse droughts even further back in the past, before climate change even had a name, as this graph from the 2021 paper Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability shows:
Compared to these historical drought episodes, recent intermittent summer dry spells are far from extraordinary.
Also, as detailed in multiple Climate Realism posts on the topics neither floods, here and here, for example, nor wildfires, here and here, are more frequent or severe now than they have been in the past.
Even heatwaves are neither more frequent nor deadly now than they have been historically, with deaths from temperatures declining.
Europe’s actual environmental challenges—such as nutrient pollution in rivers, overfishing, and urban sprawl—require pragmatic policy solutions, not grandiose climate pledges. By conflating resource depletion with climate change and exaggerating extreme weather risks, Reuters has misled its audience. The problems it describes are not new, not worsening because of climate change, and not solvable by CO₂ reductions. They are solvable by better governance, better planning, and better science. Once again, journalism has been sacrificed to climate alarmism.
Moscow comments on Assad poisoning rumors
RT | October 13, 2025
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has rejected rumors that former Syrian Bashar Assad has been poisoned, saying that Assad and his family are safe in Moscow and have been living there without any problems since being granted asylum.
Earlier this month, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) cited an anonymous source as claiming that Assad had been discharged from a hospital in Moscow Region after a supposed poisoning attempt in September. The rumor has since been widely circulated by both Western and Russian media outlets.
SOHR consists of a single individual – Rami Abdulrahman – who runs the organization from his home in Coventry, England, which also functions as a clothing shop. SOHR’s reports on the war in Syria have been cited by Western governments and media, although it has consistently faced accusations of anti-Assad bias and sympathy toward armed opposition groups.
Lavrov stressed that Assad “has no problem living in our capital” and that “no poisonings have occurred.” “If such rumors appear, I leave them to the conscience of those who spread them,” he said.
The minister added that Russia had provided asylum to Assad and his family “for purely humanitarian reasons,” noting that they had faced threats of physical harm after last year’s change of power in Damascus.
Lavrov drew parallels with the 2011 conflict in Libya, recalling Muammar Gaddafi’s public killing which was widely broadcast on television – an event that the Russian foreign minister said “delighted Hillary Clinton, who watched his physical annihilation live and clapped her hands.”
Assad, a longtime Russian ally, was overthrown last December when forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized Damascus. The situation in Syria has remained unstable since, with clashes between Islamist factions and government units under the new leadership.
Russia has maintained its military presence at the Khmeimim Airbase and Tartus naval facility, and says it plans to repurpose them for humanitarian operations in coordination with the Syrian authorities.
‘Lies, misinformation’: Israeli military produced videos to justify Gaza genocide
Press TV – October 10, 2025
A new analysis has found that the Israeli military produced three-dimensional or animated visualizations not based on verified intelligence but fabricated content and digital assets to justify the Tel Aviv regime’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
A months-long investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, together with the research collective Viewfinder, the Swiss network SRF, and the Scottish outlet The Ferret analyzed 43 animations released by the Israeli army over the past two years and found that many contain “serious spatial inaccuracies or pre-fabricated assets”.
The videos, including those depicting the alleged tunnels beneath the al-Shifa Hospital and a UN-run school in Gaza, are “sourced not from classified intelligence but rather from commercial libraries, content creators, and cultural institutions,” the study found.
The clips are typically published across the Israeli military’s Telegram, YouTube, Facebook, X, and Instagram channels, and may be paired with a press conference by the occupation army’s spokesperson.
International media outlets will use the ready-made visuals, in many cases amplifying them uncritically.
“Instead of revealing hidden truths — as Israeli military officials insist, and as the international media readily amplifies — the visualizations actually blur them,” according to the investigation.
It further said that interviews with soldiers involved in the production of these videos further illuminate how the Israeli army prioritizes the aesthetic value of the animations over their accuracy.
The analysis also found that more than half of the videos contained 3D assets, which were taken from third-party sources.
Over 50 different third-party assets were identified in total, which were replicated hundreds of times across animations of sites supposedly in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, it added.
“A parking lot from Washington state, scans from a boat-building workshop in Scotland, and commercial storefront kits from the video game industry — all of these have been inserted, without credit, into animations presented as ‘illustrations’ of Hamas bunkers or Iranian weapons facilities.”
Eyad Elyan, a Palestinian academic at Scotland’s Robert Gordon University specializing in AI and 3D modeling, said he was “deeply disturbed” to learn that Israel has been using Scottish assets in its propaganda animations, saying the practice aligns with the regime’s “long history of exploiting others’ resources and employing every means possible to promote baseless claims.”
“What is especially troubling, however, is how such fabricated content is uncritically accepted and amplified by mainstream media outlets,” he continued. “Much of this material consisted of outright falsehoods — for instance, the widely circulated animation alleging that Hamas operated a command center beneath the al-Shifa Hospital. No such facility was found, but [this claim] was used to destroy almost the entire healthcare system in Gaza.”
Scottish lawmaker Patrick Harvie said the Israeli military made and distributed the videos in order to “justify” its Gaza genocide.
“When lies and misinformation are such a core part of an army’s strategy, it makes it all the more important that our governments take a stand and act to stop the atrocities that they are inflicting,” he added.
Israel unleashed its brutal onslaught on the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime failed to achieve its declared objectives of eliminating Hamas and freeing all captives in Gaza, despite killing, according to the health ministry of Gaza, 67,194 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injuring 169,890 others.
Trump’s Gaza peace plan won’t work, it’s an ultimatum under genocide
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 9, 2025
The so-called peace plan put forward by U.S. President Trump is a non-starter that won’t work, according to international legal expert Alfred de Zayas.
De Zayas says Trump’s much-ballyhooed initiative is not a peace offer. It is an ultimatum demanded by criminal rogue regimes that are responsible for genocide – the United States and Israel.
Professor De Zayas points out that Donald Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have no credibility. Both are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. The very idea of Trump proposing a peace deal amidst an ongoing U.S.-backed mass slaughter, where there is no legal prosecution of the perpetrators of genocide, nor for the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and numerous other war crimes, is grotesque and absurd.
The appointment of British former leader Tony Blair to oversee Trump’s “peace plan” in Gaza is another insult.
“He should be behind bars as a war criminal,” says de Zayas, referring to Blair’s role in launching the U.S.-British war on Iraq in 2003, based on lies, killing over one million people.
On the issue of Gaza, the problem is that Israel, with support from the U.S. and European states, has been grossly violating international law and UN treaties for decades with impunity. This shameful lack of accountability and enforcement of international law makes Israel and its Western sponsors criminal regimes. It is nonsense to expect such serial violators to now propose a peace deal when they have not been held to account for a litany of crimes.
De Zayas says we need a ceasefire in Gaza urgently, with massive humanitarian aid for a population being deliberately starved to death by Israel. But any resolution must be applied with international law and justice for the horrific crimes.
Trump’s plan is a whitewash of the genocide. The Western mainstream media are also guilty of covering up the depth of horror. The media are ridiculously spinning Trump’s offer as genuine and credible, perhaps with a few flaws pooh-poohed here and there. The media are not reporting on the true horror and Western complicity in genocide. That’s because their long-time role is to serve as a propaganda service to sanitize the crimes and systematic lawlessness of Western rogue regimes.
Professor Alfred de Zayas teaches international law and history at the Geneva School of Diplomacy. He has worked as a UN staff expert on human rights for nearly 50 years.
His latest book is The Human Rights Industry (Clarity Press, 2023), see here: https://www.claritypress.com/product/human-rights-industry/
Catch his recent articles on wide-ranging international issues at Counterpunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/author/alfred-de-zayas/
NATO eyeing ‘forceful’ response to Russia – FT
RT | October 9, 2025
NATO is considering easing restrictions on pilots to allow them to fire at unauthorized Russian aircraft, and drastically increasing its military footprint on the country’s border, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing sources. This comes amid Western claims that Russia violated EU airspace, which Moscow has denied.
Last month, Estonia and Poland claimed that Russian aircraft illegally entered their airspace. Western media has also speculated that Russia may be behind drone incidents in other EU nations, which at times disrupted air traffic. Moscow has said the West has not provided any evidence for the claims.
Several NATO members are now debating “a more forceful response” to Russia, according to the Financial Times.
The reported proposals include arming surveillance drones that currently gather intelligence on Russian military movements and lowering the threshold for fighter pilots on NATO’s eastern border to take down perceived threats. Other options under discussion involve conducting military exercises directly along the Russian border, the report said.
Two NATO officials told the FT that one urgent task is to simplify the rules of engagement, which now differ among member states. Some nations require pilots to visually identify targets before firing, while others permit engagement based on radar data or the perceived direction and speed of an approaching aircraft.
FT sources noted that the talks, initiated by states bordering Russia and backed by France and the UK, later developed into a bloc-wide discussion – which, however, is said to be in the early stages. Some governments reportedly advocate for strong deterrence policies, though others urge restraint to avoid direct confrontation.
The article comes on the heels of last week’s EU summit on creating a ‘drone wall’ to deter alleged Russian incursions, with Politico reporting that the meeting “descended into a familiar stalemate.”
Russia has accused NATO of escalating tensions near its borders through expanded military deployments and exercises. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also stated that NATO is “de facto at war” with Russia due to the bloc’s support for Ukraine.
Exposed: Western journalists secretly served ‘Israel’s’ war propaganda
Al Mayadeen | October 8, 2025
Leaked emails from the inbox of former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor reveal that prominent Western journalists, ncluding The Atlantic’s David Frum and British writer Douglas Murray, secretly offered to write speeches and provide other forms of assistance to Israeli officials during the entity’s 2014 war on Gaza, according to a report by journalists Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim published on Drop Site.
The correspondence, obtained by the hacker collective Handala and published by the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), includes communications between Prosor and several journalists and media figures.
The trove reveals that while “Israel” faced global condemnation for its war that killed over 2,200 Palestinians, more than 550 of them children, figures in Western media were privately coordinating with Israeli diplomats on messaging and advocacy efforts.
Frum’s dual role: Journalist and speechwriter
David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a former speechwriter for US President George W. Bush who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil,” began his editorial role at the magazine in early 2014. Just months later, at the height of “Israel’s” bombardment of Gaza, Frum sent Prosor a full draft of a UN speech.
In an email dated July 31, 2014, Frum told Prosor he had collaborated with Seth Mandel, a writer for the neoconservative publication Commentary, to prepare the text. The draft portrayed “Israel’s” war on Gaza as part of the “free world’s” struggle against “tyranny”, comparing it to the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany and invoking figures such as Harry Truman and the architects of the Marshall Plan.
The speech urged Americans not to grow “war weary” and to maintain support for “Israel’s” military actions. Prosor thanked Frum and said he would review the draft, though it remains unclear whether the text was ever used.
Remarkably, just one day earlier, Frum had contacted Prosor in his capacity as a journalist for The Atlantic, requesting an interview for a profile of the ambassador. Two months later, The Atlantic published Frum’s piece, “Israel’s Man at the United Nations,” which praised Prosor for his “toughness” and diplomatic skill in defending “Israel” against international criticism.
Douglas Murray’s contributions and fundraising
Frum was not alone. British commentator Douglas Murray, now an associate editor at The Spectator and a frequent television pundit, also sent Prosor a proposed draft for a UN speech on the same day, July 31, 2014.
In his email, Murray described the text as “first draft ideas,” noting it may include “more diplomatic things than needed.” His proposed speech echoed hardline pro-“Israel” narratives, including condemnation of BDS movements and disparaging references to European Muslims.
Murray pledged to continue assisting the ambassador. “I will give all the time I can to helping get it right,” he wrote.
In subsequent months, Murray continued corresponding with Prosor, sharing articles and offering public relations advice. Later that year, he informed the ambassador that he had hosted a London fundraiser that brought in over £1 million for the Association for the Wellbeing of Israeli Soldiers, a group providing direct support to Israeli occupation forces.
Prosor thanked Murray for his “wonderful work”, calling his efforts vital to “Israel’s cause”.
The revelations contrast sharply with Murray’s later insistence on journalistic independence. In an April 2025 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he chastised critics of “Israel’s” Gaza policies for lacking firsthand experience, saying he avoided commenting on countries he hadn’t visited.
Murray has frequently appeared in public wearing a “PRESS” flak jacket while embedded with Israeli forces, without disclosing his prior speechwriting and fundraising for the same military he was covering.
CNN producer’s role in Iron Dome fundraising
The leaked correspondence also implicates Pamela Gross, a former CNNproducer, who maintained close ties with Prosor during the war. Emails show that Gross and her husband, media executive Jimmy Finkelstein, then-owner of The Hill, privately discussed raising money for “Israel’s” Iron Dome missile system.
In one July 2014 message, Gross wrote to Prosor, “Clearly Iron Dome is doing the trick and saving lives. Please dear friend, let’s get it finished. Please let me know what is still left to be done at your soonest convenience.”
Prosor responded by thanking Gross for her “amazing work in fundraising for the Iron Dome project,” calling her and her husband “true assets to the state of Israel.” Gross later asked the ambassador to connect her with officials who could provide details about the project’s funding needs and how to channel donations.
Gross continued to book Prosor for CNNappearances while maintaining their personal friendship. In one 2015 exchange, she invited him on air to discuss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress, telling him she and her husband had recently dined with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Unanswered questions, ethical fallout
The leaked cache contains hundreds of verified messages, photographs, and attachments, though DDoSecrets noted it could not independently authenticate every file. Handala, the hacking group that released the material, issued a violent threat against Prosor, which DDoSecrets publicly condemned.
None of the journalists or organizations named in the emails, including Frum, Murray, Mandel, CNN, or the Israeli Embassy in Germany, where Prosor now serves, responded to requests for comment from Drop Site, which first reported the findings.
The revelations raise fresh ethical concerns about the blurred lines between journalism and government lobbying efforts during times of war. While journalists are expected to maintain independence and avoid conflicts of interest, the emails suggest that several prominent figures in Western media privately worked to shape pro-“Israel” narratives during one of the deadliest wars on Gaza.
For “Israel”, such alliances helped bolster its messaging at a time of mounting global outrage over civilian casualties. For the public, however, the leaks expose the extent to which supposedly independent voices in Western journalism may have functioned, willingly or not, as part of a broader influence campaign.
GAMAAN: The Polling OP That’s Gaslighting The West About Iran
By Sam Carlen & Iain Carlos | Mint Press News | July 28, 2025
The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), an influential Dutch polling group cited by the New York Times, U.S. State Department, and U.K. government, claims to capture the true views of everyday Iranians through unconventional online surveys.
GAMAAN calls itself an “independent” research foundation, a label echoed by news outlets and think tanks covering the group’s headline-grabbing findings, which portray the Iranian public as far more secular and anti-government than data from organizations such as Gallup and Pew Research suggest. But GAMAAN’s extensive links to U.S.-funded organizations, many of which advocate for regime change in Iran, and its flawed methodology, have raised serious questions about its credibility and impact on Western understanding of Iran.
“[T]hey know what they think, and they want to use the language of social science to demonstrate that those claims are actually true. And of course, that’s a problem,” said Daniel Tavana, an assistant professor of political science at Penn State who was a principal investigator for Princeton’s Iran Social Survey.
“[T]hey’re just ideological,” Tavana said.
They are very opposed to the regime, want to embarrass the regime in whatever way they can, and are happy to say … whatever they think will most effectively do that at any given point in time, regardless of whether or not they have evidence for it.”
GAMAAN’s role in anti-government discourse surrounding Iran has taken on heightened significance against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, which culminated in a historic outbreak of hostilities last month.
Ostensibly motivated by concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, the conflict began with an Israeli surprise attack on June 13, to which Iran responded with a barrage of missiles and drones, beginning a days-long cycle of back-and-forth attacks between the two sides.
The U.S. entered the war on June 22, conducting airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Iran responded with attacks on U.S. military bases in Qatar. On June 24, a shaky U.S.-brokered ceasefire took hold, and despite initial violations by both Israel and Iran, active hostilities gradually came to a halt.
GAMAAN’s poll results, which portray the Iranian citizenry as far more hostile to their government than other surveys, are often cited by advocates for regime change. The question of Iranians’ support (or lack thereof) for the Islamic Republic was particularly relevant during the hostilities, when doubts arose about the government’s survival, and the prospect of installing the Shah’s son was granted legitimacy by some media outlets.
While Iranian state-owned media have discussed some of GAMAAN’s ties to Western-funded organizations and regime change proponents, as well as the limitations of its survey methods, Noir News is the first to report the full scope of GAMAAN’s numerous connections with U.S. government-funded regime change operatives and the severity of its methodological issues.
Given GAMAAN’s rapid rise to prominence, with its findings often cited by Western governments and prestigious news outlets, the group’s numerous ties to U.S. government-funded supporters of regime change in Iran, and the organization’s dubious survey methods, warrant scrutiny, especially given the anti-Islamic Republic trend of its survey results (with one survey finding 81% of respondents opposed the Islamic Republic), which are used by critics as a cudgel against Iran’s government.
GAMAAN founders Pooyan Tamimi Arab, an assistant professor of religious studies at Utrecht University, and Ammar Maleki, an assistant professor of comparative politics at Tilburg University, are themselves outspoken critics of the Iranian government. Maleki refers to himself as a “pro-democracy activist” and is a vociferous critic of the Islamic Republic and proponent of regime change. Neither responded to requests for comment.
Indeed, GAMAAN has relied on U.S. government-funded VPN and anti-censorship software providers like Psiphon to disseminate its surveys; collaborated with the USAID-funded, pro-regime change Tony Blair Institute; and collaborated with and received funding from historian Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Iranian regime-critical Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, which is in turn supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Likewise, for a February 2023 report on Iranians’ attitudes toward the anti-government protests, GAMAAN enlisted the help of U.S. government-linked Iran International and U.S. government-funded Voice of America Persian in circulating survey questions.
Founded in 2019, the logic behind GAMAAN’s founding was that, in the context of state repression, traditional survey approaches based on random sampling and in-person or telephone interviews fail to capture the population’s true beliefs regarding sensitive religious and political topics, because “individuals often censor their true views or even actively alter them to avoid scrutiny by authorities,” according to GAMAAN.
Instead, the group distributes its surveys via social media, VPN platforms such as Psiphon, and encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram, allowing respondents to participate anonymously.
Unlike traditional polling based on probability sampling—random selection of respondents and persistent follow-up to minimize non-responsiveness—GAMAAN uses a voluntary, opt-in model. Respondents are not randomly selected from the broader target population of literate Iranians over the age of 19.
Instead, GAMAAN says respondents are reached “through random sampling via the popular Internet censorship circumvention provider Psiphon VPN, as well as ensuing sharing by respondents on social networks (Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter).”
Prior to its use of VPN platforms like Psiphon for sampling, GAMAAN had exclusively relied on surveys being shared on social media, a method also referred to as “multiple chain-referral sampling,” also known as “snowball sampling.”
To account for methodological issues with non-random sampling inherent to opt-in surveys, GAMAAN tries to circulate its polls across a range of channels “representing radically diverse social layers of society and political perspectives,” and adjusts response data using statistical methods meant to render the final polling data more representative of the target population (literate Iranians 19 years and older with internet access).
At times, the circulation of GAMAAN’s surveys has been aided by social media virality.
Using this unorthodox methodology, GAMAAN’s survey results have often surprised observers and contradicted the findings of long-established pollsters, such as Pew Research and Gallup, which employ conventional face-to-face and telephone polling methods. The group’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs made waves for its findings, which showed less religiosity among the Iranian population than was generally believed (and indicated in prior polling).
Among other surprising results, GAMAAN’s survey found 22% of respondents did not belong to any religion, 9% identified as atheist, and 47% reported “having transitioned from being religious to non-religious.” In contrast, Pew Research reported in 2009 that 99.4% of Iranians are Muslim.
But according to polling experts, GAMAAN’s findings cannot be generalized to the broader Iranian public due to significant bias in who its surveys reach. GAMAAN relies chiefly on the Psiphon VPN platform to circulate its survey questionnaires, with about 66% of respondents in its latest poll participating through the platform, and the remainder reached through Telegram (13.1%), Instagram (8.5%), WhatsApp (4.6%), X (1.5%), and the remaining 6.7% through other undisclosed channels.
According to polling experts, these methods suffer from “coverage bias” in that they fail to reach large segments of the Iranian population, including Iranians who do not use the internet or do not use VPNs or encrypted messaging.
Nor do GAMAAN’s methods account for the fact that Iranians who use Psiphon or come across its surveys through social media are different in important ways from the Iranian population as a whole, to which GAMAAN claims its findings can be generalized.
Indeed, GAMAAN’s survey links are frequently shared by vocal critics of the Iranian government, and demographic data reported by GAMAAN shows respondents are disproportionately urban (93.6% of respondents in its latest survey, vs. about 80% of the total Iranian population), college-educated (70.9% of respondents, compared to 27.7% of literate Iranians 19 years and older, per labor force statistics cited by GAMAAN); and high-income (54% of respondents had a “household monthly income above 13 million Rials,” compared to 40% among the target population, per GAMAAN’s methodology section).
“[F]or that inference that GAMAAN is making to be true, that this sample represents the Iranian population, the adult age population, we would have to assume or believe that Psiphon users are reflective of the Iranian population as a whole, which … just could not possibly be true,” Tavana said.
GAMAAN’s surveys have a high rate of repeat participation (i.e., a large share of respondents to a given survey participated in previous GAMAAN polling), with 26% of respondents in its most recent poll having participated in previous GAMAAN surveys, which GAMAAN interpreted as “indicating that the random sampling method was effective in distributing the questionnaire among a wide range of demographic groups, reaching far beyond networks familiar with GAMAAN.”
“The authors’ claim that this number provides evidence that their methods reach a random sample is a vast misinterpretation,” according to Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology at UCLA who was a principal investigator for the Iran Social Survey along with Tavana. “Indeed, it is the opposite. This number, if true, is evidence of how this organization’s methods are reaching a relatively small, interconnected group of people who are predisposed to take their surveys.”
Harris highlighted that, per GAMAAN’s own methodology section in its most recent survey report, 5-11 million Iranians use Psiphon daily (the main source of survey participants), meaning the “refined sample” of 77,216 (which excludes “random or bot-entered responses,” per GAMAAN) constitutes approximately 0.7-1.5% of daily Psiphon users in Iran, yet GAMAAN reported that “26% of respondents had previously participated in GAMAAN’s surveys.”
“When you have a 26% repeat rate from what’s already less than 2% of your potential sample pool of Psiphon users (and less than 0.2% of all adult VPN users), that’s a major red flag about how representative your sample really is,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir.
[I]t shows they’re not really getting a random sample of all Iranians, just likely a small, enthusiastic subset who regularly take their surveys. Indeed, the 26% number, given this relatively large sample size, is telling.”
Sunghee Lee, an Associate Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, wrote in an email to Noir that “without further information,” she would agree with Harris’s assessment of the problematic nature of the high repeat-response rate.
“Based on my quick search, the adult population of Iran appears to be around 70 million. The sample of 77K from the June 2024 report accounts for 0.1% of the adult population. This means that, if a true probability sample is used for 77K, you are likely to be sampled 1 out of 1000 studies. The fact that 26% of the sample is a repeat group suggests that the sample is likely to represent a group much narrower in scope than the adult population.”
While GAMAAN purports to use “various balancing methods such as weighting and the sample matching method” to derive a representative sample from its raw survey data, survey experts interviewed by Noir said these methods can’t compensate for the unrepresentative nature of GAMAAN’s underlying data.
“[W]e use weights when we don’t know what the probability is that any given person will enter into a sample, and so we weight certain respondents in our sample more or less if we think that they were more or less likely to be chosen to be on our sample, we don’t have any way to assess that,” Tavana said.
“So what they call weights is actually just refining the sample so that on key demographics, the sample looks more like the Iranian [population]. But it’s not a probability sample to begin with.”
Stanford University social psychologist and survey methodologist Jon Krosnick concurred, writing in an email to Noir : “[T]he phrase ‘matching and weighting’ without disclosing the details also sounds like a snake oil salesman. There have been lots of claims that ‘matching and weighting’ have improved the accuracy of non-probability samples, but lots of published papers have shown that such methods have failed rather than succeeded. I don’t know of a single one showing improvement in accuracy.”
Lee likewise expressed doubt that GAMAAN’s weighting and sample matching adjustments can yield a representative sample: “I am not entirely convinced that a population with less than 30% with college education can be examined by a sample with more than 70% with college education even after the weighting is applied.”
Lee also noted that the Pew Research study GAMAAN links to in its June 2024 survey report when discussing the “raking” weighting method for adjusting online opt-in samples, which used over 30,000 online opt-in survey responses to evaluate weighting procedures and their ability to reduce bias, concluded that “[e]ven the most effective adjustment procedures were unable to remove most of the bias.”
Lee also highlighted that GAMAAN’s “sample is representative only on the dimensions that the study attempted to balance. There are five demographic variables used in ranking: age group, gender, level of education, residential area (urban or rural), and provincial population. Therefore, whether results on the study outcome variables (e.g., expected election turnout) are representative is debatable.”
“The bottom line for me is that abandoning random sampling in Iran or the U.S. leaves a researcher with no basis for generalizing the results of a survey to any population,” Krosnick wrote. “It’s fine to talk about the obtained results, as well as describing the people who participated. But not to generalize.”
According to the survey experts interviewed by Noir, a chief issue with GAMAAN’s approach is the inappropriate generalization of its survey results to the entire Iranian adult population, rather than the (likely meaningfully different) participants in its surveys.
“This doesn’t mean [GAMAAN’s] surveys are useless, but their results should be presented much more cautiously, with clear acknowledgment that they represent opinions of a specific, self-selected subset of internet-using, politically engaged people – not the general population,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir. “This is especially crucial when the surveys cover sensitive political topics that might influence US/European policy or public opinion.”
“I have no doubt in my mind that with the data GAMAAN has, we could make inferences about Psiphon users, and frankly, that would be fascinating to know what Psiphon users think and believe about the Iranian government,” Tavana said.
It’s an incredibly important constituency we could generalize their findings to, and make inferences about, the activist population, maybe even the online population, right? That would be fine, but to say that it’s representative of the whole country … we would have to believe [all] of these things that we know are false. We would have to believe that Psiphon users in particular, but also Twitter and Telegram users, are reflective of their population, and we already have substantial verified information that they are not.”
“GAMAAN tells us to believe that their findings are generalizable to the entire adult population, right? This is invalid,” Tavana said. “That conclusion does not follow from, even if we had their data, even if we knew what procedures they were following, how they were recruiting subjects, and so on, that scientifically does not logically follow from what they are doing.”
Even the central premise of GAMAAN’s approach—that citizens of a country with a repressive, authoritarian state will not give honest answers to questions pertaining to sensitive political or cultural issues when an interviewer is present—is dubious, Krosnick wrote.
“[M]any studies have surprisingly shown that removing interviewers rarely causes responses to change much,” Krosnick wrote. “In general, if a person is going to participate in answering questions, why bother if the person is going to lie – it’s obviously easier just to decline to participate at all from the start or to break off mid-interview.”
GAMAAN has also drawn criticism for a lack of transparency in its methods and, with one exception, a failure to subject its work to the rigor and scrutiny of publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals.
“Because they don’t document carefully enough for scientific standards what they do, none of what they produce is replicable,” Tavana said. “This is compounded by the fact that their data is not publicly available. I cannot go and download their data and analyze it for myself, right?”
The only article based on GAMAAN’s survey work that has been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal to date, “Survey Zoroastrians: Online Religious Identification in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” primarily focuses on a single finding from GAMAAN’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs (which was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with Dr. Ladan Boroumand” of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, an Islamic Republic-critical organization supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy) – that 8% of respondents identified as Zoroastrian (a far higher share than reported in previous research).
The paper does not use GAMAAN’s more controversial findings (such as those concerning Iranians’ political beliefs). Moreover, a note appended to the journal article states “[t]he raw data used for this research can be shared with researchers under a confidentiality and collaborative agreement with GAMAAN,” which Tavana characterized as “unusual.”
“Typically, we do not require these kinds of agreements for access to this type of data,” Tavana wrote in an email to Noir. “I have seen it before when the data is proprietary or owned by a private company. But not data that an academic has collected on their own. This means that no one – not the reviewers, the editorial staff, or anyone else – has verified the claims made in the article.”
“[B]ecause we cannot replicate what they do, because their data are not available, we don’t know whether the inferences they are making on that data are valid, and so we have to take them at their word, and there are many reasons why we probably should not take them at their word,” Tavana said.
GAMAAN’s methodological shortcomings may account for substantial differences seen between its findings and those of long-established pollsters using traditional probability sampling.
For instance, in a 2022 survey on Iranians’ political beliefs, GAMAAN reported far lower approval ratings for then-president Ebrahim Raisi compared to those reported by Gallup in a 2021 survey. GAMAAN itself highlighted this divergence (illustrated in the graphic below), but wrote that “both surveys are substantially similar … if Gallup’s results are compared with only the Principlists and Reformists in GAMAAN’s sample” (meaning, responses from more conservative and incrementalist participants in GAMAAN’s survey align with Gallup’s findings across its entire sample).
Figure 13-1 — Maleki, Ammar. 2022. Iranians’ Attitudes Toward Political Systems: A 2022 Survey Report. Published online, gamaan.org: GAMAAN.
GAMAAN’s Ties To US-Funded Regime-Change Orgs
Chief among GAMAAN’s ties to U.S. government-funded groups is the organization’s recent “partnership” with the Tony Blair Institute. GAMAAN “exclusively provided” the U.K. nonprofit with detailed survey data gathered in June 2020 (regarding Iranians’ religious beliefs), and February & December 2022 (regarding political systems and the Mahsa Amini street protests, respectively).
The Tony Blair Institute used GAMAAN’s survey data for a series of articles depicting the Iranian populace as eager for regime change, with one article titled “The People of Iran Are Shouting for Regime Change – But Is the West Listening?”.
Founded by former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Institute has received millions in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at least some of which were Cooperative Agreement grants “characterized by extended involvement between recipient and agency.”
The Tony Blair Institute is also funded by the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (akin to the U.S. State Department), as well as private entities such as the French consulting firm Altai Consulting. Altai boasts the European Commission, USAID, and the French Development Agency as clients.
GAMAAN’s widely-discussed 2020 survey of Iranians’ religious beliefs was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with” Dr. Ladan Boroumand, co-founder and research director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a nonprofit focused on Iranian human rights abuses and critical of Iran’s Islamist government.
Named after her father Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was allegedly assassinated by Islamic Republic agents in 1991, the Center’s ‘Omid’ project documents cases of executions and assassinations in Iran in a searchable electronic database. The organization isn’t shy about supporting regime change, stating that its “goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”
The Boroumand Center has received substantial funding from the U.S. government-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), of which the Boroumand Center is a “partner.”
Ladan Boroumand has held multiple positions at the NED, including serving as a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow, researching “secularization in Iran,” a current member of the editorial board for the NED’s Journal of Democracy, as well as a current Research Council Member at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. She has also served on the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy, of which the NED serves as the “secretariat.”
Ladan Boroumand is also on the advisory committee for the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project, which convened various experts and former officials “to develop a holistic US policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran for the next four years.”
The Atlantic Council is an influential international relations think tank with extensive ties to U.S. lawmakers that receives large sums from the U.S. government (with FY 2023 grant obligations totaling over $6 million). The group’s October 2024 Iran Strategy Project report recommends a policy of continued pressure against the Islamic Republic, including through “enhanced support to the Iranian people” with the “long-term goal of supporting the Iranian people’s ability to change their system of government if they so desire.”
Ladan Boroumand was invited, along with her sister Roya Boroumand, to a July 2018 speech by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Reagan Library, amid the Trump administration’s pivot to a hardline posture towards the Islamic Republic. The two sisters likewise joined 12 other Iranian diaspora women in signing an August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”
GAMAAN has also consulted with Dr. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who has long worked with the U.S. government and the NED-funded Tavaana, a project of the E-Collaborative for Civic Education (ECCE), founded by staunch opponents of the Islamic Republic, Mariam Memarsadeghi and Akbar Atri.
Tavaana, which describes itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative,” aimed at ushering in democratic governance. It creates and disseminates anti-government media and information on anti-censorship tools, and has an extensive social media following. Memarsadeghi was also a signatory to the August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”
Memarsadeghi is also the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum, an organization that supports ousting the Islamic Republic and works to “reverse engineer an Iranian government that upholds security, the rule of law, and individual liberty.” Ladan Boroumand is one of only two advisors to the Cyrus Forum and was previously listed on Tavaana’s website as a teacher.
Ebadi also appears to have been invited to the U.S. State Department’s 2017 Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Implementers’ Conference, organized by the Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination (NEA/AC).
Ebadi’s name and role as president of the Centre for Supporters of Human Rights—a U.K. NGO focused on human rights issues in Iran that Ebadi founded—appear on a guest list circulated by the State Department in September 2017.
GAMAAN has also relied on U.S. government-funded virtual private network (VPN) providers Psiphon and Lantern for assistance in disseminating their surveys and bypassing Iranian government internet censorship.
Since at least 2021, GAMAAN has collaborated with Psiphon, an open-source tool for circumventing internet censorship (using VPN and other technologies) that was developed at the University of Toronto and publicly released in 2006. Psiphon has received millions in funding from the Open Technology Fund, which “receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. government via the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).”
Psiphon, the Tony Blair Institute, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, and Shirin Ebadi did not respond to requests for comment.
The Context
GAMAAN co-founder Ammar Maleki’s ire against the Islamic Republic is more than ideological; it’s personal. His father, Mohammad Maleki, who served as the first president of the University of Tehran, was a well-known critic of the country’s human rights abuses and use of the death penalty.
In 2019, the elder Maleki joined 13 other Iranian activists in signing a pair of open letters calling for Iran’s Supreme Leader to step down and a “complete and peaceful transition” away from the Islamic Republic. Ammar Maleki told Univers, the student newspaper of his employer, Tilburg University, “My father was imprisoned regularly until old age. Almost all the milestones in my life he missed.”
He makes his views on the Islamic Republic clear on X: “To understand/analyze the #Islamic_Republic of Iran, 3 golden rules should be kept in mind: 1- I.R. [Islamic Republic] cannot be reformed by dialogue but will surrender to pressure 2- I.R. officials lie unless proven otherwise 3- when I.R. officials/supporters say #Iran, they mean the I.R. only!”
Hardline politics are not unusual among academics. More unusual and concerning is Maleki’s willingness to accuse those who call into question GAMAAN’s findings and methodology of carrying water for the Islamic Republic. Daniel Tavana experienced this firsthand when he criticized GAMAAN’s methodology online.
“I understand that you have a hard time these days selling your data by the IRGC-initiated IranPoll, so you attack GAMAAN to get attention. I cannot waste my time answering nonsense on GAMAAN’s method for an apologist! Our results were corroborated by external checks & field evidence,” Maleki wrote, referring to Tavana and the Iran Social Survey’s use of IranPoll to conduct surveys within Iran.
Noir couldn’t find evidence of IranPoll having ties to the Islamic Republic, and Maleki did not respond when we asked him to elaborate on the allegation. Tavana likewise stated, “IranPoll has no connection to the government [of Iran].”
Nonetheless, Maleki seems to allege that IranPoll’s work is evidence that Western universities “are under the control of the regime’s thugs,” as he wrote on X.
If mainstream media citations of GAMAAN’s findings are any indication, Maleki’s tenacity seems to be paying off.
Whether you’ve seen it in reports published by the State Department, the American Foreign Policy Council, the government of the United Kingdom, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, The Guardian, The Economist, CBC, Al-Monitor, The Jerusalem Post, Voice of America, the Wilson Center, DW News, Tablet Magazine, The Hill, The Washington Times, or Christianity Today, there’s a good chance that if you live in the West, GAMAAN has helped shape what you think is happening in Iran.
GAMAAN’s rise shows no signs of slowing: the organization announced in January that Maleki had been “selected as the country representative for Iran (2025-2026) in the prestigious World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR).” The Washington Post described WAPOR as “the leading professional association of pollsters working outside the United States.”
For Tavana, GAMAAN isn’t merely worsening academic and mainstream conversation around Iran—it’s potentially providing justification for the kind of military confrontation that actually materialized last month.
“It wasn’t a very long time ago where, you know, the U.S. invaded another country, largely on the assumption that people who lived in that country wanted the invasion and [welcomed] their liberation … And so I think that, like, trafficking in these half-baked ideas is actually quite dangerous, and it’s going [to], if unchecked, get a lot of people killed,” Tavana said.
Sam Carlen is an investigative journalist writing for Noir News, an independent newsletter covering foreign policy and U.S. soft power projection, policing and surveillance, and other topics.
Iain Carlos is an investigative journalist and the founder of Noir News, a newsletter covering foreign policy, policing, surveillance, and other topics.
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How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous
By Professor Glenn Diesen | November 26, 2024
For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.
This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous. … continue
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- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
- New Study: Human CO2 Emissions Responsible For 1.57% Of Global Temperature Change Since 1750
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