As protesters burn Iranian cities, Western media ignores the shocking wave of violence, relying on U.S.-funded NGOs for data. The one-sided portrayal has helped push Trump to the brink of renewed U.S. attacks.
Protests in Qazvin, Iran on Jan. 2. (Tasnim News Agency / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)
By Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed
The Grayzone
Western media has ignored a growing trove of video evidence showing terrorist tactics deployed across Iran by protesters described by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “largely peaceful.”
Recent videos published both by Iranian state media and anti-government forces reveal public lynchings of unarmed guards, the torching of mosques, arson attacks on municipal buildings, marketplaces and fire stations and mobs of armed gunmen opening fire in the heart of Iranian cities.
Instead, Western media has focused almost exclusively on violence attributed to the Iranian government. In doing so, they have primarily relied on death counts compiled by Iranian diaspora groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the regime change arm of the U.S. government, and whose boards of directors are filled with committed neoconservatives.
The NED has taken credit for advancing the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests which filled Iranian cities throughout 2023 — and which also featured gruesome acts of violence ignored by Western media and human rights NGOs. Today, the NED is far from alone among the intelligence-aligned actors seeking to fuel the chaos inside Iran.
The Israeli spying and assassination agency known as Mossad issued a message from its official Farsi language account on Twitter/X urging Iranians to escalate their regime change activities, pledging that it would be supporting them on the ground.
“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” Mossad instructed Iranians. “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”
Toppling Tehran Through Terror
Protests began in Iran early this month when merchants took to the streets to demonstrate against rising inflation rates triggered by Western sanctions. Iran’s government responded sympathetically to the bazaar protests, providing them with police protection.
However, these demonstrations quickly dissolved, as an amorphous mass of anti-government elements seized the moment to launch a violent insurrection encouraged by governments from Israel to the U.S. — and by self-proclaimed “Crown Prince” Reza Pahlavi, who has branded government workers and state media outlets as “legitimate targets.”
On Jan. 9, the city of Mashhad became the scene of some of the most intense riots, as anti-government forces torched fire stations, burning fire fighters alive, while setting fire to buses, attacking city workers, vandalizing Metro stations and causing over $18 million in damage, according to local municipal authorities.
In Kermanshah, where anti-government rioters shot and killed 3-year-old Melina Asadi, groups of militants were filmed firing automatic weapons at police. In cities from Hamedan to Lorestan, rioters have filmed themselves beating unarmed security guards to death for attempting to impede their rampages.
Footage has emerged from the central Iranian city of rioters attacking a public bus and setting it aflame on Jan. 10.
In Tehran, meanwhile, mobs of rioters have attacked the historic Abazar Mosque, burning its interior, while others conducted arson attacks and burning copies of the Quran inside the Grand Mosque of Sarableh and the Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kadhim shrine in Kuzestan.
Rioters have set fire to a large municipal building in the heart of the city of Karaj, while burning the marketplace to the ground in central Rasht. In Borujen, anti-government hooligans reportedly torched a historic library filled with ancient texts during a night of looting and destruction.
None of these incidents have elicited any reaction from Western media outlets or governments, even after the Iranian foreign ministry obliged ambassadors from Britain, France, Germany and Italy to view footage of the violence carried out by rioters firsthand.
[Likewise, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a statement condemning only government violence.]
According to the Iranian government, over 100 police and security officers have been killed during the unrest. However, a pair of Iranian NGOs based in Washington and funded by the U.S. government has set the death toll on the government’s side at a much lower figure. These groups have become the go-to source for Western media on the protests.
Regime-Change Lobbyists Set Agenda
In assessing the death toll in Iran, outlets throughout the U.S. and Europe have depended on two NGOs based in Washington and funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy: the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran and Human Rights Activists in Iran.
A 2024 press release by the NED explicitly described the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran as “a partner of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”
Elsewhere, a 2021 statement from Human Rights Activists in Iran states that the group “expanded its network and decided to start receiving financial aid from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-governmental and non-profit organization based in the United States” after it was accused by the Iran government of ties to the C.I.A. in 2010.
The NED was created under the watch of the Reagan administration’s C.I.A. director, William Casey, to enable the government to continue meddling abroad despite widespread distrust in U.S. intelligence services. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein, famously admitted, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the C.I.A.”
While failing to acknowledge the NGO’s funding from NED, The Washington Post and ABC News have cited the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center prominently in their coverage of Iranian protests. Seated on the Center’s board of directors is Francis Fukuyama, the ideologue who signed the Project for a New American Century’s founding letter — perhaps the most important manifesto of modern neoconservatism.
Figures from the suggestively-named “Human Rights Activists in Iran” have circulated even more widely, with the NGO’s recent estimated death toll of 544 people cited by dozens of U.S. and Israeli mainstream outlets across the political spectrum, as well as by Dropsite.
The “shadow C.I.A.” intelligence firm Stratfor has also cited the NGO in an article entitled, “Protests in Iran Provide a Window for U.S. and/or Israeli Intervention.”
With the precise number of casualties from the protests still difficult to ascertain, a motley crew of online influencers has filled the information void with overblown, dubiously sourced claims.
These propagandists include the noted Jewish supremacist Trump confidant Laura Loomer, who crowed that “the death count of Iranian protesters killed by the Islamic regimes’ forces is now over 6,000!,” citing a supposed “source in the Intel community.”
The digital casino Polymarket also inflated the death toll, claiming without sourcing that “over 10,000” people had been killed by “Iranian Forces [using] Automatic Rifles on Protesters,” and falsely stating that Iran had “lost nearly all control” of “three of its five largest cities.”
In recent months, Polymarket has become notorious for allowing insiders to abuse advanced knowledge of political developments — such as the recent U.S. military assault on Caracas and their abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro — to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The self-described “world’s largest prediction market” was established with a major investment from AI warlord Peter Thiel, and now features Donald Trump Jr. as an advisor.
By spreading clearly inflated death tolls, regime change activists and Trump cronies are apparently goading the notoriously gullible president into launching another military assault on Tehran.
In a Jan. 7 assessment of the protests, Stratfor described the chaos in Iran’s streets as an enticing opportunity for war, writing,
“While unlikely to collapse the regime, the ongoing unrest could open the door for Israel or the United States to conduct covert or overt activities aimed at further destabilizing the Iranian government, either indirectly by encouraging the protests or directly via military action against Iranian leaders.”
However, the C.I.A. contractor acknowledged that “renewed military strikes on Iran would also likely put an end to the current protest movement by leading instead to a wider display of Iranian nationalism and unity, a pattern observed after U.S. and Israeli strikes in 2025.”
‘Locked & Loaded’
Iran’s latest round of anti-government protests has predictably received hearty endorsements from a host of Western leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump.
“If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump announced. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
Days later, Trump threatened Iran again: “You better not start shooting [protesters] — because we’ll start shooting too.” Then, on Jan. 12, Trump decreed that any country caught trading with Iran would face a 25 percent tariff on goods exchanged with the U.S.
Now, Trump is reportedly mulling an attack, considering options ranging from cyber-warfare to airstrikes. However, the pace of the anti-government protests appears to have slowed, with relative calm returning to major cities.
As the dust clears, millions of Iranian citizens are pouring into the streets of cities from Tehran to Mashhad to express their indignation at the riots, to denounce the foreign elements that helped spur the regime change rampage, and to proclaim their support for the government.
But in newsrooms across the West, giving voice to these masses of Iranian demonstrators seems forbidden.
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Wyatt Reed is the managing editor of The Grayzone. As an international correspondent, he covers stories in more than a dozen countries. Follow him on Twitter at @wyattreed13 .
This article is from The Grayzone
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Thank You Max & Wyatt
I am commenting here as one who does not trust standard media sources. Before retirement I had the pleasure to work with many Iranians, and in retirement I have come into contact with many Iranians as I have been volunteering on online platforms for practicing English. From years of conversations I have come to believe that the regime of Khamenei is deeply unpopular. Iranians are tired of the corruption, the harsh treatment of women and religious minorities, and the lack of basic freedoms in society. Normal countries do not hang homosexuals in public squares. This article leaves several unanswered questions. If the police were protecting the protesting merchants, then… from whom? If the armed groups were not part of a government crackdown, then how did they get their weapons? (Iran makes it almost possible for ordinary people to have any type of weapon.) Yes, it is true that Western sanctions have done major damage to Iran’s economy, but a fair assessment of Iran’s economy would include mention of the tens of billions of dollars which has been sent out of the country to finance the long hoped-for destruction of Israel. How have ordinary Iranians benefitted from the lavish funding of Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and assorted groups in Iraq and Syria? How have the leaders of these groups become so wealthy? The current leader of Iran has been in power for 37 years, and not one Iranian ever voted for him. Khamenei was appointed by a religious council of “experts”. Iranians are a proud, well-educated, highly cultured and hospitable people. Were conditions different, Iran would be a major tourist destination, as it is home to major archaeological sites. To say Iranians have been dealt a raw hand is putting it mildly. What needs to happen is that all Iranians, inside and outside the country, need to be given the chance to vote, unhindered and unmonitored, and decide what kind of system they want in their country. It’s hard to imagine how to bring this about in the current circumstances, but the process begins with acknowledging that this is what needs to happen.
It is not right to say “Western media ignores the shocking wave of violence” The radio and television channels in Western Europe give a lot of attention to the rebellion in Iran and let Iranians in Iran and those who could escape speak, tell and show what is going on in Iran.
We are not at all relying on U.S.-funded NGOs for data. You should know since this narcistic extreme right president is in charge the west is even not wiling to believe everything what is coming our from U.S.A. funded institutions or nationalistic organisations.
Concerning the burning of mosques and Korans we in the Europe do not agree with such actions even in case so many people are repressed by the religious leaders. Prayer houses and holy scriptures should never be put on fire.
Concerning the death toll in Iran it is as difficult as in many other countries at war. Outlets throughout the U.S. may have depended on two NGOs based in Washington and funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, but it is a totally different matter for Europe. We are not just depending on two NGOs based in Washington and funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy: the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran and Human Rights Activists in Iran.
We use the many contacts of the Iranian refugees who found a living in several European countries. Next to them we use the infiltrated secret services of our own European Institutions, press organisations and televison stations, as well as Amnety International, the Red Crescent, Red Cross and Artsen Zoonder Grenzen or Medecins Sans Frontières (Medecins Without Borthers).
The writer of the article is also very wrong by saying “But in newsrooms across the West, giving voice to these masses of Iranian demonstrators seems forbidden.”. Televisionchannels gave enough attention to the different sides of Iranaian groups, which also were allowed to demonstrate in our cities. Groups ‘for’ and ‘against’ the regime and ‘for’ and ‘against’ the rebellion in Iran were equally given a voice in the media.
While I can well believe that Mossad and US secret agencies are party to fomenting the dissent in Iran, I believe the people of that country are quite capable of forming their own opinion that it is time for an end to the repressive Islamic fundamentalist regime of the Ayatollahs. Prior to the revolution Iran was a country of educated intelligent people (albeit under the despotic control of the Shah) who somehow allowed themselves to be gulled into believing the Islamists offered a better deal. As the citizenry have found out, they replaced one despot —who at least allowed women a place in society – with a regime that thinks Sharia law and its attitude to women is what the people want. As recent resistance by women has shown, some people have had enough.
Excuse me but I have to ask .
No bias , tell me , is an intentional internet shutdown a “Blackwash”
WE ARE CLEVER NOW.
That’s why we read and rely on CONSORTIUM NEWS!
What is the evidence for “lynchings of unarmed guards”? This is first time I hear about existence of such force in Iran. Are you referring to Basij forces who are in plain clothes and it is well known that tbey are armed and carry concealed weapons?
There may or may not be reliable evidence of this claim … in this time of unreliable footage and reporting, one cannot trust anything.
But surely the more important part of that news item is that govt forces are under attack, armed or unarmed? I mean, how would any western nation react if its armed police were being killed by mask wearing street gangs?
Right now, at this critical moment all, all efforts must be 100% dedicated to stopping a potential Washington-Zionist attack on Iran.
We’re at a crucial moment in time.
If we’re unable to thwart this possible impending Washington-Zionist attack on Iran, it’ll likely take place by Thursday night. Netanyahoo has fled to Greece, US personnel are being evacuated from Qatar.
This has absolutely nothing to do with anything but appeasing the paranoid and hegemonic Zionist freaks in our midst.
Cooler dovish heads are no longer in the decision-making rooms in Washington, the mahogany tables are now all filled with creepy Zionist supremacist sadists.
Please help us all.
Europe is well aware that since Donald Trump took office, the United States of America has become an unreliable country with the leaders of that nation being of the same ilk as Putin and Netanyahu … very dangerous power-hungry individuals who like to see their country expand and do not shy away from encroaching on other people’s territory.
But we are also aware of what a loudmouth Trump is, who talks a lot but changes his tune with the wind and cannot be taken seriously when it comes to protecting people. What interests him is not what is good for the population, but what economic benefits he and ‘his nation’ could gain if he were to go on a conquest.
Debunking “BigLie” news [h.t.: Karl Sanchez] is always in favor, always in style, always sorely needed and greatly appreciated.
The Dark side of both Christianity and Judaism working hand-in-glove.
If any more proof is required to show that not all souls are one people, as Netanyahu and his cohort are claiming, alone for those of the Mosaic faith, in Palestine.
Max Blumenthal shows that speaking the truth to the power elite is on the right side of international justice.
Whereas, on the other hand, a namesake or religious affiliation, be it Christianity, Islam or Judaism, shows, for one, that US Senator Richard Blumenthal is on the opposite side; defending Israel at whatever the cost to humanity. He is for continuing the deception of unilateral hegemonic global power.
The names may be the same, but the spirit in their character are literally lightyears apart; having nothing to do with religious affiliation or political Party membership.
‘We’ as yet, after centuries of so-called civilizing evolution, still haven’t figured out that all of humanity are “one people”.
I don’t see talk of whether the fatal helicopter crash of the former Iranian president was an accident, or a ploy to get a more Western-friendly president installed. Has the change in presidents changed Iran’s policy towards the US?
What?! You’re telling me Ellison, Bari Weiss and NED aren’t telling the truth?
No way.
While the gullible lap up the MSM lies they are not thinking about what is still happening in Gaza, Venezuela, Greenland or with the Epstein case. Good distractions for the orange one.