Iran = Syria 2.0. What Western bigots don’t understand about Iran.
When Feminism is used to justify murder, ethnic cleansing, and regime change.
The unrest in Iran which began on 16 September after the death of Mahsa Amini has entered its third month, shifting from street protests to terror attacks and assassinations, mass shootings and lately armed clashes in Sistan and Baluchistan, Khuzestan, as well as in the Iranian Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan provinces.
Under the cover of protests led by young women who want the removal of the Islamic dress code, armed groups have assassinated clerics, police and intelligence officers, members of the Basij and IRGC as well as ordinary civilians, burned police stations, religious centers, and destroyed private property, in a desperate attempt to destabilize the country and foment enough instability to provoke regime change and civil war.
As I predicted in my previous article “The Death of Mahsa Amini - Color Revolution or Legitimate Protests in Iran?”, Western media has been quick to give the events a strong Kurdish divisive narrative. What supposedly started as a protest against the Islamic dress code and police brutality, quickly developed into multiple insurrectionist movements. The feminist pretext was swiftly replaced by sectarian and ethnic calls for regime change and self-determination, similar to what has been seen in the past in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
We found out in the past weeks that Mahsa Amini’s cousin, Erfan Salih Mortezaei, is a member of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, a terrorist organization with headquarters in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, known for its secessionist goals and for fighting the Iranian government since 1979. The New York Times, a propaganda publication of the regime in Washington, portrays the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), another Kurdish terror group from Iraq, funded by Saudi Arabia and trained and armed by the United States, as no more and no less than the Iranian Opposition. Yes exactly, a guerrilla group who wants to secede the Kurdistan region from Iran, is in the eyes of the United States the Iranian opposition. Soon they will start saying the same thing about the Baloch separatist groups from Sistan and Baluchistan.
Going further, John Bolton, former US Ambassador at the United Nations and National Security Advisor in the Trump administration, a well-known advocate for regime change in Iran and one of the architects of the US bloodbath in Iraq, has admitted in an interview given to BBC Persian that the rioters seized weapons from Basij stations, and they also receive guns smuggled into Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan. Bolton went even further and directly encouraged the protesters to kill government forces. His statements seem to have been confirmed by the Iranian police and border guards who announced the capture of multiple batches of weapons in October and November, in the provinces of West Azerbaijan and Sistan-Baluchistan.
On 26 October peace in Iran was once again disturbed by the murderous terror attack committed by Daesh/ISIL in the Shah Cheragh mosque in Shiraz. 15 people, including women and children, were murdered and 40 were injured. According to the Mehr News agency, 26 people linked to the terror attack were arrested by the Iranian security forces. The terrorists were from Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.
The terror attacks continued on 16 November, when 7 people were killed by 2 terrorists riding motorcycles in the city of Izeh in southwest Iran. Footage recorded that night shows the police asking people to leave the area and requesting on radio for heavy weaponry to confront the terrorist attackers. On the same day, a similar event took place in Isfahan, where two Basij members were shot to death by armed thugs riding motorcycles.
From November 19, the Revolutionary Guards began a special operation in the city of Mahabad, West Azerbaijan province, against the separatist groups involved in arms smuggling and riots in the country. Similar actions have been taken by security forces in the cities of Javanrud and Paveh, in the Kermanshah province, as well as in the city of Piranshahr, in the West Azerbaijan province. Videos available on the internet show heavy firefights between security forces and separatist armed groups, as well as the citizens of Mahabad giving a warm welcome to a convoy of IRGC armored vehicles.
On November 20, Iranian ballistic missiles and suicide drones hit the bases and training centers of Komala and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan terror groups in Northern Iraq, inflicting heavy casualties among the members of these organizations.
Taking all of these elements into account, it becomes more than obvious that the protests aren’t about women’s human rights. The unfortunate death of Mahsa Amini is been exploited by foreign forces interested in stoking waves of violence and unrest inside Iran. Under the cover of protests where young women burn their hijabs, a gesture of defiance against the clerical establishment, a very sophisticated operation is taking place, involving various Kurdish, Arab, and Baloch terror groups, Mujahedin’e Khalq infamous terror organization and their troll farms in Albania, multiple Farsi language TV channels broadcasting from abroad, owned by the British, Saudi, American and German governments, paid agent provocateurs and instigators. This is not just a color revolution were some legitimate protests based on real grievances are hijacked and used for regime change, this is the West’s plan to destroy Iran as a nation, divide it on sectarian and ethnic lines, eliminate its rich culture, identity, and influence in the region, and capture the vast and modern Iranian military arsenal. Undoubtedly, what we are witnessing these days bares a lot of resemblance with the failed coup d’etat/civil war operation that destroyed Syria since 2011.
What is even more interesting is the fact that what is happening in Iran has been already prepared and presented in a document published in 2009 by the Brookings Institution, one of the most important think tanks in the United States. Titled “ Which Path to Persia”, this document represents the blueprint of the United States' strategy of toppling the leadership in Iran through popular uprisings/velvet revolutions, doubled by an armed insurgency led by the Kurdish, Baloch, and Arab militant groups. In chapters 6 and 7, the strategists at the Brookings Institution analyze multiple ways of starting a civil war in Iran, and how to create safe heavens for the groups involved. Iraq is mentioned as one of the possible locations used to train and arm the separatists.
Psychological Warfare, Media Propaganda, Steps toward Foreign Intervention.
Stirring up unrest in Iran and creating international support for the rioters requires multiple steps, various tactics of psychological and cyber warfare, and a lot of media propaganda, especially when the end goal is a foreign intervention based on “humanitarian” grounds. The leadership of the country which is targeted by the US for regime change is labeled by its media propaganda proxies as an “illegitimate dictatorship” or as a “regime” hated by the people. Isn’t it funny how Western governments are never “regimes” or “illegitimate”? The US and its European vassals are funding separatist groups, which become “Iranian opposition” in the Western media, cripple the Iranian economy with sanctions, instigate ordinary Iranians to take part in violent riots against their government, and use the online propaganda machine to gain international support for military intervention and regime change.
The internet war is fought by the Mujahedin’e Khalq trolls headquartered in Albania, who use social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to instigate people in Iran to commit acts of violence against security forces, clerics, and members of the state administration. MEK trolls fill the online medium with fake stories about the situation in Iran, spread by a miriad of fake accounts, and put pressure on Iranian celebrities to make statements in favor of the protests. One such fake story widely spread by US propaganda outlets like CNN and Newsweek is the one claiming that the Iranian leadership sentenced 15,000 protesters to death. The story became so viral internationally that even the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, fell for it. If Instagram labeled the story as fake, Twitter didn’t take any action, opting to remain passive when fake accounts continued to promote it as if it was true. Of course, no one expressed regrets for spreading such ludicrous statements, because as we all know, when it’s about Iran, anything goes.
Creating the proper ground for the legitimization of foreign intervention inside Iran requires popular support from the ignorant West. To obtain it, this time the US is using heavily the feminist card to shape international public opinion. From the story of Mahsa Amini, a young woman of Kurdish ethnicity, supposedly beaten to death by the morality police, although no actual proof for this accusation has ever been presented, to the brave women who burn their veils on the streets of Tehran, a lot of feminist imagery, slogans and motifs are being presented daily in the media, the type of stories and symbols who are very appealing for the average Westerner, especially for radical feminists, liberals, and activists for hire, looking for a new cause and some money to make. The story of beautiful women oppressed by bearded old clerics is an instant success in the US arsenal of propaganda.
For years the internet has been filled with old video montages of Iran before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. All of these videos show a utopian Iranian society where teenagers dressed in western clothes drink Coca-Cola and enjoy a happy life. For American and European audiences these videos are very attractive. Unfortunately, no mention is made about the real situation of Iran during the Pahlavi era, and about the fact that besides of a few cities where Western influence was strong and where Iranian women were wearing short skirts and dyed their hair blonde, in the majority of country the population was very poor, conservative and strongly attached to traditions and the Islamic faith. The part in which the CIA trained the SAVAK, the secret police of the Shah, to torture and kill anyone who protested against the monarchist dictatorship is of course missing too. Another missing part is the one where the majority of Iranian natural resources were in the hands of Western powers, while the ordinary Iranian was sinking in poverty and despair.
The average ignorant Westerner who has zero knowledge about other cultures and traditions has been indoctrinated for decades to see the Islamic religion as evil and to think that all Muslim women should be “liberated” and helped to adopt Western customs because, in their arrogant view, their ways are the same with so-called “human values”.
Brainwashed Westerners, suffering from the classic “White Savior Complex”, a leftover from the Colonial Era, identify only with those Middle Eastern women who dress in Western-styled clothes, behave like Westerners, and crave the Western liberal lifestyle. The collective West purposefully chooses to ignore the other side of the story, the Middle Eastern women who keep their traditions and practice their faith. For them these women either don’t exist, and if they exist they get labeled as victims who need some sort of Western salvation. When was the last time the West popularized or supported traditional or religious Middle Eastern women? Never. The truth is that the collective West doesn’t care about human rights or the situation of women from other cultures. All they care about is how to use pretexts to foment chaos and division in the countries they seek to control or simply destroy.
Orientalist Feminism – A tool of the Empire.
The regime in Washington has successfully identified ways to infiltrate Iran and weaken it from inside, while simultaneously demonizing it from the outside. Since the 1980s, the US has used Westernized Iranian women to advance its destructive agenda. Books like “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi and “Not without my daughter” written by Betty Mahmoody, became instant bestsellers in the West. The stereotype of the religious fanatic man who persecutes women and denies them their freedoms gave birth to bizarre and ridiculous claims about the Islamic Republic of Iran. Azar Nafisi, who claimed in her book “Reading Lolita in Tehran” that in Iran virgin women sentenced to death are raped by prison guards, so they can’t enter heaven after death, has been harshly criticized by Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi, who called Nafisi a “native informer and colonial agent” and a “comprador intellectual” of the West.
What Nafisi ultimately represents is the standard model of a Westernized Middle Eastern woman, devoid of her culture, religion, and national identity, who embraces Western values and Orientalist concepts. Women like Azar Nafisi and Marjane Satrapi, the author of Persepolis, reach fame and notoriety because they say exactly what the West wants to hear, that everything about a traditional and religious Iran is evil and backward, and should be replaced with so-called Western values and freedoms. The type of feminism advocated by the likes of Nafisi and Satrapi is a form of Orientalist Feminism, which operates on the basis that Muslim women should be saved from their native culture and religion, and transformed into Western liberals who look, talk, and behave like white North American and European women. Orientalist Feminism’s role is to confirm and amplify Western biases about Muslims and ends up being a pure Islamophobic tool of the United States’ foreign interventionism and neocolonial agenda.
Another representative of the Orientalist Feminism movement is Masih Alinejad, a self-proclaimed Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights activist, paraded these days on almost all major Western news channels. Alinejad, by far the most toxic and cringe agent provocateur, has been very vocal in her efforts to instigate violence inside Iran after the death of Mahsa Amini. She openly called on NATO countries to expel Iranian ambassadors, starve the Iranian people with sanctions and bomb Iranian military bases. All of this of course, in the name of feminism and women’s rights. In the West’s view, Iranian women should be starved to death through crippling sanctions, deprived of medicines and opportunities, so later they can be saved by direct military invasion. We know how well this went in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A journalist for Voice of America, a CIA media outlet similar to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Masih received for years money directly from the US State Department. Alinejad, who enjoys posing together with Mike Pompeo, the former director of the CIA during the Trump administration, and with French President Emmanuel Macron, has been exposed recently in a series of leaked videos, instructing people inside Iran who she is paying, on how to invent stories about children being killed by the Iranian security forces. Masih is even giving technical instructions on how these paid Iranians should appear in videos to achieve a more “cinematic” look. These manufactured stories of persecution and death at the hand of the “Islamic regime”, have been presented on Farsi-language channels like Iranian International or BBC Persian, with the aim of inciting people to protest and topple the government and the clerical rule.
Old Lies – Same Propaganda.
In parallel with Alinejad’s campaign to stir riots inside Iran, and gain support from Western liberals for harsher sanctions and even military intervention, CNN rolled out a propagandistic story about how Iranian security forces are using rape tactics to crush the protests. This story based exclusively on “covert testimonies” (fake stories), echoes bitter memories of other CIA-invented allegations, like the famous 1990 Kuwaiti Incubator Hoax, or the use of Viagra by Gaddafi’s forces to mass-rape Libyan women, a story recycled again recently and used against the Russian forces who invaded Ukraine. The wave of fake news, lies, manipulations and ludicrous allegations against the Iranian government wouldn’t be complete without the already often-used accusation of chemical weapons use. Iran International, the Saudi-owned propaganda channel headquartered in London, didn’t lose too much time before announcing that the Iranian security forces have used “green gas” against Kurdish protesters in the cities of Javanrud and Piranshar, reminding the reader about Saddam Hussein’s horrendous chemical attack on the Kurds in Halabja in March 1988. To bring the level of paranoia to even higher levels, Israel’s Major General Aharon Haliva claimed that Iran could potentially even attack the World Cup tournament taking place these weeks in Qatar. What exactly Iran would gain from doing such a thing, mister Haliva fails to tell us. All these stories combined paint the caricature image of a vile Iranian regime, bloodthirsty and unstable who kills young women at home and even plans to attack an international sports event in a neighboring country. This type of villain caricature image helps to legitimize foreign intervention and any type of action, regardless of how illegal or forced it is, to topple the leadership in Tehran and balkanize Iran into small chunks divided on ethnic and sectarian lines.
Women, Life, Freedom – the terror slogan so beloved by Western Liberals.
By far the most popular slogan used in the recent protests in Iran is “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (Women, Life, Freedom). It has become so popular that even Western feminist NGOs and celebrities use it now as their rallying chant in support of the protesters. What very few know is that the creators of this slogan are Abdullah Ocalan and its Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant organization, which is recognized by Turkey, the United States, the European Union, and several other countries as a terror group. PKK’s ideology mixes Kurdish separatist nationalist ideas with Marxism-Leninism and socialist concepts, with the end goal of creating an independent Kurdish state in Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq.
From drug trafficking to suicide bomb attacks, car bomb detonations, and guerrilla warfare, the PKK has been in a continuous struggle with Turkey since 1984. Most of the PKK’s suicide bombing missions have been carried out by the female members of the organization. Some of them were pregnant or pretended to be pregnant when they carried out these terror operations. Kind of ironic when this comes from an organization that spent decades campaigning for Kurdish women’s lives and freedoms. The essence of the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” slogan can be traced to Jineology, a form of feminism and gender equality theory created by Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party. This progressist feminist ideology wants to break away from the old tribal traditions of the Kurds and emancipate the Kurdish women, giving them a more prominent role in the Kurdish struggle for independence.
Jineology is one of the pillars of “Democratic Confederalism”, a system of democratic Kurdish self-governing without any direct control from the state. While promoting the emancipation of Kurdish women, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party doesn’t hesitate to deploy them as suicide bombers on the streets of Turkey. Selim Çürükkaya, one of the founders of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, wrote in his book titled “The Dictatorship of Abdullah Öcalan” , that Kurdish women have been sexually abused by high-ranking leaders of the organization. PKK is also using feminism as a propaganda tool to gain international sympathy and whitewash its image among naive and uneducated Western audiences.
The Kurdish Myth – Ethnic Cleansing under the guise of Feminism.
Kurdish militant groups in Syria and Iraq have been portrayed in the Western media as courageous people who bravely fought against radical Islamists from Daesh/ISIL and other Wahhabi fanatic groups, protecting their communities against total annihilation. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the Kurdish woman guerrilla fighter has become a very appealing feminist model for the West. Images of beautiful Kurdish women in military outfits fighting barbaric jihadists have gained a lot of popularity for Kurdish groups in Europe and the USA. Without denying the bravery of Syrian and Iraqi Kurds who fought hard against Takfiri extremist groups, we should acknowledge the fact that without the involvement of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, today black ISIS flags would have been seen waving over Damascus and Baghdad.
The United States skilfully rebranded the PKK-affiliated “People’s Defense Units” (YPG) as “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) and used them to take control of Syria’s oil fields. The Americans also turned a blind eye when their Kurdish allies engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Arabs and Turkmens, closed Christian schools in Qamishli and requested expat cards from the Syrian refugees who arrived in the areas under their control, all of these of course in the name of ‘’Democratic Confederalism’’. In 2020, the YPG/SDF signed a contract with a US company, Delta Crescent Energy LLC, for the exploitation of the Syrian Oil fields. In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report detailing the systematic abuses committed by Kurdish “Democratic Union Party” (PYD) militias in Afrin (Êfrîn in Kurdish), Ain al-`Arab (Kobani), and Jazira (Cezire). The report accuses the Kurdish separatists of arbitrary arrests, abuses in detention, due process violations, disappearances and killings, as well as the use of children in the PYD armed groups.
While Western audiences were busy falling in love with the romanticized image of the brave YPG female fighter, in Iraq Kurdish factions betrayed the Yazidi minority living in Sinjar and left them to be slaughtered by ISIS militants. Iraqi Assyrians criticized the Kurdification of school curricula and the efforts of the Iraqi Kurds to confiscate and occupy Assyrian lands. According to Human Rights Watch, the armed forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) prevented displaced Arabs from returning to their homes in Nineveh and Erbil Provinces and even destroyed many of their houses in a clear effort to ethnically cleanse the area. Amnesty International in 2016 accused Kurdish Peshmerga forces of bulldozing the homes and driving out hundreds of Arabs from Kirkuk. To drive the Kurds out of the oil-rich city, Qasem Soleimani, the senior commander of the Quds branch of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had to intervene and warn the Peshmerga of heavy consequences if they fail to comply.
Former CIA officer Sam Faddis, the author of the book “The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War” praised in 2021 the Iraqi Kurds for their support of the American effort to destabilize and destroy Iraq. He reassured both the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the main Kurdish political parties in Iraq, of the United States’ support, and confirmed the continuous presence of American troops in Iraq, which is essential for the survival of the so-called Iraqi Kurdistan autonomous region.
The next step in the US-Kurdish partnership for the destruction of the Middle East, after the invasion of Iraq, the balkanization of Syria and the takeover of its oil fields, is the creation of a civil war in Iran. Washington sells the ignorant West a false image of the various Kurdish factions it controls. Under the banner of Kurdish and Iranian feminism and human rights, the regime in Washington uses ethnic divisions and sectarianism to advance its murderous foreign neo-colonial agenda. The Kurds have once again sold their souls to the devil, siding with the same country that provided Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons he used against the Kurdish people in Halabja in 1988.
Propagandistic slogans like “Women, Life, Freedom”, created by terror organizations who invent new forms of feminism while using women they exploit as suicide bombers, are similar in scope to the “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave” chants heard on the streets of Homs, Syria, in 2011. The model of the Syrian “moderate rebels” painted by Western media propaganda outlets is once again reactivated. Now the moderate rebels are Kurds, especially Kurdish female protesters who become guerrilla fighters, implementing Washington’s regime change policies. The balkanization of Iran is the ultimate goal of the collective West, and the essential step in controlling the Middle East for the next 100 years. If Iran is turned into rubble and ashes with the active participation of Kurdish, Arab, and Baloch separatist groups, the prospect of a new emergent multi-polar world is going to fade. Through its proxies, Washington is forcing a bloodbath in the predominant Kurdish and Baloch areas inside Iran, as a pretext for direct military intervention.
Since 1979, Iran’s role in helping anti-American resistance forces all over the world has been essential. Many times Tehran has foiled and defeated America’s dirty plans in the Middle East, and now is becoming an influential international power. This makes the collective West very uneasy, prompting desperate calls for destabilization and foreign intervention. Iran’s Achilles heel is represented by the Westernized Iranians and the new generation of Iranian women. The leadership in Tehran needs to find ways to make the values of the Islamic Revolution appealing once again to ordinary Iranians. This is essential for Iran’s survival as a united and strong nation, conscious of its old and rich history, national identity, and place in the international arena of the 21st century.
If Iran falls…the New World falls.