The Islamic Republic of Iran is receiving pushback from Western media outlets over its execution of a man that was charged with killing two members of Iran’s security forces. However, the story is being manipulated in the latest saga of distortions and outright lies that are being perpetuated about the Iranian government.
Western media outlets picked up on the case of Majidreza Rahnavard, a young Iranian man who was executed earlier this week. The Iranian judiciary managed to pass the death sentence through with urgency, as the death penalty was carried out only a month after the Iranian attacker was arrested for murdering 2 members of the Iranian security forces, on November 17. Rahnavard also reportedly injured four others with a long knife and his execution was carried out via hanging from a crane at an undisclosed location.
The execution is the second of its kind that has been connected to riots that began back in September, both of those executed so far have been accused and tried for committing what Tehran has called acts of terrorism.
The problem with the reporting on this story has not been that it is a fabrication, as with previous reports claiming that the Iranian parliament had voted to execute 15,000 people, but that key facts are either omitted or obfuscated.
To begin with, we have the headlines that Western media are mass producing on Majidreza’s execution. The BBC‘s headline reads “Majidreza Rahnavard: Iran carries out second execution over protests“, whilst The Guardian‘s was “Iran carries out second execution linked to nationwide protests“, with all others following similar phrasing. The problem with the headlines are not that they technically lie, because what they are saying is true, however, the death sentence did not get ruled in favor of the Iranian man because he participated in protests, he was an armed combatant who killed two security officers and injured four others. If this occurred in the United States, where an armed man was sentenced to death for killing to police officers, it would be wholly disingenuous to characterize his sentence as connected to a protest that he partook in, during which he took the decision to murder others.
The Associated Press (AP) released its own story on the execution, titled ‘Iran execution: Man publicly hanged from crane amid protests‘, again omitting from the headline that the man had killed 2 Iranian security officials. The AP piece opens with the following: “Iran executed a second prisoner on Monday convicted over crimes committed during the nationwide protests challenging the country’s theocracy, publicly hanging him from a construction crane as a gruesome warning to others.” This opening depiction is in and of itself pure propaganda. To begin with, this framing of events makes it seem as if the man executed had not carried out his own gruesome murder spree with a large knife, leading the reader to believe that Tehran had executed two protesters and hung them as an example to its people that they will meet the same fate for demonstrating.
Later down in the piece, the AP article gives the reader a word salad when explaining that the man was convicted of killing 2 Iranian security officials. It then starts to go into statistics of how many Iranian protesters have supposedly been killed by the government. The AP writes that “at least 488 people have been killed since the demonstrations began in mid-September, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that’s been monitoring the protests”. CNN‘s article on the other hand dealt with the death toll by stating that they could not provide figures and that “precise numbers are impossible for anyone outside the Iranian government to confirm”.
AP’s source for its “at least 488” death toll statistic are “Human Rights Activists in Iran”. HRAI are not based in Iran, but instead the United States. On the issue of funding, they claim on their website that “Membership dues and private donations are the only sources of our income. Because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from sources that threaten its autonomy.” However, since March 2011, HRAI has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Government’s “second CIA” that is infamous for financing color revolutions and regime change efforts around the world.
The true death toll is, like CNN described, almost impossible to determine from the public record and claims we receive sitting in the West. The claims that are publicly made at this point seem to consistently number into the hundreds. However, the allegations vary widely, so quoting NED funded US-based groups does little beyond helping the AP to make a point against the Iranian Government.
The way that Western media has covered this story is atrocious and demonstrates how low the gutter journalism has stooped. Simply stating that Iran uses the death penalty against people who murder Iranian security force members is not enough for their propaganda, since the US also has the death penalty in some States. So, instead, the story has to be turned into a medieval depiction of events, that makes it impossible for someone to associate the Iranian Governments policy to that of the United States. The reality is, the US Government and its alphabet soup of security, intelligence, and military agencies would never sit aside and allow Americans to murder their security forces without retribution, they probably wouldn’t issue death penalties, instead they’d likely gun down the culprits on the spot if we go from previous examples. Also, there was almost complete silence on Saudi Arabia’s recent executions of people who were not convicted of murder.
The point of singling out the reporting on this issue, is to show how dishonest the Western media is when it comes to anything that is related to the Iranian Government. Yes, Iran has the death penalty; yes, it hangs convicted criminals from cranes; and yes, it has done that to 2 people involved in recent anti-government activities. Yet this story wasn’t enough for them to report on factually, they had to add in a more damning storyline. In order to justify sanctioning Iran, they need to portray Iran as a special kind of evil and that’s what they are doing — all while these sanctions prevent life saving medicine from reaching the country and drive the poor into starvation.
The Iranian Government must be portrayed in such a dishonest and deceitful way in order to ensure that the act of comparing its policies (regardless of how obvious the overlap) to that of any Western government is tantamount to lunacy or treason. This is why such reporting is so dangerous. Tehran evidently has issues, thus there has been several rounds of public outrage over the course of the past decades. However, the Western media and governments are not interested in the grievances of the Iranian people, they want regime change and will stop at nothing to make their people view Iran’s government and its supporters as sub-humans to achieve that goal. This is another example of the West’s gutter journalism — those who produce these propagandistic pieces are without integrity, without any journalistic standards, or are simply misled journalists who haven’t mastered their craft.
*Correction: The original publication of this article incorrectly stated that riots had begun in December. It has been corrected to state that they began in September.
“Regime change” at all cost, because rumor has it the Iranians want to be ruled by Wall Street.