Dirty Money: Meet the US Agent Driving the Cia-Led Riots in Iran
OCTOBER 4, 2022
Masih Alinejad. Photo: Al Mayadeen.
By Mona Issa – Sep 28, 2022
The largest color revolution attempt in recent Iranian history is led by a woman on Washington’s payroll – and we have the facts.
There are Iranian women, though a minority, who are not in favor of the mandatory veil – a legitimate grievance, an opinionated dissatisfaction to which humankind is entitled. And then there are people leading a fraudulent anti-hijab movement with a barrel aimed at Tehran.
Masoumeh “Masih” Alinejad-Ghomi
Meet Masih Alinejad, Washington’s weapon of choice for flaring up the largest color revolution attempt in Iran today.
“I’m leading this movement,” Alinejad, 46, told The New Yorker on Saturday. “The Iranian regime will be brought down by women. I believe this.”
Operating from an FBI safehouse, Alinejad has been living in the US for the past decade working as a full-timer for VOA Persia – or, Voice of America, Persia – Washington’s propaganda mouthpiece funded directly by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a soft power arm of the empire fully funded by US Congress, made to capitalize on harmful narratives in favor of Washington’s corporatocracy.
Alinejad’s tasks are quite a few: To take cozy photographs with the world’s most effective pro-war politicians who’ve only done everything to wipe out West Asia, such as Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo, and Madeleine “The price is worth it [to kill Iraqi children]” Albright.
Alinejad striking a pose next to the first female war criminal in the United States, Madeleine Albright, after giving a speech at the National Democratic Institute (NDI) on December 6, 2018.
Iranian agent Masih Alinejad in a meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on February 4, 2019, in Washington DC. (US Virtual Embassy of Iran)
But, that’s not all. Between 2015 and 2022, the US Agency for Global Media paid Alinejad over $628,000 to harass veiled women, spew propaganda, and demand more sanctions against her country (not a very patriotic thing to do). Alinejad has been doing everything in her media power to isolate her country, attempting to render it a pariah state banned from all diplomatic, economic and political privileges in the global arena. Indeed, a champion for imperialism, Alinejad is on a fat CIA payroll to incite violence and lies.
Masih Alinejad’s US government payroll is visible on a number of websites, such as govtribe.com and USASpending.gov, just by punching in her UEI in the search bar: H2JFTHB14639.
The latest narrative exploited by Alinejad is as such: 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, in a CCTV footage, gets in a verbal dispute with a female police officer over the way she had her hijab wrapped around her head. There is no escalation for the dispute; the woman leaves the girl alone and walks away. In a matter of seconds, the young woman freezes, bends, and falls over a chair to which bystanders ran to attend. The girl, who had underwent an open brain surgery in 2006, sustained a heart attack which put her in a coma. Two days later, she was announced dead, after which Western tabloids accused Iranian police of beating Amini to death, leading to the riots.
Mahsa Amini’s Death and Western Obduracy in Accepting the Truth
Admitting to lead the riots against the government is only a statement. Her tweets further expose her agenda – the transfer in narrative from one tweet to the next is baffling.
On September 14, the day Amini suffered a heart attack, Alinejad made no mention of beating or violence. She wrote on Twitter: “Amini suffers heart attack after being arrested by morality police.”
On September 15, the CIA asset ramps up the rhetoric a notch: “This woman is in a coma because morality police savagely arrest her.” Still, no mention of abuse, beatings or physical violence.
Between that tweet and a comment, Alinejad caters to her bosses: “Amini is in a coma after being beaten by morality police.”
On September 16, the day the young woman was announced dead, Alinejad launched a hashtag which she had been paving fertile grounds for: “#MahsaWasMurdered by the Islamic Republic’s hijab police in Iran.”
Washington’s lackeys were at work too: One of the first to accuse the police of beating Amini was Maziar Bahari-founded IranWire. Bahari is an anti-Tehran Iranian exile who has admitted to “covering illegal demonstrations” and “helped promote color revolutions” in Iran. An empire asset.
The second Twitter post which propagated the false narrative was from Babak Taghvaee, a double-agent exile accused of disseminating sensitive information to the CIA and Mossad; a military contributor to Israel Hayom, Pentagon research reports, and US State Department-funded Radio Free Asia/Radio Liberty, which is also on a BBG payroll.
With the hundreds of fake accounts which trended the matter on social media, the tweets gained massive momentum, and riots were immediately stirred up. Terrorist groups among the crowds were detected and arrested carrying sharp weapons and explosives, killings were carried out with the aim to blame on the government, and rioters burned banks and other irrelevant state institutions, creating chaos. The MEK, mind you, has been a terrorist organization in the US until being delisted in 2014 – the year Alinejad made her way to the US. Now, tabloids pair “freedom-loving Iranians” with MEK supporters and organizers.
Washington for long has tried to mobilize Iranians against their government, either through media propaganda, or through sanctions. The chaos brewing is a dream come true for Alinejad, a byproduct of over decades of work. A Wikileaks cable from 2009 sent to the US State Department wrote about a dissatisfied Alinejad complaining of a “lack of cohesion among reformists” which was impeding Washington’s plans and interests.
Global media, Hillary Clinton, Regime-change Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and the NED have all simultaneously bandwagoned on the campaign, shedding crocodile tears on Iranian women. Mind you, these entities have projected, enabled and funded the most brutal, patriarchal policies against women around the world, including in the United States. There was no regard for Palestinian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Libyan or Syrian women when the US either bombed or funded weaponry to bomb societies back into the Stone Age. Washington funds the most repressive entity in West Asia today, “Israel,” whose system bases itself on racism, rape and uprooting.
Not to mention the sanctions which Alinejad has repeatedly called for to be implemented against Iran, as she “believes” they work. Sanctions have affected the lifestyles of many Iranian women, impeding them from their right to sanitation, securing quality nutrition and health for their children, and utilizing resources for healthy living. Not so feminist, is it?
Liberal Feminism is an Imperialist Project – Part 1
The hijab is a democratically voted and a legitimatized law
Perhaps Big Media’s abuse of freedom is not leaving any space for us to investigate. Facts, when conveyed effectively, are an angry mass’ greatest sedative: After Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government was toppled in 1979, revolution leader Imam Khomeini held a nationwide referendum on which people voted whether or not they advocated for Iran to be ruled by an Islamic constitution. Within this context, Iranian women integrated the hijab into the constitution, and Iranian women have the right to revoke it if they wanted to. The law is a democratic decision made by the people and the women of Iran. Hence, the legitimacy of the law is still intact.
The popular support for the law was reiterated in a 2014 national poll which collected data from all provinces across the country, holding the question of whether they agree that the mandatory hijab should be implemented on Iranian women even if they do not agree with it. Around 19% of the population completely agreed, 35% simply agreed, and 25% were neutral.
In 2021, Iranian deputy speaker of the parliament Ali Motahhari suggested another referendum on the veil be conducted when protests again were on the rise, exhibiting the democratic values which the state holds, as opposed to what the West paints the country to be – a clerical wasteland dictatorship.
So the question here is: What is there to fight for when Iranian women themselves are in favor of the hijab by popular referendum and demonstration? Do the West and its blinded followers want to save Iranian women from themselves?
For a population widely familiar with Edward Said’s Orientalism, this projection could be quite embarrassing.
The infiltration and disruption of a society
In 2002, former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu held a two-hour-and-a-half-hour conference just before George Bush announced his invasion of Iraq, in which he called on the United States to foment regime change in Iran (and Iraq, obviously), offering an explanation on how to dismantle the anti-imperialist social fabric in the country. In his vision, Fox Broadcasting would air “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place” to Iranians through their televisions. “This is pretty subversive stuff,” he remarked. “The kids of Iran would want the nice clothes they see on those shows. They would want the swimming pools and fancy lifestyles.”
The current riots in Iran are not an event suspended in time, but rather a continuation of years of disruption attempts by people like Alinejad and Netanyahu. The very social fabric of the country is what kicked out Western greed in 1979; a fabric largely built on cultural affluence and appreciation for tradition brewed over the course of centuries. To shift that fabric would entail transforming the material conditions. Hedonism, pleasure and materialism are weapons in a toolbox used to dumb down communities into virtual enslavement.
Hollywood has proved itself as one of the best tools to redefine the values of freedom, so effective that even Arab media have been throwing Western cultural projections onto Iranian women, who are largely supportive of the mandatory veil.
Hearts may be in the right direction, but not in the right place. Activists on social media have taken to advocate for the “autonomy” of Iranian women (according to their standards and terms), regardless that it may not be consistent with the nature of their state or society.
If we truly want to help and support Iranian women, we must first bring our cultural projections to consciousness – Are we truly supporting their struggle, or are we telling them how they should live their lives? For a society which is proud and emotionally attached to its culture, are we doing justice by following governmental-funded tabloids attempting to dismantle the very fabric of an anti-imperialist society which has evolved so progressively?
There isn’t much predictability about when the fog of propaganda would clear up so we could perceive matters free of the manufactured anger that the media has managed to muster from millions.
https://orinocotribune.com/dirty-money- ... s-in-iran/
Violence in Iran; Is It Internal or External in Its Inception?
OCTOBER 4, 2022
Photo composition showing two TV screens, in which the image of Mahsa Amini and the other with no signal. Photo: Al Mayadeen.
By Fra Hughes – Sep 30, 2022
Be careful what you call for at a time when the imperialists want war with China, Russia, and Iran.
The tragic death of a young woman in an Iranian police station who was seen collapsing on CCTV is a devastating blow to her family and friends.
We all mourn the loss of an innocent young woman while we await the official outcome concerning the cause of her death.
While local police are still investigating the cause of death, the Western mainstream media claim she was beaten to death.
The reaction here in Ireland and the UK has been almost instantaneous and universal.
Rallies and marches defending the right of women to choose whether or not to wear the Hijab are taking place in towns and cities in the UK and Ireland.
The irony or hypocrisy of these rallies is open to debate, so let’s have a look at what’s happening.
There are no rallies for the millions starving in Yemen.
No mass rallies for the besieged people of Donbass, but we do have rallies to support Ukrainian fascists.
No rallies against the daily brutality of the unelected, unmandated Gulf monarchies or the excesses of Mohammed Bin Salman, Crown Prince of Al Saud and the man accused of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
They did have rallies against Saddam Hussein. Rallies against Gaddafi and rallies against Al-Assad; all presidents of countries that had to fight national wars of liberation to free their people from foreign imperialist military occupation.
They had rallies against Serbia.
They had rallies in favor of color revolutions, the so-called Arab spring, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Ukraine.
Question: What is the common denominator here?
Answer: Western imperialist foreign policy.
The West supports and indeed arms Saudi Arabia in its grotesque war on Yemen because it suits the regional aspirations of NATO, the EU, America, and “Israel”.
They destroyed Libya and Iraq while balkanizing Syria and sanctioning Iran.
China is bad, Russia is bad, Iran is bad, yet right-wing governments in Kiev, Warsaw, and Budapest are good, as are the death squads in Columbia and the assassinations of Iranian scientists.
We must be careful not to conflate civil rights with regime change.
Let’s be very clear about what is happening in Iran.
Syria has been destroyed by external forces using internal divisions to destabilize the government. The same happened in Libya, Ukraine, and most recently in Belarus. The last thing the people in Iran need is violence orchestrated by “Israel”, the UK, the US, France, and Germany, etc., using the hijab as a pretext not to “liberate women from religious domination” but to destroy the country.
Be careful what you call for at a time when the imperialists want war with China, Russia, and Iran.
If you stand against the Iranian government at this time, you will be supporting the destruction of another sovereign nation and all that entails; refugees, death, injuries, and destruction.
Is that what you want, or can you not see past the sound bites and propaganda photos?
Wake up, wise up, and grow up, to the realities of where this might be going.
I was at a protest one time at city hall in Belfast, where I called out, “Free Julian Assange.” A young woman turned towards me and said he was a rapist, “I believe the women.”
I told her she would be better believing the evidence as there was none.
This woman believed the lies of the mainstream media and simply repeated a sound bite, “I believe the women.”
She had not researched the data, nor looked behind the headlines.
Kier Stammer imprisoned Julian Assange on trumped-up charges as part of the elaborate ruse to extradite him to the US.
The Western masses are bombarded with a constant stream of lies, propaganda, and misdirection, while the demonization of peoples, governments, and sovereign nations that are not already under Western or Zionist domination runs riot.
How often have we seen this regime change handbook played out?
Do you remember the nurse in Kuwait who claimed to have witnessed seeing Iraqi troops taking babies out of warm incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor while stealing the equipment?
It turns out that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to America.
Now we have Western media claiming the young woman, Mahsa Amini, 22, who died in a Tehran police station, was beaten to death by the police.
That might happen if you are Black and living in America, but it doesn’t happen in Iran, unless, of course, you choose to believe the BBC, Fox News, CNN, Le Monde, etc.
“If you’re not aware, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are exercising oppression.” Malcolm X
Ultimately, the Iranian establishment must release all available evidence into how Mahsa died, including the post-mortem results.
Mahsa Amini’s Death and Western Obduracy in Accepting the Truth
If there is foul play, people must be held to account.
If she died of natural causes, then Western propaganda must be discarded.
Iran has been under sanctions and siege since 1979.
The only people who want destabilization in Iran are not the Iranians but the enemies of Iran.
I do have issues with the religious aspects of the Iranian government, but as the regional bulwark against Zionist expansionism and as leaders of the Axis of resistance, we need a strong, just, and civil rights compliant Iran to help create a more multi-polar world and equitable planet.
Let’s not destroy Iran on false allegations.
Let’s stand by the leader of the Resistance in West Asia and the cultural values of Persians.
(Al Mayadeen – English)
https://orinocotribune.com/violence-in- ... inception/
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Fighting for the rights and sovereignty of Iranian women
October 3, 2022 Lallan Schoenstein
The solidarity movement of the Iranian women evoked by the brutal death of Mahsa Amin can serve to encourage women in the U.S. to fight back against the combined repression of the state and the church on their reproductive health.
The undemocratic ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court eliminating women’s right to abortion is overwhelmingly unpopular. The justices who are appointed for life are not elected. The majority of judges profess conservative religious zeal and far right-wing political ideology. In one 2022 decision, they moved to undo the First Amendment’s separation of church and state in public schools.
The Biden administration, which was elected in opposition to the Trump crowd, appears to be doing nothing to check the Supreme Court’s rabid implementation of racism and bigotry. In states around the country, voting rights are being challenged, history lessons forbidden in schools, the right to gender freedom denied, and state violence against people of color, LGBTQ2S, and disadvantaged workers is validated.
With that in mind, consider the problems faced by our sisters in the Iranian movement. Why is the powerful U.S. corporate media giving it a thumbs up? Why is the Biden administration seeking ways to intervene? President Biden publicly sided with the protesters in his speech at the United Nations. And his administration has moved to set up satellite links and social media with the intention of spurring opposition to the government with dubious information from the U.S.
U.S. economic sanctions on Iran
Can it be that they are concerned about the lives of Iranian women? The hypocrisy is startling.
Harsh U.S. economic sanctions against Iran began in 1979 and have generally been tightened during the following years. Donald Trump tossed out a deal made by Barack Obama that relaxed the sanctions to deny Iran the development of nuclear energy, a move meant to block the economic development of Iran. Trump amped up the most punishing sanctions, and Biden has not returned to the deal made by Obama.
The years of U.S. economic sanctions have deprived the entire population of the basic necessities of survival. Women, children and the elderly suffer most from the U.S. sanctions, which even include denying basic medical supplies.
U.S. sanctions are a form of economic warfare. Sanctions have been imposed on Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iraq, Cuba, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela — among others.
The goal of sanctions is to destabilize the country and bring about regime change, to deprive those countries of self-determination. U.S. sanctions endanger people’s lives, particularly those already most vulnerable in society: children, women and oppressed genders.
The human toll was devastating when sanctions were imposed on Iraq. According to the Geneva International Center for Justice, some 1.5 million children were killed by U.S. sanctions on Iraq.
The catastrophic results of U.S.-imposed regime change can be seen in the countries surrounding Iran.
U.S. imperialism and Iran
The U.S. media dwells on the theocratic form of the Iranian government as if the enactment of archaic forms of religious law were unheard of (what about the U.S. Supreme Court?). Even more importantly, how did the Iranian religious leaders come to power?
In 1951 a progressive leader named Mohammed Mosaddeq became Prime Minister of Iran with the rise of massive popular support. Under his leadership, the Iranians nationalized their oil industry. When the Shah, a monarch of the Iranian Pahlavi dynasty, tried to intercede to protect Anglo-U.S. oil interests, the Shah was forced into exile.
The United States CIA, with the active support of the British MI6, responded by organizing a coup. Mosaddeq was arrested and tried for treason. All opposition to the Shah, which had been led by the National Front and Communist Tudeh Party, was suppressed. The U.S. reinstated the Shah’s rule under a martial law regime with brutal measures such as banning the gathering of three or more people. An international consortium took over the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years. The U.S. supplied military aid while Iranian workers suffered ever deeper poverty levels, dislocation and decay.
The Iranian Revolution
During the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution, Sam Marcy wrote in November 1978: “The Shah of Iran has not yet been overthrown, but no monarch has ever been so completely a prisoner in his own palace and so thoroughly hated by the overwhelming bulk of the population as is Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.”
Marcy was a leading Marxist thinker, an active supporter of the Iranian Revolution whose writings were followed by some Iranian revolutionaries.
“First, it should be noted that all the social classes in Iran today — not merely one or the most oppressed but all the classes — are in political motion. None of the classes can any longer openly champion the status quo. To one degree or another, the bourgeoisie, the comprador bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeoisie in the rural and urban centers, and, needless to say, the workers and the peasants, agree either expressly or by implication that the status quo, the present situation, is unendurable and that the consequent political crisis must be resolved now.”
Thus, the Iranian Revolution began in 1978 with workers’ strikes, most notably the Iranian petroleum workers. Major demonstrations that faced a hail of bullets arose, “not only so in Tehran, in Tabriz, in Isfahan, in Abadan, but all over the country.” The hated SAVAK, the military police of the Shah, was defeated, and large segments of the conscript army came under the influence of the revolution.
Despite the support of Jimmy Carter’s administration, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was kicked out and forced to retreat to a safe haven in Texas.
At the time, Marcy wrote: “The leadership of the overall anti-Shah opposition is in the hands of bourgeois democratic forces concentrated principally around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a religious leader, and not in the hands of a working-class party.
“This should not be surprising in the light of the catastrophic consequences following the imperialist-engineered overthrow of the Mossadegh regime. What followed was not the mere installation of a puppet in the person of the Shah, but the extermination of practically an entire generation of militants, revolutionaries, and progressives in the annihilation that followed, as were other progressives. A historic defeat of such magnitude as entailed by the overthrow of the Mossadegh government not merely wipes out a generation of political leadership and activists in the anti-imperialist and working class movements, it also leaves a wide generation gap which a long period of repression has filled in with other social and political forces.”
The Islamic Republic
Ayatollah Khomeini took over the Tehran government, and Iran officially became the Islamic Republic on April 1, 1979. The revolution became limited to the political overthrow of the Shah. The class structure — relations between exploiter and exploited classes — remained intact. The revolution did succeed in releasing the working class from a fascist dictatorship.
The working class, weakened by years of imperialist and colonial domination, succeeded by joining a united front with a hostile class represented by the clerical Khomeini regime. They needed to join other forces to fight for their sovereignty while not subordinating their class interests.
In 1979 Marcy warned: Workers in the U.S. need to avoid the imperialist anti-Muslim bias and consider the difference “between the religious leader of an oppressed country who fights imperialism as against one who, no matter how lofty or advanced his bourgeois conceptions may be, conciliates with imperialism.”
Thirty years later, John Parker, who traveled to Iran in an anti-war delegation in 2010, reported some facts never mentioned in corporate media attacks against Iran. Parker says that more than 65% of Iran’s university students are women, as are more than a third of the doctors. At the time of the 1979 Revolution, 90% of rural women were illiterate; even in towns, the figure was 45%. So, in a little over 30 years, tremendous strides were made in regard to educational opportunities for women. Now large numbers of increasingly well-educated women have been entering the workforce.
Critical support for the current movement
While the mouthpieces of U.S. imperialist interests loudly champion women’s rights, there is no evidence that the U.S. government has alleviated gender oppression anywhere abroad or at home. Quite the opposite.
It is crucial to support Iran’s women and oppressed genders by fighting to end U.S. sanctions, which oppress all the women and oppressed genders in Iran. It is the foremost way to back the fight for self-determination and defend against the opportunistic advances of those who wish to return them to the decades of colonial exploitation.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ian-women/
I think there a class aspect to this with upper class women wishing to ape their sisters among the Golden Billion being the vast majority of the anti-hijab crowd. My sympathy therefore does not extend too far.... Of course these religious strictures are unfair and should not exist but every society progresses at it's own rate. Look how well forcing the issue has worked in Afghanistan...
