{"id":7875,"date":"2018-01-13T10:55:18","date_gmt":"2018-01-13T07:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/?p=7875"},"modified":"2021-01-21T19:24:48","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T15:54:48","slug":"coverage-iran-protests-illustrated-protests-not-iran-organized-fringe-cultists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/posts\/7875","title":{"rendered":"Coverage of Iran Protests Illustrated With Protests Not in Iran\u2013\u2013Organized by Fringe Cultists"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to covering protests in other countries, it seems any vague picture of brown people protesting can stand in for those actually on the streets expressing their grievances.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Since the outbreak of protests across Iran three weeks ago, several major outlets have used pictures of demonstrations\u00a0 in the United States, France, or United Kingdom\u2014organized by a fringe, cult-like group, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)\u2014in place of images of the entirely unaffiliated protesters, 6,000 miles away, who are the topic of discussion.<\/p>\n\n

These are all images of rallies by the MEK (sometimes known as the People\u2019s Mujahedin, or its benign-sounding front-group name, National Council of Resistance) being presented as protesters in Iran. Several other outlets used their images, but noted they were simply \u201csolidarity\u201d marches in the US or Europe. While this is technically accurate, it\u2019s still wildly misleading, given that it\u2019s safe to assume most people won\u2019t know that the organizers of these rallies are part of a US- and Israeli-aligned fringe group, and not allies of the workers and young people taking to the streets in Iran.<\/p>\n\n

Casually throwing around MEK images to represent unrest in Iran is the worst combination of insulting and sloppy. It would be like a Chinese outlet, in 2012, using images of a Westboro Baptist Church protest in a story about Occupy Wall Street, because both opposed the US government. The exact ideology of those protesting in Iran isn\u2019t 100 percent clear\u2014they seem to represent a mix of groups and grievances\u2014but MEK has virtually zero support in Iran itself,\u00a0 having been disowned by the Green Movement (the last major protest movement in Iran) in 2009, and is widely loathed for working with Israeli intelligence and fighting alongside the Iraqi army in Iran\u2019s decade-long war against Saddam in the 1980s that killed a half-million Iranians. The MEK has carried out several bomb attacks in Iran, and was even officially listed by the US State Department as a foreign terrorist organization for 16 years, until it was removed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, after a years-long lobbying effort by pro-regime change forces within the US.<\/p>\n

The only major media faction that even pretends the MEK has any legitimacy within Iran is the Murdoch group, which routinely runs MEK\u2019s blatant disinformation (Fox News, 1\/1\/18) and pro-regime change op-eds (Wall Street Journal, 1\/8\/18). Even consistent regime change partisans, such as Bloomberg\u2019s Eli Lake (1\/2\/18), warn against promoting MEK:<\/p>\n

People\u2019s Mujahedin leader Maryam Rajavi, or supporters of the Pahlavi dynasty that fell in 1979, should not be treated as leaders or spokesmen for this organic uprising. They seek to impose an agenda on a movement they did not create. Don\u2019t let them do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No intellectually honest person takes MEK seriously as a viable alternative to the current government in Iran. The idea that it is an actual \u201cIranian opposition\u201d is a Western media fiction. But the group\u2019s rallies outside Iranian embassies provide great visual fodder for indifferent or dishonest editors in need of high-quality \u201cIran protest\u201d images\u2014without the mess of actually paying Iranian photographers, or dissecting the on-the-ground political reality in Iran.<\/p>\n

Adam Johnson,Fair.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the outbreak of protests across Iran three weeks ago, several major outlets have used pictures of demonstrations in the United States, France, or United Kingdom\u2014organized by a fringe, cult-like group, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[15,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[109],"class_list":["post-7875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-organizations-propaganda-system","tag-hypocrisy_mko","tag-third-view-mek","module-article","ctype-story","blog-western-bloggers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=7875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}