The Daily Populous Sunday June 22nd, 2025 night edition
Authored by newlinesmag.com and submitted by FLTA

Take a look at certain corners of Persian-language media, and you might think that the restoration of the Peacock Throne and the return of the so-called “king of Iran,” Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, are imminent. You might even think Iranians are happy to be bombed out of existence if it means getting rid of their own government. Pahlavi has issued calls to the Iranian people, telling them on his X account: “The future is bright, and we will pass this sharp turn in history together. Now is the time to rise; it is time to take back Iran.”

If you spend some time in the opposite corner, the one ruled by Islamic Republic media, you might come to believe that “Persian arrows” — poetic speak for missiles — are undoing “Zionist cult strongholds” in occupied Palestine, as one regime account on X put it, and that Iran is about to crush Israel and win this war for good.

As Israel’s war on Iran rages, there is another, older information war that underpins discussions about the military operations affecting lives on the ground. This information war has been waged mainly on satellite TV channels and in social media spaces, funded by a range of state actors and political groups, though overwhelmingly by Israeli or Israel-adjacent groups that have pushed pro-Israel narratives into Iranian homes and onto personal devices.

This Israeli propaganda has taken the grassroots and authentic demands for an end to theocracy voiced by Iran’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement and weaponized them to support Israel’s military assault. In these pro-Israel narratives, the Israeli government, which supports the crown prince’s bid for leadership, is presented as the savior of Iranian women. The narratives are promoted by the Persian-language satellite TV station and website Iran International — which is seemingly Saudi-funded but entirely pro-Israeli — as well as U.S. and Israeli political figures and hundreds of social media micro-influencers.

It is not by chance that Israel has called its military operation “Rising Lion,” an important Persianate symbol that adorned Iran’s flag prior to the 1979 revolution, during the Pahlavi era. In memes making the rounds, there are visual variations of this theme conflating Iran with Israel. In some, we see a mighty lion wearing the Israeli flag coming to rescue Iran. In others, we see two lions dressed in the flags of Israel and Pahlavi Iran uniting.

Even before the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, though much more forcefully thereafter, these Israeli-funded sites ran smear campaigns against well-respected observers in the West who had long offered nuanced reporting and expertise on Iran — ironically, many of them women. You were either with the regime change agenda or you were an Islamic Republic apologist. One of these projects, Iran Disinfo, even received money from President Donald Trump’s State Department but was forced to shut down in 2020, after investigations revealed that it was effectively a government body funding attacks against U.S. citizen journalists.

The result of these groups pushing propaganda and disinformation has been a highly polarized Iranian public sphere, in which Iranians with different political persuasions can’t find common ground and are talking past one another.

For Iranians inside Iran, the situation is made more fraught by the fact that the Islamic Republic has restricted freedom of the press in its own media ecosystem. The resulting vacuum has forced a majority of Iranians to seek information elsewhere, making them susceptible to media sources flooded with disinformation and propaganda.

It’s fair to say that the Islamic Republic lost its information stranglehold over its own population long ago. For decades, practically since its inception in 1979, it has used state television and radio as propaganda tools, fabricating ostentatiously false narratives at times of domestic political strife, such as during the 2009 Green Movement and 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprisings. Even more egregiously, the state has used its broadcast media as part of its intelligence apparatus, with some TV reporters known as “interrogator-reporters,” using forced confessions to fabricate their stories for the state’s narrative.

This toxic media environment bodes badly for communication and connection in a nation that is undergoing profound transformations. Yet there seems to be some hope that divergent voices — outside of Israeli-adjacent spaces — are coalescing around an anti-war message.

The reality of the bombs on the ground is presenting challenges to the Israeli-influenced narratives, confounding even some of their most vocal sponsors. In a telling sign, the influential Iranian opposition voice and media figure Masih Alinejad — who champions women’s rights but has for years hobnobbed with Washington hawks and has lately seemed to function as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu — issued a rebuke on Wednesday to the Israeli prime minister. After reposting Israeli evacuation calls on her popular social media accounts and receiving criticism for doing so, she pivoted and published a stern letter, stating that these evacuation orders put innocent people at risk: “Do not kill the people of Iran fighting for their freedom!” The internet took note. As the BBC Persian correspondent Bahman Kalbasi put it on X, “Netanyahu has lost Masih Alinejad. That is not insignificant.”

Even Netanyahu seemed perplexed for a moment, when on Wednesday he issued a call to Iranians to flood the streets, wondering why they hadn’t already. “This is your opportunity to stand up and make your voices heard,” he said, pumping his fist and adding, “Woman, life, freedom,” followed by the same slogan in Persian: “Zan, zendegi, azadi.”

Iranian social media accounts responded by widely sharing an image of a woman in Berlin holding a placard that read, “Don’t ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ us, you murderer!”

The difficulty of grappling with the Israeli bombardments has made it even more challenging for some authentic voices in Iran to stake out positions.

When some of Iran’s most prominent civil rights activists — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi and the celebrated filmmaker Jafar Panahi — issued a statement on Tuesday that condemned the war and asked Iran’s leaders to stop uranium enrichment, yet failed to address Israel’s illegal aggression against Iran, they were widely criticized by Iranians outside the country as acquiescing to yet another takeover in the imperialist tradition of regime change. Some on social media went so far as to call their statement a betrayal of the Iranian people. Yet observers inside Iran, if they managed to see the statement at all with their shaky internet connections while evacuating their homes, were less vocal. As one friend in Tehran put it, “It’s hard to say whom we hate more right now, [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei or Netanyahu.”

Mohammadi came out more forcefully against Israel’s aggression later that day, encapsulating conflicted sentiments with the following words in a BBC Newshour interview: “Imagine this, we have a misogynist theocracy in Iran with Supreme Leader Khamenei at the top, who took us to hell while promising us heaven, and at the same time Netanyahu, who is taking us to hell while promising freedom and democracy.”

For most Iranians, Israel’s military assault on their cities this past week has been bewildering. Yes, many have dreamed of an Iran after the Islamic Republic. From the 1999 student protests through to the 2009 Green Movement, the wave of protests of 2017-2020 and, most recently and perhaps most vehemently, in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022, Iranians have longed and struggled for a democratic government.

But Iranians have seen this regime change horror show before, most notably in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Now, like then, the bodies of women serve as sites of this political fantasy of liberation. Prominent women’s rights activists inside Iran, such as Mohammadi and Golrokh Iraee, have condemned Israel’s policy of annihilation in Gaza and repeatedly emphasized that they are not simply aligned with Israeli political aspirations for Iran.

Over the Islamic Republic’s four and a half decades, Iranians have tried hard to reform the system from within. They have been thwarted by their own government, but also by the breakdown of the nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other parties when Trump withdrew during his first term, the extreme sanctions that ensued and the recent peace negotiations that Netanyahu hijacked.

They are now in an impossible position. On the one hand, many rejoice at seeing some of their repressors meet their fate. Initially, there were even videos of Iranians throwing parties to celebrate the deaths of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders who had unleashed unfathomable violence on protesters during the 2022 uprising, killing more than 500 people. When Iranian state TV was targeted, forcing the anchor to abandon her hyperbolic propaganda rant and desert the set, videos circulated of Iranians chuckling with schadenfreude.

On the other hand, many fear being robbed of the prospective rewards of the slow work they have done over many years to determine their own fate and secure a brighter future. Those early moments of gratification have now vanished as they seek safety from the bombings of civilian infrastructure that have also killed more than 500 people, many of them women and children.

Iranians are now faced with a desperate moment, in which reckless U.S. and Iranian decisions have culminated in the arrival of an internationally indicted war criminal, who is elsewhere orchestrating what is widely regarded by experts and independent nongovernmental organizations as a genocide, to decide their future. Even the best outcome of this equation would compromise the valiant freedom struggles Iranians have long waged. And so, most Iranians inside the country blame their own government for this tragic outcome as much as they blame Israel.

This is something that civil society groups in Iran have pointed out in response to the war. The Writers’ Association of Iran issued a statement saying, “The war of this fascist regime, whose foundations rest on occupation and genocide, against a state that is built on the blood of opponents and freedom-seekers not only claims the lives of innocent people but stops and sets back years of resistance for freedom and equality.”

Another meme making the rounds on social media features one of Iran’s fiercest voices of resistance, the rapper Toomaj Salehi, whose track “Rathole” became a rallying cry during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. In it, Toomaj is looped in an endless repetition of a phrase he has uttered: “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.”

An overwhelming chorus is emerging from Iranian social media accounts and reporting on the public’s outlook, even among activists who have fought for years against the Islamic Republic.

In an otherwise contested war of narratives, there is agreement: “War is not the answer.”

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Nervous-Basis-1707 on June 21st, 2025 at 20:22 UTC »

There was very little chance for an Iranian revolt against the IRGC. The regime is extremely unpopular but an Israeli/American effort to overthrow Iran will not be met with eagerness from the Iranians.

Especially when you make idiotic evacuation orders for a city as large as Tehran on your Truth Social account.

littleredpinto on June 21st, 2025 at 17:15 UTC »

We are all bombarded by propaganda..mostly aimed at keeping the population divided and fighting each other, so the uber wealthy can keep stealing everything around them....on a side note, gonna watch They Live today, not that it is relevent. Just a good movie with one of the best fight scenes ever.

FLTA on June 21st, 2025 at 16:33 UTC »

Submission Statement: As Israel and Iran continue to exchange missiles and flood information channels with propaganda narratives, many Iranians are coalescing around a simple message; war is not the answer. Many dissidents were, at first, delighted to hear of Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders being killed by Israel after their role in suppressing previous protests and uprisings.

However, even the biggest critics of the Islamic regime are also denouncing Israel’s attacks on Iran. The result of Netanyahu’s poor efforts to inspire an uprising by co-opting Iranian grassroot chants and using airstrikes that have caused civilian casualties can be summed up by this part of the article

> Netanyahu seemed perplexed for a moment, when on Wednesday he issued a call to Iranians to flood the streets, wondering why they hadn’t already. “This is your opportunity to stand up and make your voices heard,” he said, pumping his fist and adding, “Woman, life, freedom,” followed by the same slogan in Persian: “Zan, zendegi, azadi.”

> Iranian social media accounts responded by widely sharing an image of a woman in Berlin holding a placard that read, “Don’t ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ us, you murderer!”