The Iran regime sucks, it’s authoritarian and brutal.
Yet I can’t help but having a nagging feeling that the reason we are hearing these stories, is to help justify the next move of Israel/USA.There is no doubt that USA is a huge part of the reason it is as bad as it is now in Iran, because half a century of sanctions against Iran has undermined their economy, and bad economy is a major factor of the internal problems of Iran. Life threatening poverty has a strong tendency to lead to violence.
Deepa Parent at The Guardian has been churning these articles out at a steady pace, often pushing out inflated death tolls of Iranian civilians and citing unconfirmed sources. Any story from her should be considered highly suspect at best and consent-manufacturing propaganda at worst.
https://thegrayzone.com/2026/02/01/guardian-iranian-death-toll-concocted-monarchist-doctors/amp/
The Grayzone is a disinformation blog that exists to defend authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, al-Assad’s Syria, and China. They specifically e.g. whitewash China’s ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang, deny al-Assad’s chemical attack on Douma, and support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
You surely know this, of course, if you’re citing them. I’m just clarifying for others.
You may not be a fan of the source, but the facts in the article speak for themselves
- Parent went from being a fashion journalist to an Iran “expert” in a suspiciously short space of time
- She has published multiple articles making bold claims about the violence perpetrated by the Iranian regime that no other outlet has verified
- She has pushed 30,000 death toll figure based on little to no evidence
- Her articles often cite unknown or unverified sources, e.g. “a student in Tehran said …”
Other outlets that challenge the alleged death toll numbers, include Zeteo [link], just FYI.
You may not be a fan of the source
That’s an odd way to say that the source is uncredible and a mouthpiece for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity of authoritarian regimes. You know, like the kinds of crimes being discussed here.
And outlets like The Guardian and The BBC are responsible for covering up and whitewashing the crimes against humanity committed by Israel and its Western allies.
Does that make every article written for them fundamentally untrue?
Okay, so you just fundamentally don’t understand or care about how source credibility, bias, or anything outside of a black-and-white binary works. Taken in the extreme, I can’t say “Hey guys, check out this InfoWars source*” and then claim “but mainstream outlets are biased and lie too!!” when I’m rightly called out for it.
Yeah, sources like BBC News are biased for e.g. Israel’s genocide in Palestine. That’s why we normally treat them with a grain of skepticism when they report on things like that; for BBC News specifically, I’d probably just find a better source if I want reporting on Israel in Palestine or Lebanon. Nonetheless, it’s not ridden with unhinged conspiracy theories about how e.g. al-Assad never carried out an illegal chemical attack on his own people or AI-hallucinated disinformation about Alexei Navalny.
The Grayzone is a quintessential mouthpiece that exists effectively solely for that purpose.
* Edit: I guess I actually can cite them now and it’d be kind of funny. God bless you, Tesseract.
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The signatories included Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates
Wow, I’m so impressed that bastions of human rights like checks notes Russia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Pakistan, and Qatar found China’s cultural-genocidal “achievements” “remarkable”.
Was this actually meant to sway anyone, or were you just hoping copy–pasting this would get people to zone out, not read it, and just passively agree you’d said something convincing?
Edit: Anyway, here’s a good debunk of that article by Modern Chinese historian and socialist David Brophy. I disagree with Brophy on the subject of “genocide” because it’s very clearly a cultural one (whereas he’s using the one about killing off etc. of a group), but he nonetheless compellingly points out that the article you linked is a crock of shit. Even disregarding that they used AI to write it and provably hallucinated sources, it’s still a sloppy piece of propaganda.
Wow, I’m so impressed that bastions of human rights like
Right back atcha
Oh, okay, so you’re pulling a disingenuous whataboutism for someone who wasn’t even being discussed.
I didn’t offer Adrian Zenz’s opinion for the same reason I wouldn’t have offered Saudi Arabia’s. You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia which is why I criticized you for doing so. I instead offered the opinion of David Brophy excoriating that piece of AI slopaganda but who you completely sidestepped because his article competently and credibly drags the Monthly Review one into the street and puts it out of its misery.
It’s actually kind of hilarious that you’re (unsurprisingly) doing one of the main things Brophy criticizes Prashad and Chak for in the debunk I seriously doubt you cared to read.
Edit: And by the way, just because I didn’t even think to earlier because I was more frustrated with your invoking someone never discussed here than I was with what he said: here’s the full context.
He was replying to Michael D. Swaine, who wrote:
Other than the fact that “he” alone did not do this, that many CN actually like greater surveillance, and that the camps are a gross overreaction to a real problem, no. But I was thinking more of the BRI nonsense, “quasi-emperor for life,” “play by its own rules,” MIC 2025, etc.
Zenz replied:
Many Germans liked Hitler’s control mechanisms. They reduced crime and rid society of unpopular minorities. @Dalzell60
You deliberately took this out of context. He’s literally using Hitler to describe how many people liking bigoted authoritarian measures doesn’t make it a good thing.
He’s still part of an expressly right-wing think tank, so I’m not suddenly endorsing things he’s written about China’s cultural genocide. What I am saying is that this is the dumbest possible way you could’ve smeared his credibility – by picking out a quote where he’s obviously and fully criticizing Hitler.
Coming into a comment thread that is calling out the manufacturing consent against Iran, and bleating “but Xinjiang!” is whataboutism if I’ve ever seen it.
And yes, you are parroting Zenz. He is the source of this myth - via countless western sources regurgitating the same claims he’s been making since 2018.
In March 2017, the Jamestown Foundation (Washington DC) published a three thousand-word report on “Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State” written by Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.1 A few months later, the same writers published another report, this one slightly longer at nearly five thousand words, with the more aggressive title, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang.”2 At that time, there was not much interest in these stories. Zenz came from the Victims of Communism Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the U.S. Congress in 1993 and funded by various right-wing sources, including the Heritage Foundation.
You decided to offer the opinions of countries like Saudi Arabia
And, ya know, a plethora of others that you decided to ignore for some reason… Associating a large swath of Muslim and Arab nations with human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia really lets your racism show.
Nah, the kind of violence we are talking about here has nothing to do with sanctions/Israel/USA. It’s the regime against the people, not people against each other. And this is 100% the regime’s responsibility. Israeli and US leadership is bad, but it has nothing to with the regime’s brutality. Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them. Plus they run a very corrupt and inefficient economy anyway.
Also the sanctions are international, they hit Iran’s economy, but the regime could get rid of them at any time. It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them.
They had already agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons, and let international observers in to verify, in the talks that ended apruptly when the US and Israel started bombing them.
And before that, there had already been a deal in place, which the US unilaterally pulled out of.True. But only one part of a bigger picture.
Honey wake up time for your daily portion anti-Iran propaganda by TheGuardian
Trying so hard to manifacture consent.
