Posted by siev 1/26/2026
While you're at it, you can try explaining Ukranians why it's fine that Russia is invading them because America is bad.
Because I guess you're not interested in my own personal experience of witnessing said people get killed either. Or not exiting my home because I feared for my life. But you seem to have a loose definition of "unconfirmed" [1] so I won't dwell on that. Here's all I have to say:
> When the Israeli government claims that Iran needs to be toppled to protect the Iranian people, while they simultaneously commit genocide in Palestine, I have to stop and think about their real motives.
The Iranian government is evil.
The Israeli government is evil.
Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.
> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran
_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-i...
Interestingly, during the last internet blackout in Iran, a lot of the pro Scottish independence X accounts went quiet too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...
I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
The Scottish independence movement is a very strong, grass roots campaign that has been building for many decades ( pre-web never mind pre-twitter ), with the Scottish ambivalence to the Union having deep cultural roots.
What keeps Gaza and the wider actions of the current Israel government in the news is the constant killings and injustices. If they didn't want to be in the news perhaps they could stop killing people.
Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.
I am saying that there is evidence that the amount of media (and I am including X/Twitter and other social media) attention given to various causes around the world is actively manipulated. This is in response to a comment querying the perceived disparity in media coverage of events. Not that these events are or are not occurring or a more 'worthy' cause than one another.
I very much understand the history around Scottish independence, but unfortunately it will take me a lot of convincing to genuinely believe that twitter accounts in Iran sharing news that Balmoral castle has been taken over by protestors [1] are well meaning.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260117184736/https://www.teleg...
If you don't believe Iranian tweets are a major factor in Scottish independence - then why mention it?
And while I agree there is a lot of media manipulation attempts out there - I'd argue, if you take your Iran/Israel issue as an example - do you truely believe that Iran is outgunning Israel in this regard??
In terms of coverage - did this incident gget much coverage? https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260125-israeli-forces-ki...
In the 848 days since Oct 2023, 1109 people have been killed within the occupied terrorities by Israeli government forces or settlers.
That's more than 1 a day. Are you arguing that has disproportionate coverage?
I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
With that said, I would argue there is a huge difference between those you have mentioned in how they deal with protests.
To make my point clearer, I have an idea for you: In each of the countries you mentioned, go to the capital with a sign "I am against this regime, I want change" and see what happens.
Nice try, but no. The main difference will be how much coverage your arrest will receive, depending on who arrests you and who covers the story.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/12/politics/trump-krebs-khal...
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-04-26/ty-article-opinio...
0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans.
I think we can all agree that Iran shouldn't be massacring its own nationals even if as the government claims they are foreign-influenced, but don't use this as a platform to push an agenda that harms even your own cause.
>0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans.
"One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"
Sure, they all had moms and dads and to their families they were likely important and missed but there is a World of difference to the people left behind between some activist no one knows getting murdered by the state and their own families and acquaintances getting mowed down while they themselves are living precariously.
This moral absolutism is relativism in disguise.
edit: sorry, I shouldn't have replied to a political post however egregious. I will not engage further.
The Israeli's demand was returning the hostages and the bodies of the people Hamas murdered. Hamas refused to do that for a year and a half.
Numbers: even if one accepts the 60,000+ figure, but since over 25,000 Terrorists have been eliminated on Gaza, the combatants-to-none ratio is rather impressive. And yes, Hamas women are usually assistants... all that is in the course of 2 years.
VS Islamic Republic of Iran massacring some 60,000 in a few days.
[Journalist].Shirin Sadeghi @ShirinSadeghi Jan 22, 2026: Thread on the scale of death, injury and devastation in Iran right now. This Dr conservatively estimates 60,000 killed, 360,000 injured and at least 1 million directly affected.
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Iran may have killed over 30,000 protesters in two days: Report. By Brady Knox. Washington Examiner. January 25, 2026. — Over two weeks, the Rapid Support Forces murdered thousands of civilians, with one estimate putting the kill count at over 60,000.
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CBN News @CBNNews: The Middle East is watching to see if the U.S. will strike the Iranian regime. As further reports of the violence inside Iran come in, the number of those killed by the regime is staggering.
Global terrorism expert Dr. Amir Hamidi said, "A physician-linked medical network has released what is described as a hospital-registered death toll of 40,274, emphasizing this does not cover all facilities and includes victims who never reached hospitals. Based on those gaps, the estimated toll may exceed 60,000. This is not crowd control. This is mass killing, disappearing chemical attacks, and black cloth to hide the evidence. This is a nationwide uprising met with state terror. And it fits the pattern of crime against humanity.”
It's a massacre on a scale that makes it one of the world's deadliest in a generation. The International Center for Human Rights adds that more than 350,000 have been injured and more than 10,000 blinded. [Saman Rasoulpour @SamRasoulpour Editor in Chief | Co-founder, Pulse Media | Covering Iran: news & analysis]
Saman Rasoulpour @SamRasoulpour: In the early days of Iran’s nationwide internet shutdown, at least 30,000 to 60,000 people were killed on the streets. During this period, Mohammad Marandi was among a small, handpicked group of regime-approved individuals inside Iran who retained internet access , joining international media via live video from the state broadcaster Press TV’s studio in Tehran, while helping justify the regime’s narrative as the killings unfolded. Jan 28, 2026.
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Turlockers continue to show support for Iranian protesters. Joe Cortez, Turlock Journal, Jan 28, 2026 — ... protesters in Turlock, with friends and family still in Iran, paint a far more harrowing picture. “When I spoke to my friend (Saturday), he told me that it’s over 60,000 that have been killed,” said Turlock’s Raymon Galavan, who came to the U.S. from Iran in 2006. “People are protesting for freedom with nothing in their hands, and they’re being killed with (military-grade) bullets. And the people who are in hospitals, they take them out and they kill them on the street, and bury them in mass graves. This is the reality. This is not out of a movie.”.. “What they’re telling me right now is that there are absolutely two or three families in each street, and in each alley, that have had someone killed,” said Farhad. “The estimated number of killed in two nights is more than 40,000. Whoever says different … forget about it. It’s a massacre.” Robert David, who co-organized the local protest with Charles Sharlou, added to those disturbing totals. “The numbers we’re getting are more than 800,000 injured and over 300,000 who have been arrested by the regime,” said David, also a native of Tehran. “There is no freedom in Iran. Whatever the regime wants, they do in the name of Islam, and everybody is expected to follow.”
It’s 30k in a week - all civilians vs 60k in 2 years - in a mixture of civilians and combatants.
Qatar spent $20B on education alone in the US. China Russia and Qatar have collectively brainwashed millions of Americans and Europeans.
lmao, every. single. time.
Qatar spent $20B on education alone in the US. China Russia and Qatar have collectively brainwashed millions of Americans and Europeans.
However, if someone pick and chooses where to apply human rights, it's unethical to say the least.
Or is it all made up? Did Israeli official say on TV they want to starve Gaza, or not?
Don't get me wrong, people are definitely suffering, but when there are so many lies, it's hard to tell what's true, and when you spend your entire life in bomb shelters and see your friends and family get murdered, it's even harder to care.
Look at the UN. You've got that Francesca Albanese woman, who's supposed to be an "expert on human rights". Even she spread the obvious lie that "Israel killed more journalists in Gaza than both world wars combined", a ludicrous claim anybody with half a brain knows is ludicrous. Nobody knows how many journalists died in the two world wars (nobody knows how many died in Gaza while we're at it), and even her source for that claim says so ("No one knows how many reporters have been killed doing their jobs... Available counts are fragmentary and deaths of non-Western journalists, especially prior to the 1990s, are largely undocumented.").
But she spread the lie anyway, and the media helped her spread it more. Why? Why would an intelligent UN official spread such a lie? Why was the Wikipedia article about Zionism edited to say that "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible", with the only "sources" cited for that insane, false claim being anti-Israel texts from the past decade only?
Not everything about the war is a lie, but much of it is.
Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.
The only real way to peace for gazans is to have a non Islamist government take over (like from the UAE) and re educate the population to not start training their children for intifada at the age of 3 or 4 and instead use some of the billions they've received in aid to build infrastructure and education.
George Floyd got a lot because he was a borderline case, an innocent man shot by police for some, a criminal who got what he deserved for others. That creates tension. That creates arguments. "local cop shoots innocent 80-year-old woman carrying groceries" is a story for a day at best, then the cop gets punished and we move on.
Gaza is the same. You have one side complaining about human rights abuses, and the pro-Israel side supporting Israle to the death. In Iran, there's no such tension, we all agree that this is bad, shrug and move on.
[1] (funnily enough, this was cited today on HN in an entirely unrelated article) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
The reason isn't that no one disagrees, it's that Qatar, Russia and China don't think the issue is divisive and have not launched a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign about it. And the actual press couldn't care less if Israel isn't involved.
She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"
I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.
What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
Lots of worse things have happened in the past two years (Sudan, Nigeria, and now Iran). No Jews no news.
> Weeks after it was exposed that Hamas’ so-called “Gaza Health Ministry” has been circulating false casualty figures, much of the media are still reporting them without a hint of skepticism.
> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas’ own tallies.
> Aizenberg’s findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.
Also noted, re: the two sources cited:
* In November 2024, Honest Reporting Canada's assistant director, Robert Walker, was criminally charged with 17 counts of mischief for allegedly vandalizing several properties in a Toronto neighborhood by spray painting anti-Palestinian graffiti.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonestReporting
and
* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".
Anything coming from Hamas is certainly not trustworthy, but according to the ICJ, there were quite a few more indications that Israel did this. Just the blocking of food alone is proof of targeting non combatants.
This goes both ways and applies to all conflicts, but somehow we always cherry-pick the source that is not aligned with western interests as the "untrustworthy".
I "cherry-pick" sources that do not spread lies. That excludes Hamas, as well as the circle around Netanjahu. The ICJ seems more interested in truth and you may criticize how that went for them, or are they anti western in your book?
I don't claim the bias was deliberate. The point is that we have internalized having to conform with the narrative of western (elite) interests, which in this case is to exert control on the region, resources and trade routes.
The left loves Islamists even though Islamists are against everything the left stands for (women's rights, freedom of press, religion, sexuality, etc).
I think Qatar's influence ($20B+ spent on US education) is the biggest factor here.
So somehow the Iranian socialists failed to see that Khomeini was a reactionary even worse than the Shah, until it was too late. So this alignment is not new, but it's still completely mind-boggling. For instance: Every progressive leftist I know in the US hates the church they grew up in, hates Christianity, hates religion. I'm an atheist myself, so I don't care about that. But then they can somehow idolize Islamic theocratic regimes that are far more totalitarian than even the rigid culture they grew up in. Why that? Ignorance, post-colonial guilt, some racist idea that brown people don't have the same thoughts and agency to rebel against bad ideas? Yeah, Qatari money in the universities is part of it, but this has been going on longer than that.
Here's a theory: They're what Hannah Arendt called, in Origins of Totalitarianism, "superfluous men", outcasts of the educated elite who are attracted to any utopian belief, no matter how murderous. The more murderous the better, actually. Because they have an unearned dissatisfaction and an unearned sense of grievance, coupled with a righteous sense of anger about things they know very little about.
I think this comment is misguided enough / detached from reality enough to rightfully be flagged to death for being trite and not contributing anything to the discussion.
Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.
This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:
Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia
Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.
The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
Which coutries are those?
UAE directly finances the sanguinary RSF in Sudan and CTS in Yemen, Saudi Arabia/Qatar has financed institutions behind the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood/Salafism in the worlld and Turkey has a shaky economy with a large underbelly as well as engaging in their own brand of imperialism abroad.
It's one thing to accuse someone of not replying to the "strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", and another thing to accuse someone of "hate", which is a very serious accusation that requires proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially in the EU where strong anti libel laws apply.
>" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
If you had a strong plausible interpretation you'd have given one.
The rhetoric that Sweden, Germany, UK and France are Muslim countries is exclusivley used by very far-right standing people to fearmonger and hate against immigrants. What would it even mean for these countries to be Muslim? Germany has literally a party with "Christian" in their name in the government. You still hear the bells of Christian churches everywhere.
You do understand what’s happening in Iran, right? Hard to take your comment seriously.
Even with ublock Origin, these corporations will build a profile on me. Not so in Iran, where people can live without the watchful eye of Google looking at everything they do.
I'm sorry but how tone-deaf can someone be? Over 12.000 people have been killed in the protests with some reports going up to 30.000 since then and here you are happy about the fact that Google cannot profile them anymore. Protesters are beeing shot on-masse in the streets and families from outside the country have no ideas if their brothers and sisters are even still alive. Have some decency.
With that said, what in the actual fuck makes you say this when ten(s) of thousands are being murdered in conjunction with this ad-free period you’re speaking so wistfully about?
Some places you have the former and not the latter. Other places you have the latter and not the former. But human rights are important! Every one of them!
You should try it.
So, maybe, if it ever happens to you, have a backup in case of such emergencies.
I guess, next will be; but what if...and that's for you to fugure out.
Heck, a meteor might hit, and you won't be able to blame the government for your lack of backup.