Protests across Iran after young woman dies in police custody

An article at Essence of Time suggests that it was a 'prearranged provocation'. - Source
It makes perfect sense considering that recently Iran signed a memorandum to join the SCO thus getting closer to China, Russia and the multipolar reality these countries are trying to make it happen.

Now considering all the above, the Golden Question is, concerning the current chaos that broke out in Iran: Cui Bono? Certainly not the Iranian people, nor the Iranian government.
 
What I’m wondering now is, why Iran? Sounds like a plan to de-stabilize the order they have in their country. I’m sure I can figure that out within an arm-throws reach, it just never caught my interest until now.
The why Iran question is more a why now question (as regime change in Iran has always been close to the top of the nasties wish list). And the why now question is probably best answered by looking at what is happening in Russia/Ukraine. Putin has done the unthinkable and posted a rallying flag to the whole world that isn't part of the so-called Golden Billion, and he's winning the argument. Therefore the soft underbelly of his process is destabilization of those countries perceived as being in alignment with where he wants to take the world. Right now there are multiple tensions being brewed up in various fault line locations, the most obvious being Taiwan/China, all of which have the intention of sowing chaos where order and co-operation are starting to reap rewards. As the evil empire gets more desperate, and as more and more non-aligned or wavering countries see this and see how Putin's promise of mutual prosperity, cooperation, and the honoring of national sovereignty, becomes a genuine alternative choice, the more we should expect destabilization, attempts at orange revolutions, mysterious assassinations and the like. The message being to all those quietly considering their allegiances, you want some of this do you!?
 
Ahh ok, I understand. I thought things there were really brutal. Thank you.
I visited there and I saw many women wearing the headscarf loosely, with hair showing, and also underneath it if they have long hair. In some areas, they take it off here and there or for pictures. It's not so strict. Of course, the idea that a woman needs to cover her hair is silly, but that's a different topic. Let's say it's not Saudi Arabia. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this incident with the woman who collapsed and sadly passed away is used by certain terrorist groups (MEK/MKO) to organize protests. There were also some reports of people within the protests shooting at protesters and putting the blame on police officers. Found interesting information on this guy's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/AryJaey and Press TV.

It's always tricky to tell what's true and what's false information, but if you look at the signs, it's clear that there's an agenda going on. You'd never see such a reaction from the same people who claim to care about 'women's rights' to killings or abuse in other places. What I also thought was a good point: If they care so much about the Iranian people, why did they refuse to send life-saving medication to the country? So, yeah, fishy stuff going on, but the govt seems to have it somewhat under control. Press TV retweets they detained "49 members of MKO terror group during recent riots" and "9 foreign nationals of foreign countries for their role in riots."
 
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The Iran people's revolt is right. Iran regyme is so terrible. It's not just matter of women's hair, it is a matter of a dark dictatorship. I have a friend from Iran and he pries to rescue from the regyme.
For example, the internet is almost illegal in Iran.
 
For example, the internet is almost illegal in Iran.

Really? So how did the video from the mall get online?

What is the point (by your description) of showing and promoting a shopping centre if things are so restrictive? Only in the last few hours because of the events that have taken place is access being limited, but who really benefits from this? Because without that access, either the Iranian government controls the narrative.... or the narrative - by not being able to access the internal reality of the country - is controlled by the Western mass media. But even the latter may already be the sinister hand of the Western media.

And by the way, my position is not to defend Iran, I just question what you say, based on the facts.

How do you explain, for example, this video in the middle of a rural area, where one would assume that you are far away from communications, and that the only person in it is a woman? By the way, even the girl is quite well made up, for a country life.


It is even interesting that this video comes from Kurdistan, and what do we know about Kurdistan?


Iranian leaders roundly criticized the referendum and warned of further instability in a war-torn region. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused the United States and foreign powers of trying to “create a new Israel” to serve their interests. President Hassan Rouhani called the plan to split Iraq a “foreign sectarian plot.” [...] Meanwhile, thousands of Iranian Kurds took to the streets of Baneh, Saghez and Sanandaj in Kurdistan province to support the KRG move. The Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, a political group and militia exiled in northern Iraq, also supported the referendum. In the Kurdish regions of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij paramilitary have set up an extensive command-and-control system—second only to Tehran province—to deal with unrest and cross-border attacks by Kurdish militants.

So what's going on here? We see a pattern, don't we?

To conclude, it is quite obvious that you not only repeat your posts, but that you have rationalised and evaded answers and used very vague arguments.

I don't mind if you have a different, contrary opinion. It bothers me that your opinion is based on "oh evil regime must disappear" without any basis, without looking for solid data and that you only offer "a friend told me so".
 
In case there is any doubt of a color revolution

It's a tragedy what happened to the poor girl that died after being beaten by the police. But as has been mentioned by others here, it seems that the peaceful protests have been hijacked and weaponized against the Iranian government and against the Iranian people as well, as a consequence, in order to destabilize the country and orchestrate a possible coup.

I'm not implying that the Iranian current leadership doesn't have It's own flows to work on and improve but if one tries to look at the bigger picture one sees that recently Iran was getting way to close to China and Russia, the "last drop" being probably the signing of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization memorandum by Iran. Cui Bono from the the chaos in which Iranian people have been plunged in in the last weeks? For sure Not the Iranian people, nor the Iranian government it seems.
 
It's a tragedy what happened to the poor girl that died after being beaten by the police

Mahsa Amini, was not beaten, she had a heart attack and there is a video when she collapses and is helped.

On the other hand, we expect the EU to impose sanctions on Israel also for the death of Palestinian children.

EU to impose sanctions on Iran over the death of Mahsa Amin​

German Foreign Minister Analena Berbock said she wants the European Union to impose sanctions on Iran due to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody and the suppression of demonstrations.

“The Iranian authorities must immediately stop their brutal treatment of the protesters,” said the German minister, calling for an investigation into the death of Mahsa Amini and those protesting because of it, Tanjug reports.

The EU bloc is said to have last agreed on human rights sanctions against Tehran in 2021.

It added, however, that no Iranians had been placed on the list since 2013 as the EU avoided angering Iran in hopes of preserving the nuclear deal Tehran signed with world powers in 2015. Currently, a series of sanctions are in place for around 90 Iranian individuals, which are renewed every April.

On September 22, America imposed sanctions on Iran’s morality police over allegations of abuse of Iranian women, holding the unit responsible for the death of Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested in Tehran for wearing “inappropriate clothing.”

The French foreign ministry signaled on Monday that it would support the sanctions, saying in a statement that Paris was examining available options for the bloc’s response in the event of “new massive abuses of women’s rights and human rights in Iran.
 
On the subject of how strict or liberal Iran is about women’s rights, dress codes etc., I think it’s safe to say that in this thread alone, there is evidence that there are areas or districts where women can more or less dress however they like, whereas there are still official policies that try to enforce a particular style of dress. Why else would Amini and others be at the police station in the first place.

It seems similar to speeding fines in England. Many people break the speed limit, and everyone knows this, however, the police put out GATSO cameras and vans with guys sat in the back pointing light guns at cars to try and catch people. When they do, they have the option to go on a ‘speed awareness course’, where they turn up to a designated building, and have to go through a re-education about the dangers of speeding, how to identify different high accident areas, etc.

So I don’t know this for sure, but I’d imagine women in Iran can basically push the boundaries of what is acceptable to the authorities, and if there happens to be dress enforcement officers or overly zealous police or religious figures in the area who catch them, then they got unlucky, and they accept the ordeal of having to go to the local station for a ‘telling off’, and be shown how to dress properly, and probably about how dangerous and degenerate it is for society for them to expose themselves, and the Imam says… etc.

Then, the video clearly shows Amini arriving at the building of her own volition and joining a group. And then whilst she’s being told off for how she’s wearing her clothes, she has a medical emergency, which unfortunately lead to her death.
 
Mahsa Amini, was not beaten, she had a heart attack and there is a video when she collapses and is helped.

On the other hand, we expect the EU to impose sanctions on Israel also for the death of Palestinian children.

EU to impose sanctions on Iran over the death of Mahsa Amin​

German Foreign Minister Analena Berbock said she wants the European Union to impose sanctions on Iran due to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody and the suppression of demonstrations.

“The Iranian authorities must immediately stop their brutal treatment of the protesters,” said the German minister, calling for an investigation into the death of Mahsa Amini and those protesting because of it, Tanjug reports.

The EU bloc is said to have last agreed on human rights sanctions against Tehran in 2021.

It added, however, that no Iranians had been placed on the list since 2013 as the EU avoided angering Iran in hopes of preserving the nuclear deal Tehran signed with world powers in 2015. Currently, a series of sanctions are in place for around 90 Iranian individuals, which are renewed every April.

On September 22, America imposed sanctions on Iran’s morality police over allegations of abuse of Iranian women, holding the unit responsible for the death of Mahsa Amini, after she was arrested in Tehran for wearing “inappropriate clothing.”

The French foreign ministry signaled on Monday that it would support the sanctions, saying in a statement that Paris was examining available options for the bloc’s response in the event of “new massive abuses of women’s rights and human rights in Iran.
My mistake, sorry for not having paid more attention on the matter, though, in this case it's even more clear that what's happening now in Iran has the flavor of a color revolution being fuelled by someone who would benefit from it.
 
The following article by Kit Klarenberg published on Sott exposes diligently and objectively, to me at least, the chaos that engulfed Iran recently fuelled by foreign powers following the death of Mahsa Amini.

From the article it is clearly seen how foreign powers waged a psyop war against Iran, especially on the internet, fuelled by the internal struggles Iran is facing lately with the objective of manipulating the Iranians to participate in a color revolution style rising against the Iranian government. Below follows the article:

Decoding the Pentagon's online war against Iran:
From a click of a button in the US to violence on the streets of Tehran, the latest protests in Iran are being engineered and provoked from outside

The civil unrest in Iran in response to the recent death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was waiting at a Tehran police station, although rooted in legitimate grievances, also bears the hallmark of a western-sponsored covert war, covering multiple fronts.

Mere days after the protests erupted on 16 September, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had initiated a wide-ranging audit of all its online psyops efforts, after a number of bot and troll accounts operated by its Central Command (CENTCOM) division - which covers all US military actions in West Asia, North Africa and South and Central Asia - were exposed, and subsequently banned by major social networks and online spaces.

The accounts were busted in a joint investigation carried out by social media research firm Graphika, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which evaluated "five years of pro-Western covert influence operations."

Published in late August, it attracted minimal English-language press coverage at the time, but evidently was noticed, raising concerns at the highest levels of the US government, prompting the audit.

While the Washington Post ludicrously suggested the government's umbrage stemmed from CENTCOM's egregious, manipulative activities which could compromise US "values" and its "moral high ground," it is abundantly clear that the real problem was CENTCOM being exposed.

#OpIran

CENTCOM's geographical purview includes Iran,
and given the Islamic Republic's longstanding status as a key US enemy state, it's perhaps unsurprising that a significant proportion of the unit's online disinformation and psychological warfare efforts were directed there.

A key strategy employed by US military psyops specialists is the creation of multiple sham media outlets publishing content in Farsi. Numerous online channels were maintained for these platforms, spanning Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Telegram.

In some cases too, fake journalists and pundits, with numerous "followers" on those platforms emerged, along with profile photos created via artificial intelligence.

For example, Fahim News claimed to provide "accurate news and information" on events in Iran, prominently publishing posts declaring "the regime uses all of its efforts to censor and filter the internet," and encouraging readers to stick to online sources as a result.

Meanwhile, Dariche News claimed to be an "independent website unaffiliated with any group or organization," committed to providing "uncensored and unbiased news" to Iranians within and without the country, in particular information on "the destructive role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all the affairs and issues of Iran and the region."

Their respective YouTube channels pumped out numerous short-form videos, presumably in the hope they would be mistaken for organic content, and go viral on other social networks. The researchers identified one instance in which media outlets elsewhere had embedded Dariche News content into articles.

An army of bots and trolls

Some of the fake news organizations published original material, but much of their output was recycled content from US government-funded propaganda outfits such as Radio Farda and Voice of America Farsi.

They also repurposed and shared articles from the British-based Iran International, which appears to receive arm's length funding from Saudi Arabia, as did several fake personas attached to these outlets.

These personas frequently posted non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in order to increase their authenticity. They also engaged with real Iranians on Twitter, often joking with them about internet memes.

Pentagon bots and trolls used different narrative techniques and approaches in an attempt to influence perceptions and engender engagement. A handful promoted "hardliner" views, criticizing the Iranian government for insufficiently hawkish foreign policy while being excessively reformist and liberal domestically.
One such bogus user, a purported "political science expert," accrued thousands of followers on Twitter and Telegram by posting content praising Shia Islam's growing power in West Asia, while other "hardliner" accounts praised the late General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), slain in an illegal US drone strike in January 2020, as a martyr, and encouraged the wearing of hijabs.
The researchers state the purpose of these efforts was unclear, although an obvious explanation is the Pentagon sought to foster anti-government discontent among conservative Iranians, while creating lists of local "extremists" to monitor online.

Orchestrated opposition


Overwhelmingly though, Pentagon-linked accounts were viciously critical of the Iranian government, and the IRGC. Numerous Pentagon bots and trolls sought to blame food and medicine shortages on the latter, which was likened to ISIS, and posting videos of Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu.

More sober posts criticized Tehran for redistributing much-needed food to give to Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, while others highlighted embarrassing incidents, such as a reported power outage that caused the country's chess team to lose an international online tournament.

Furthermore, multiple fake users claimed to seek "justice for the victims of #Flight752", referring to the Ukraine International Airlines flight accidentally shot down by the IRGC in January 2020.

Using hashtags such as #PS752 and #PS752justice hundreds of times, they blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei personally for the incident.

Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February, these accounts used Persian versions of widely-trending hashtags #No_To_Putin and #No_To_War - themselves overwhelmingly disseminated on Twitter by pro-Ukraine bot and troll accounts, according to separate research.

The users condemned Khamenei's verbal support of Putin and accused Iran of supplying drones to Moscow, which it was claimed were used to kill civilians.

They also pushed the narrative that Iran's collusion with Russia would result in adverse political and economic repercussions for Tehran, while making unflattering comparisons between Khamenei and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"One has sold Iran to Russia and ordered their peoples' murder. The other is wearing a combat uniform alongside his people and has stopped the colonization of Ukraine by Russia with all his might."
Scattershot fury

There were also cloak-and-dagger initiatives intended to damage Iran's standing in neighboring countries, and undermine its regional influence.
Much of this work seems to have been concerned with spreading panic and alarm, and creating a hostile environment for Iranians abroad.

For instance, accounts targeting audiences in Afghanistan claimed that Quds Force personnel were infiltrating Kabul posing as journalists in order to crush opposition to the Taliban. They also published articles from a US military-linked website that claimed on the basis of zero evidence that the bodies of dead refugees who'd fled to Iran were being returned to their families back home with missing organs.

Yet another damaging false narrative perpetuated by this cluster in late 2021 and early 2022 was that the IRGC was forcing Afghan refugees to join militias fighting in Syria and Yemen, and that those who refused were being deported.

Iraq was a country of particular interest to the Pentagon's cyber warriors, with memes widely shared throughout Baghdad and beyond depicting IRGC influence in the country as a destructive disease, and content claiming Iraqi militias, and elements of the government, were effective tools of Tehran, fighting to further Iran's imperial designs over the wider West Asia.
Militias were also accused of killing Iraqis in rocket strikes, engineering droughts by damaging water supply infrastructure, smuggling weapons and fuel out of Iraq and into Syria, and fueling the country's crystal meth epidemic.
Another cluster of Pentagon accounts focused on Iran's involvement in Yemen, publishing content on major social networks critical of the Ansarallah-led de-facto government in Sanaa, accusing it of deliberately blocking humanitarian aid deliveries, acting as an unquestioning proxy of Tehran and Hezbollah, and closing bookstores, radio stations, and other cultural institutions.

Several of their posts blamed Iran for the deaths of civilians via landmine, on the basis Tehran may have supplied them.

Laying the ground

Other CENTCOM psychological warfare (psywar) narratives have direct relevance to the protests that have engulfed Iran.

There was a particular focus among one group of bots and trolls on women's rights. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women's opportunities abroad with those in Iran - one meme on this theme contrasted photos of an astronaut with a victim of violent spousal abuse - while others promoted protests against the hijab.

Alleged government corruption and rising living costs were also recurrently emphasized, particularly in respect of food and medicine - production of which in Iran is controlled by the IRGC, a fact CENTCOM's online operatives repeatedly drew attention to.

Women's rights, corruption, and the cost of living - the latter of which directly results from suffocating US sanctions - are all key stated motivating factors for the protesters.

Despite the rioters' widespread acts of violence and vandalism, targeted at civilians and authorities alike, such as the destruction of an ambulance ferrying police officers away from the scene of a riot, they also claim to be motivated by human rights concerns.

Establishment and fringe journalists and pundits have dismissed as conspiracy theories, any suggestions that protests in Iran and beyond are anything other than organic and grassroots in nature.

Yet, clear proof of foreign direction and sponsorship abounds, not least in the very public face of the anti-hijab movement, Masih Alinejad, who for many years has encouraged Iranian women to ceremonially burn their headscarves from the confines of an FBI safehouse in New York City, then publicizes the images online, which travel round the world and back via social media and mainstream news outlets.

A regime-change war by other means

Alinejad's activities have generated a vast amount of fawning and credulous media coverage, without a single journalist or outlet questioning whether her prominent role in the supposedly grassroots, locally-initiated protest movement is affiliated with foreign hostile interference.

This is despite Alinejad posing for photos with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, and receiving a staggering $628,000 in US federal government contracts since 2015.

Much of these funds flowed from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency that oversees propaganda platforms such as Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, the latter of which has produced a Farsi-language show fronted by Alinejad for seven years.

These clusters of social media posts may appear innocuous and authentic in an age of click-bait and viral fake news, yet when aggregated and analysed, they form a potent and potentially dangerous weapon which it turns out is one of many in the Pentagon's regime-change arsenal.
Edit: clarification
 
I told you what my Iranian friend said.
He said that facebook and twitter was banned in Iran. And he told me they changed vpn settings for internet access.

I can't access Sputnik or RT in my country (UK) because the government has forbidden it. So why are they pointing fingers at Iran when there's oppression close to home? The answer should be obvious - because the motivation is not freedom in other countries but enslavement in all of them.
 
I can't access Sputnik or RT in my country (UK) because the government has forbidden it. So why are they pointing fingers at Iran when there's oppression close to home? The answer should be obvious - because the motivation is not freedom in other countries but enslavement in all of them.
Yes, but it is not same thing. You can not access Sputnik but that doesn't mean you can not learn tragedic events in your country. You can tell and listen about any meeting, action or attact if happens. But in Iran the internet bans just mean forbidding all these important events.
 
Yes, but it is not same thing. You can not access Sputnik but that doesn't mean you can not learn tragedic events in your country. You can tell and listen about any meeting, action or attact if happens. But in Iran the internet bans just mean forbidding all these important events.

So how is the propaganda that is fomenting the attempted colour revolution spreading?
 
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