The Iran Editorial Line
what fresh hell is this
Well, I was hoping to post a nice film review this week, but that would feel gross in the circumstances. If nothing else, I am feeling quite energised by the sheer amount of cortisol flowing through me, and might as well make some use of it.
Today, I want to break down two of the most sinister pieces of propaganda I have seen this last week or so. Of course, there’s been plenty more since, but I want to keep this brief, so let’s begin.
Exhibit A: ‘About Iran, from an Iranian Woman.’
If you use the Substack app on a regular basis, you have probably seen this.1 It needs examining because, while you can easily pick out the imperialist/Zionist talking points if you’re attuned, it’s quite an insidious piece, which frames tacit support for the Israeli/US attack in a ‘nuanced’ way. This soft-sell for imperial ultraviolence has always been the most dangerous, because it is appealing to people who are psychologically normal, as opposed to the Freudian outliers that go for open fascist rhetoric.
The author does appear to be a real person, an American (of course…)-Iranian woman called Lili Michelle who does stand-up and puts clips on instagram and TikTok. She was apparently against the Israeli attack on Iran last year, but has evidently changed tack since.2
Of course, Lili being a real person does not mean that her post’s super-viral spread is entirely organic - whether an author is genuine or not, it’s easy to boost particular kinds of speech with bots, and Lili’s speech is, when you pare it back to the essentials, amenable to bombs. Still, I do think it’s at least partly organic, because again, this is the kind of speech that is agreeable to normies who want to be reassured that everything’s fine and they don’t need to do anything, and there’s always a market for that.3
Tl;dr, she is basically arguing that the assassination of the Ayatollah was a historic moment for Iranians, because he represents oppression (this much is understandable), therefore how dare you think the current onslaught is a bad thing?
The entire article is parsed and structured basically exactly as a liberal Zionist ‘it’s complicated’ person would argue Israel-Palestine, and like a Zionist there’s a lot of special pleading and appeals to her own identity (substitute Iranian for Jew). She keeps saying that she is anti-war, but every such statement is always immediately followed by a ‘but,’ and that should tell you something. It’s no exaggeration to say that the whole article is just ‘but -’ statements followed by equivocation. For the most part, she frames the war as the lesser evil, and anti-war rhetoric as the greater. It’s a standard piece of apologia pretending to be something more sophisticated.
She even goes so far as to follow a (brief, incidental, glossing over) comment on the Minab school bombing with a ‘but’ :
Note the use here of the smaller number - fifty - when the real number is over three times that.* She uses emotive language like ‘devastating’ to camouflage what she is actually saying, which is ‘it’s sad, but.’
Consider also the familiar use of the passive voice: ‘children dying’ as opposed to the more accurate ‘children being killed (by Zionists).’ Even worse, it’s ‘children dying is not political.’ If children being killed for political ends is not political, what is?
(*The current number seems to be 186 total victims including staff and parents, and 165 pupils, mostly under the age of ten. Lili published before the full figure was known, but within 24 hours we were hearing numbers above 100, and at time of publishing (7/3/26), she has not edited it. We can only conclude that minimising it has become a choice.)
Moreover, consider the jibe about ‘people who were silent when tens of thousands of Iranians were brutally killed.’ This kind of tips her hand, because it is very recognisably the still-current imperialist/Zionist talking point about the killings during the recent protests. Since the crackdown, unverified Iranian death toll estimates have been a multi-purpose tool: they are thrown in the faces of anti-Zionists to relativise Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, while simultaneously manufacturing consent for the next attack on Iran. Trump himself quoted those estimates in his speech, alongside the usual superlatives about ‘the brutal October 7th attack,’ which should tell you something.
Invariably, Zionists also push the same charge of hypocrisy that Lili is pushing. ‘Why don’t you protest Iran?’4 is the new ‘Why don’t you protest Sudan?’,5 which in turn is the new ‘Why don’t you protest Yemen?’6 The only country these people don’t want you to talk about is Palestine.
Anyway, Lili goes on in much the same style. There are many more ‘buts’, and a core, recurring part of her argument is: how dare you privileged Western (implied white) people oppose this attack on Iran? Of course, this ignores the fact that a) Lili herself is posting about this ‘from the comfort of an American apartment,’ b) those apartments aren’t even that comfortable these days,7 and c) the most outspoken anti-war people in any Western country are going to be disproportionately not-white and disproportionately Muslim.
She appeals to identity-based credentials and lived experience, and quotes some snotty messages from her DMs, but ultimately, this is all just noise. You do not need to be an Iranian exile to understand that any military operation headed up by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be a sadistic bloodbath, and when they massacre a school within the first hour of the war, you should really read the room.
They even timed8 the attack to coincide with Purim, a festival celebrating the ‘pre-emptive’ killing of 75,000 Iranians. This was not lost on the Israeli public, who are currently accusing Iran of being Amalek, just like they accused Palestinians of being Amalek. This translates to ‘God has commanded us to kill every man, woman and child,’ if anyone’s wondering.
Before moving on, I screenshotted the ‘but’ statements from Lili’s article just to show how blatant this all is, and how familiar the ‘it’s complicated’ smokescreen is. This one super-viral post has turbo-charged her previously inactive Substack account, which makes me worry that there’s going to be more where it came from, because social media is a Skinner box designed to reward malevolent takes.
Exhibit B: The BBC should be abolished
This one is an absolute doozy, and represents the BBC doubling down on their familiar brand of barely-veiled imperialism. This was the same institution that employed Jimmy Savile for decades, and boy does it show at times like these.
Even just this opening salvo is worth dissecting, as it contains several signature features of the BBC’s standard Gaza Editorial Style.
Firstly, they couch the bare facts in language bordering on incredulity - ‘Iran says/according to Iranian officials’ is not used neutrally, but as a caveat, with the same disbelieving tone as the BBC’s trademark ‘according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.’ They still use these pernicious words to cast doubt on Palestinian death tolls to this day, despite the Health Ministry’s tally proving time and again to be a drastic undercount.
(If you’re not aware, the Lancet recently published a report which estimates that at least 75,000 people had been killed directly in Gaza by last January; the Israelis also evaporated around 3000 people with thermobaric bombs.)
This is followed by ‘Iran has blamed the US and Israel.’ Again, the language is incredulous: they are saying this as if anyone else is likely to have been responsible for an airstrike on Iran during a US/Israeli attack on Iran. The insinuation is that Iran could plausibly have bombed itself, an opinion that they do platform later in the article. Conveniently, they neglect to mention the fact that Israel lately bombed every school in Gaza and killed tens of thousands of children, and the US helped them do it. These small factoids would add credence to what the Iranians have reported, and are therefore relevant context.
Next, they do what they always do, and report the denial of the perpetrators as if they were a reliable source: the IDF is treated as a reputable and trustworthy institution, and the US’s empty promise to investigate itself is treated as credible.
Next - in case those pesky Iranians weren’t making it all up, and didn’t bomb themselves - they hedge their bets by including the bit about a ‘nearby’ military base (the classic ‘Hamas tunnels’ defence). The Guardian has an image showing how distant the two sites actually were:
It’s possible that the base was the target, but consider the resources and technology that the Israeli/US forces have at their disposal, and think about the kind of states we’re dealing with. Israel is a fascist theme park with a habit of sniping starving children, and the US is its funhouse reflection. In case there was any doubt, the American ‘Secretary of War’9 boasted after the massacre about how there would be ‘no stupid rules of engagement,’ and it would not be a ‘politically-correct war.’
The school was also targeted by not one, but two missiles, the second arriving after an interval and destroying the prayer hall where the survivors of the first strike were gathered. This is what they call a ‘double-tap,’ and it’s something that both the US and Israel do all the time. Al Jazeera has combed through the information in more detail, but the bottom line is that it does not look like an accident.
The BBC also saw fit to include the above bit from a social media rando blaming the regime. Because of course it’s Iran’s fault when foreign aggressors kill Iranian children, and it’s totally legitimate to platform baseless conspiracy theories when they suit the imperial agenda.
Contrary to the victim-blaming take boosted by the BBC, a warning was, in fact, issued around 9:45 (when the first bombs hit Iran), but by this point the school day had already begun. They were hit less than an hour into the war, between 10 and 10:45, by which point some parents were on the scene to collect their children. Again: a packed school was hit within literally the first hour. Think about that.
Lastly, this point about journalists was clearly included to sow doubt, to the benefit of the perpetrators of the atrocity. Meanwhile, the BBC routinely glosses over the fact that Israel has denied observer access to Gaza for two years, and killed more journalists there than have been killed in any other modern war.
(They also never mention the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons, which you’d think would be relevant context given the stated pretext for this war!)
Closing thoughts
To finish up, I want to acknowledge that yes, Iranians are suffering under an oppressive regime, and yes, that is a terrible thing. If there is a solution to that problem, I don’t know it, though there’s little reason to believe that endless sanctions and menaces are making the regime any softer.
[Edit 23/03/26 - Frankly, I now feel ashamed of this comment. Is it right for me - or anyone - to be talking about the ‘oppressive’ nature of the Iranian government, at a time like this? As if it is uniquely so, and as if we can trust any of the horror stories spread by a self-evidently despicable media? By advancing this dubious and ultimately irrelevant talking point, I feel like I was doing unpaid labour for Mossad.
A few weeks down the line, having watched how things are unfolding, I am honestly amazed by the courage, dignity and resourcefulness of the Iranians, who put us all to shame. At this point, my biggest fear is that Israel has picked this fight it never could have won in order to create the conditions where it has an ‘excuse’ to use nuclear weapons, something that its depraved populace is clearly itching to do.]
But (Lili had about twenty, I’m entitled to one) we can be sure of this: if one thing is less likely to benefit Iranians than an American-led bombing campaign, it is an Israeli-led bombing campaign.
God help us.
Circa 18k likes at time of publishing.
As far as I can tell (and I am not going through all her clips), she has never said much about Palestine: she’s got a clip doing crowdwork with an Israeli, but she’s no Sammy Obeid. Whereas he puts them in the spotlight and gives them enough rope to hang themselves, she acknowledges the awkwardness (because you sort of have to) but makes light of it, juices it for a few laughs and moves on.
It’s also more than agreeable to right-wingers who fully support the bombs, and love a token brown person saying the same thing as them but in a palatable way.
There’s a false equivalence: if you protest the Iranian regime in a Western country, nothing will happen to you, because your government is very happy to see people showing support for its own manifest agenda (i.e. bombing Iran). Every Murdoch/Ellison outlet will ghoulishly circulate footage of you ‘celebrating’ and feeling ‘relief’ while Iranian schoolgirls are blown to bits. On the other hand, if you protest against Israel’s crimes, you risk becoming a political prisoner. Plainly, one of these causes is not like the other.
Which also doesn’t really work, because a) no anti-Zionist on earth would object to peace in Sudan, b) Western politicians are not publicly declaring themselves fanatical supporters of the RSF, and c) the RSF is backed by the UAE, an ally of Israel.
Some other RSF facts:
They changed their logo, which used to contain an abbreviation resembling the Arabic name for Jerusalem, to avoid offending Israeli sensibilities.
They fought on the same side as the Israelis in Yemen.
They are aggressively anti-Islamist, contrary to Zionist claims, which transparently aim to tar Hamas with the RSF’s notoriety.
They are one of very few groups in the Muslim world to class Hamas as terrorists.
Speaking of Yemen, and since Lili has invited us to play the numbers game, perhaps we should add the hundreds of thousands starved in Yemen by the US/Israel’s allies to the tally. Why not also factor in the tens of millions killed by Western sanctions worldwide since 1970? Iran is a kitten compared to its enemies.
Bizarrely, ‘why don’t you protest Yemen?’ was also asked of Palestine supporters by Zionists, when they were the ones that did it! These people don’t even take the trouble to know who they are killing at any given time. It’s like that John le Carre quote about the English:
In case it needs to be said - Most Americans do not have the same class interests as the people who started this war, and many will suffer because of rising fuel prices because of the war Lili is manufacturing consent for (while pretending not to support). People who were already on the edge are going to end up homeless, and meanwhile ICE violence is going to escalate. This is not to say that Americans are the primary victims of the attack, only that no-one is getting a puppy out of this.
According to Marco Rubio, it was the Israelis that made the first move, not the Americans. The tail does, in fact, wag the dog. (Which is not to say that the dog is not monstrous in its own right.)
A noted serial rapist, Messianic heretic, crusade-fetishist, ‘Deus Vult’ tattoo-wearer who wants to repeal women’s right to vote. He also has a tattoo with Hebrew letters, because fascists intuitively associate themselves with Israel.