Dr Declan Hayes: Iran’s back-handed propaganda war

Because Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Tehran University Professor Mohammad Marandi have, together with Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari, emerged as the public backbone of Iran’s publicity machine, the West has placed substantial bounties on their heads. Although there are many petitions doing the rounds protesting at that, those repulsive bounties are as much a part of the West’s propaganda efforts as were the most wanted Iraqi playing cards issued in 2003 to undermine the late Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq and to justify the illegal and criminal war the West waged against him.

Although modern Iran is undoubtedly much stranger militarily than Iraq was in 2003, it is important to gauge whether Iran is also noticeably stronger in the PR stakes. This is because perception is at least as important as the reality of boots on the ground. If, as with Iraq, the West can con itself into believing that it is fighting to bring democracy in the form of uncovered female heads to Iran, then its efforts to free the women of Iran from head scarves and their men from having an abundance of oil will be, as in Iraq, all the stronger.

Certainly, if Messrs Araghchi, Marandi and Zolfaghari were to end up at the business end of Western assassins, then Messrs Trump and Netanyahu, along with their sycophants, would have to consider that a good day’s work and a worthy continuation of the mass slaughter we have most recently seen in Syria and Iran, but particularly in Gaza and Lebanon.

The only way the US and Israel can indefinitely control the Strait of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb is by deploying tactical nuclear weapons against both Iran and Yemen in the hope that Pakistan will not reply in kind.

As targeted assassinations of scientists, poets, diplomats and academics have been an integral part of this Western military campaign, we can safely conclude that all three of them are living on borrowed time and that they will soon be, to use the Iranians’ own term, martyred.

But would that, to use the hackneyed Black Panthers’ term, be a case of killing the revolutionary but not the (Iranian) revolution? I think so as Iran, to its credit, has assembled quite an effective propaganda orchestra of its own.

Although Iran’s Lego cartoon videos lampooning Trump have been immensely popular, the Iranian tribal grandfather who shot down a brace of choppers, deserves mention in dispatches. As does his pint-sized granddaughter, who reflects the attitude of another little Iranian toddler, who asked for Iranian missiles to be painted pink in remembrance of their martyred comrades in diapers.

Although their critics might argue that those children would be better employed following more traditional childish pursuits, they are infinitely less blood thirsty than many of the expatriate Iranians who, in echoes of Madeleine Albright; are on record repeatedly saying that slaughtering Iranian children is a price worth paying to restore the Shah and Savak, his notorious secret police.

The way that I see it is that Iran, from learned scholars like Araghchi, Marandi and Zolfaghari right down to those little toddlers, are disseminating a unified message and that message is being amplified throughout the non-Western world by Russian and Chinese media, as well as by the likes of Tucker Carlson and others in the collective non-traditional media, whose reach far outstrips that of the BBC, Fox News and their ilk.

Although Israel and her belligerent allies still have the ear of President Trump and his inner circle, that ear, which stopped a bullet during his Presidential campaign, might soon become redundant.

Trump and Biden before him have helped move the world’s political centre of gravity to the east, to places like Pakistan, which has its own issues with Afghanistan, India and China and which therefore cannot be considered a permanent vassal of the US.

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The only way the US and Israel can indefinitely control the Strait of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb is by deploying tactical nuclear weapons against both Iran and Yemen in the hope that Pakistan will not reply in kind. But Iranian propaganda in Pakistan makes that an implausible gambit, as the Iranians have made their war against Israel and the US, if not quite a global affair, then certainly a south Asian one.

Not only can the US and its Israeli sprog not control the Strait of Hormuz but there is no way they can guarantee shipping from there to India, Pakistan and places further east. Not only has the US allowed Israel paint it into a corner over all this but Iran’s propaganda and diplomatic machines, together with their allies throughout the Fertile Crescent, will continue to make a very good fist of telling anyone with a pair of functioning ears that the American writ no longer runs in their part of the world and that, sooner than the West expects, the Lebanese body bag count will be avenged with Israeli bound missiles painted in pink and other girlish hues.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Dr Declan Hayes is an Irish academic, author and geopolitical expert.

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