One evening in 2014, I was walking home to my flat in Beirut admiring the Lebanese sunset along the corniche and found myself humming a melancholic tune. When I stopped to analyze what song it was that had gotten stuck in my head, I was horrified. It was the ISIS theme song, the murderous terrorist group that was wreaking havoc in the Middle East, beheading “kafirs,” raping and kidnapping women only to turn them into slaves. The group was committing atrocities in the name of religion and yet recruits were joining them. Why? Expert, emotion evoking propaganda.
Sound familiar? The Iranian regime - who calls itself the Islamic Republic of Iran while executing a teenager in the name of God on Eid al Fitr marking the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, is at the same time putting out admittedly hilarious meme style videos trolling Donald Trump - and the left and those aggrieved with Israel and the US, are lapping it up. I find none of this surprising as I co-authored this investigation for the Atlantic Council in 2020 on Iranian digital influence efforts warning of the sophisticated messaging tools they were refining.
The goal is for the lego videos - which I won’t link to help their views - to soften the regime’s image and distract from their atrocities, especially towards women. What this so-called Islamic Republic has done to women in prison will make your skin crawl - just ask Maryam Mehrtash whose grandmother survived years in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, the subject of an animated short documentary I am the Executive Producer of, That Night.
Maryam has spent her career shaping narratives at the highest levels of American communications. Now she’s working to help especially those new to the subject of the Iranian regime and its history, understand that while they purport to be the anti-imperial resistance, the truth is far more sinister.
The price of propaganda got personal for me recently; I lost a friendship over it. Not over facts but over being told how I’m allowed to talk about them.
“Please stop using the word Islam when you refer to them, it’s very offensive.”
Asked to soften it, to stop naming what it is, to blur the line between a regime and the religion it weaponizes when that line is the whole point. I patiently explained, poked holes in their narrative but my messages went unread, uninterested in the inconvenient truth. Ghosted. Unfollowed. As if telling the truth of what I’ve seen, what I’ve reported, what people I trust and vetted have lived through, was the real offense flying in the face of a system that felt more comfortable to believe despite it being a lie.
So this video is a PSA more than anything, and I hope you’ll join us.
