Manipulating past and present

A glance at reports from the West's principal news outlets and at specialist journals show that the rulers of the Islamic Republic have spent big money on buying influence, directly or indirectly, over the past four decades. All despots and kleptocrats do this, and Iran has done it quite well.

The most striking recurrent theme among those in the media doing Iran's bidding is the attempt to present a traumatized, ransacked society as natural and ordinary. The aim of this perfect lie is to establish some dangerous ideas in Western minds, namely that events in Iran are like those of other, developing countries and indeed that Iran is a few steps ahead of other states in the region for its ability to weave modern cultural elements into its religious and traditional culture.

Iran's foreign foot soldiers in culture and universities play a related but different role. To establish the idea that their state is perfectly normal, criminal rulers must aggrandize the nation's past, present and future before Western eyes.

The two sets of actors have their respective roles: Those in the media are tasked with falsifying facts about present-day conditions in Iran, while the academics work on distorting the Islamic Republic's past and also its future prospects for the Western audience.

No sign of ethics or decency

Remember, Western universities, and especially those in North America, are run like companies, so profits and resources always come first. In that environment, those who pay for research will inevitably shape and control its contents and themes.

It is easier of course to identify the shenanigans of regime promoters in the media than it is in academia. Yet what comes out of a good many Iranian and Oriental studies departments is as harmful as the fake and half-fake news peddled on contemporary Iran. Their common assumption is that the Islamic Republic is an ordinary, legal polity that simply followed the collapse of another system in a progressive process of development.

The reporters and academics who serve the Islamic Republic, wittingly or not, are employed for this one task: to "normalize" the regime's past, present and future. As the apologists of its crimes, they have long since discarded any professional ethics or decency.

Ideological gangsterism

Iran's regime may well be the world's only example of "ideological gangsterism." This means it has combined its vast criminal resources with a millenarian ideology, while redirecting the state apparatus and public purse toward particular goals. Iran's revolutionary gangsters have a hand, and a share, in so many criminal activities in the world. They are not after profits principally, but rather spreading their ideology and imposing their catastrophic vision across the world.

While some Western politicians have begun to catch onto the clerical regime's nature, many have yet to take stock of its crimes. This is what ultimately explains why they insist on pursuing a dialogue with Tehran. Indeed, they are swayed by the nonsense emitted by interested media and academic departments. It seems the Western resolve to keep talking to the regime rests on the enduring pillars of naivety and cynicism.

It is like making a deal with the devil; no sane individual would agree to such a meeting. Must you talk to the devil to accept the reality of evil? He'll only deceive you!

One recent image from Iran says it all: the morality police in Tehran shoving a girl into a van. Elsewhere in the world, this is only how wild animals are treated. In Iran, this is the reality of life, not the pictures the regime and its bidders prefer to circulate of cheerful young people in gardens abloom.