In November 2025, Iran’s president Pezeshkian announced that Tehran could no longer remain the capital of Iran: drought would soon make the city of 10 million people unlivable. Scientific American diagnosed Tehran’s plight as “a perfect storm of climate change and corruption”, citing Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute.
Six months later, Tehran was experiencing record rainfall and snow, and dams were overflowing in other parts of the country. The Iranian Embassy in Bulgaria posted a video of one such dam, at Paveh.
You can’t predict the weather. But “climate change and corruption” presumably didn’t change in six months. If the rain keeps up, what did change?
This note reviews some of the scientific literature on weather modification, with specific reference to well-funded weather modification programs based in the United Arab Emirates, which were damaged in Iran’s retaliatory strikes during the Ramadan war. The notion that the US military induced drought over Iran and/or Iraq is speculative; the notion that the US and UAE are engaged in active weather modification in Iran’s environs is established fact.
Cloud seeding
The focus of the UAE weather modification program is cloud seeding. Simply explained, cloud seeding involves aircraft spraying materials (usually silver or potassium iodide) into clouds around which water vapor will condense, growing clouds and inducing precipitation. The US military weaponized cloud seeding over Vietnam between 1967 and 1972, which they called Operation Popeye, to try to disrupt North Vietnamese logistics by extending the monsoon. Another US military weather modification project was called STORMFURY (not Epic Fury or Epstein Fury), and involved the manipulation of hurricanes (Willoughby et al. 1985).
The UAE program is not limited to chemical interventions. In 2021, they tried what the BBC called “cloud-busting drones”. The drones delivered electric charge to clouds to attempt to aid condensation.
Evaluations of the UAE’s extensive cloud seeding program indicate success in enhancing rainfall (Hosari et al. 2021, Wehbe et al. 2023), and the physics of cloud seeding continues to advance, including in and around the UAE. Saudi Arabia reported a successful cloud seeding in 2025 (Alzahrani and Abdelbaki 2025).
Ground-based weather modification
German scientists have experimented with using lasers to create clouds – in lab conditions, but lasers aren’t the only option for ground-based weather modification. A 2009 paper by Beare et al., “Accounting for spatiotemporal variation of rainfall measurements when evaluating ground-based methods of weather modification” described a study in Australia of a system called Atlant, a ground-based ionization technology for affecting rainfall. The system’s functioning is described as follows:
“1. Initially, negative ions are generated from a high-voltage corona discharge wire array; the ions become attached to particles in the atmosphere which later act as cloud condensation nuclei; the ions are conveyed to the higher atmosphere by wind; the electric charges on these particles are transferred to cloud droplets; and the electrostatic forces on droplet interaction aid the coalescence of the cloud droplets, resulting in enhanced raindrop growth rate and ultimately increasing rainfall downwind from the Atlant ion emitter.”
Ground-based manipulation of the ionosphere through the emission of radiated power is the science of the US military’s HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program). Emitters can add considerable energy to targeted areas of atmosphere. Ground-based ion emitters were used for cloud seeding in Oman in 2013 and 2014 in a trial reported in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences (Chambers et al. 2016).
Iran’s complaints
Iraqi scholar Salam Abdulqadir Abdulrahman (2024) described cloud seeding as “problematic” because of the transnational nature of clouds and disputes over water:
“Similar to water basins, there are cloud basins or cloud lines, shared by states.
“A cloud basin starts from where the clouds form and begin their journey and all the areas they travel over to where they disperse completely. For example, the northern areas of the Middle East, except for the northern part of Turkey, share a basin. Their clouds are largely formed over the Mediterranean Sea and move eastward. They travel over Israel and Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, south of Turkey, northern Iran and some other areas. It is believed that seeding clouds in one state, the upwind, reduces the amount of rain in another state, the one downwind; i.e. part of the rain of a downwind state is seized by an upwind state. The shift of rain causes security concerns for downwind states.”
Iran thus complained in 2018: “Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iran’s Civil Defence Organisation, accused Israel in a press conference in 2018 of manipulating weather and making the clouds unable to rain over Iran. He alleged that Israel had stolen Iran’s snow.”
Rainfall in 2026
Two mechanisms are suggested for how a drought over Iran could be engineered through UAE-based weather modification.
First, cloud seeding over UAE could indeed have deprived Iran of rainfall in proportion to the extra rainfall received by UAE.
Second, if ground-based ionization can be used to encourage condensation, a similar process could be used to discourage condensation and prevent the formation of clouds.
One Iranian poster (@AcEpic69, April 15/26) speculated that THAAD radar arrays could be used to disrupt the formation of clouds over Iran. Another poster (@raminrnp, April 22/26) believes that weaponized weather modification against Iran will continue from other bases (Qatar, Bahrain), drones, HAARP emitters in the northern hemisphere, and more.
In this fourth section we have left the scientific literature and headed on to twitter. The evidentiary standard is lowered. Correlation is not causation. But the radars are destroyed, the UAE’s cloud seeding program is disrupted, and it’s raining in Iran again.
After the Cossack Coup, a power struggle between rivals leads to Reza Khan rising to the top. He defangs an American financial mission, jails and executes his rivals, plunders the tribes, makes a personal bank, and becomes not only Shah, but in Gholi Majd’s words, “the largest private landowner… in all likelihood in the recorded history of mankind.” Britain’s sponsorship of his rise, and Britain’s sponsorship of his fall in 1941, ends our study of Interwar Iran.
The 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement made every Persian government that followed unviable. Britain wanted Iran to be a colony, but couldn’t find a viable collaborator in the Qajjar Shahs or the Majlis. So, in 1921, they used one of their favorite moves: they organized a coup to overthrow a government they had installed and supported. The coup was run by the only viable military force in available: the Cossacks. And one Cossack commander in particular rose to prominence in the process: Reza Khan, who in a few years will change his name to something more familiar…
The war began with the US assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader and murdering 168 schoolgirls in class.
Assassinations and attacks on schoolchildren are now a normal part of the way the US and Israel act in the world. Still, it was jarring to see online that in places like Toronto and Beverly Hills, people celebrated these murders. Even in North America, which is full of diasporas who call for the overthrow of the countries from which they came, seeing – from non-Israelis – celebrations of genocidal bombing is rare, surprising – even baffling. After all, when Israeli Jews celebrate deaths, they’re celebrating the deaths of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians – never other Jewish people.
What explains these dancing monarchists? Why no solidarity for their fellow people back home?
Hasan expresses bafflement at people dancing while Iran is being bombed
There is only one answer: those dancing see themselves as racially distinct from the people being bombed. They have no more solidarity with the bombing victims in Iran than Israeli Jews have for Palestinians. How is that accomplished? The same as it is with Zionists: over generations, through school textbooks and media saturation. It turns out these dance moves have their roots in an unexpected place: dusty academic texts from a century and a half ago.
As one racist president of the Eugenics Society, JM Keynes, put it memorably a century ago: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
To whose academic tune are these monarchists dancing? The melody of Aryan race theory, of course. Orientalist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, first coined the Aryan term. Around 1786, Jones wrote about these Aryans (1).
“… we Europeans, together with the Persians and the Hindoos, however wide may be the apparent and superficial differences between us, are, nevertheless, members of a close and common brotherhood in the great families of nations. First westward and northward, afterwards east- ward and southward, the Aryans extended…”
Jones’s contemporary, Freidrich von Schlegel in Germany, took this up, putting Germany and the Indo-Iranians together in the Aryan race in 1819: “everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin”, he said. To Schlegel, who coined the word ‘Aryan’ from Greek and Sanskrit words, it was the Aryan race who brought civilization to India, Egypt, and Europe (2).
From the beginning, these European racial anthropologists were as anti-Arab as they were pro-Aryan. French orientalist Ernest Renan (3) wrote in 1852:
“Imprisoned as all Semitic people are in the narrow circle of lyricism and prophetism, the inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula never had the slightest idea of what can be called science or rationalism. It is when the Persian spirit, represented by the Abbasid dynasty, vanquished the Arab spirit, that Greek philosophy penetrated Islam. Although subjugated by a Semitic religion, Persia always maintained its rights as an Indo-European nation.”
Renan believed that Arabs and Aryans were “perfectly distinct… two different species having nothing in common in the manner of thinking and feeling.”
Racism is an academic theory with many filthy contributors but one of its main founding fathers must be Arthur de Gobineau. The author of the 1855 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races taught that race was the motor of history, that all good things came from the pure white race, and that purity of race and blood were the key to everything. Gobineau wrote that Aryans were pure and unadulterated, that Jews were the chosen race and superior to all others, and that Arabs, Africans, and Asians were degenerate races. (4) As Iranian-Canadian academic Alireza Asgharzadeh describes Gobineau (5):
“Seeing racial crossbreeding as central to the decay of civilizations, Gobineau argued that civilizations mixing with peoples incapable of civilizing will be ruined eventually. In his view, “the blood” was the source of all human ability, power, intelligence, creativity, imagination, and resourcefulness. These qualities were passed on through blood from one individual to the next, and from one racial generation to another. If a race’s blood was contaminated, then the entire race and its civilization would be contaminated. Gobineau insisted that different races were innately unequal in talent, worth, and ability, and only the “white Aryan races” were capable of creating culture and civilization. The non-Aryans and “darker races” could not produce higher forms of culture and civilization; they could only borrow from the white races.”
In Gobineau’s own blood-quantum words (6):
“The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or if intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quality of white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried with it its natural advantages, and often merely increased the confusion already existing in the racial elements.”
Gobineau’s 1855 book arrived in time to inspire a Persian-flavored version of Aryan race theory from playwright Fath’ali Akhundzadeh (7). In his 1860 book, the Maktubat, Akhundzadeh argued that the Arabs are to blame for everything. He quotes a medieval-era play, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: “From drinking camel milk and eating lizard / The Arab’s fortune has reached the point / That he wishes for the Persian crown.”
Akhundzadeh mocked the Islamic tradition of charity, arguing that Persians should not “bear expenses of 100 or 200 tomans to go to Hajj and feed hungry Arabs.”
He mocked the foundational Shia story of martyrdom, summarizing it as: “a thousand and two hundred and something years before, ten or fifteen Arabs killed ten or fifteen other Arabs in the Kufa desert [allusion to the yearly Shi‘ite commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, who was murdered in Karbala and not Kufa].”
Akhundzadeh’s most virulent hatred was always for Arabs: “The Arab tribe is unique among the tribes of the world in its capacity to weave lies and create tales, and the people of Iran are unmatched in their propensity to believe lies and tales.”
Akhundzadeh’s protege, Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (d. 1896) built on that rotten foundation, with two books written in the 1890s, Seh makhtub and Sad khatabeh. Kermani “calls Arabs “bare-arse, savage, hungry, vagabonds.” He goes on:
“I spit on them . . . naked bandits, homeless rat-eaters . . . vilest humans, most vicious beasts . . . camel-riding thieves, black and yellow scrawny lot, animal-like and even worse than animals.”
Kermani also “affirms that “the philosophers of Europe write that we have never seen two nations more antagonistic and opposed to each other in character than [Aryan] Iranians and [Semitic] Arabs.”
His dehumanization of Arabs is so excessive that he even implies that they may deserve no less than extermination.
“If it was not for the ruthless ulama of Iran,” he warns, and their relentless praising of the Arabs, Iranians would have taken revenge over their ancestors’ blood, and they would not have spared “one single tribe of the barbarian Arabs on the face of the earth.””
Everything was fine for Aryan race theory until the 20th century, when British and German racists realized they didn’t actually want to be in the same race as Indians and Persians. So the British changed their theory, and the poor Indo-Iranian racists were left behind. As Asgharzadeh puts it (pg. 92): “This was a major blow, particularly to the overexcited Aryanist elements in places such as Iran and India who were preparing their own versions of Nazism, based on the presupposition that they were biologically related to the same “superior race” as Hitler’s Aryan race.”
In Asgharzadeh’s summary (pg. 102):
“All this discursive/ideological confusion, disharmony, and Aryanist mumbo jumbo means that notions such as the Aryan myth, the superior Aryan race, pure blood, and superior civilization were nothing more than powerful ideological/discursive tools to facilitate the desire and aspirations of certain groups for power and domination.”
Academics need infrastructure – ideally state power – to get their ideas across, from journals to university students and teachers, to textbooks and children’s education (and now, Western-sponsored Persian language satellite television, Western-run Persian language social media…) The ideas found an eager patron in Reza Shah Pahlavi, a Cossack officer who’d come to power in a coup in 1921, and the German Nazis (8) sponsored a number of journals in the 1930s to disseminate Aryan race theory. Iran-e Bastan, Iranshahr, Mehr-e Iran, Partow e-Iran, Anahita, Takht-e Jamshid, were the top journals in Iran’s literary scene. Asgharzadeh (pg. 111):
“The Nazi propaganda machine advocated the (supposedly) common Aryan ancestry of “the two Nations.” In order to further cultivate racist tendencies, in 1936, the Reich Cabinet issued a special decree exempting Iranians from the restrictions of the Nuremberg Racial Laws on the grounds that they were “pure-blooded Aryans” (Lenczowski, 1944, p. 160). In 1939, the Nazis provided Persians with what they called a German Scientific Library. The library contained over 7,500 books carefully selected “to convince Iranian readers . . . of the kinship between the National Socialist Reich and the ‘Aryan culture’ of Iran” (Lenczowski, 1944, p. 161). In various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, parallels were drawn among Reza Shah, Hitler, and Mussolini to emphasize the charismatic resemblances among these leaders (Rezun, 1982, p. 29).”
Without reviewing what’s happened in the literature from the 1950s-1979, you get the idea (see my two sources, Asgharzadeh and Ebrahimi, for that history). Suffice it to say that the monarchists are the intellectual progeny of this body of work. As surely as Zionism flowed from the pens of Herzl and Jabotinsky, the Iranian monarchists Aryanism flows from the pens of Gobineau, Akhundzadeh, and Kermani. The interlocutors, the explainers, the informants for the US/Israel adventure currently upending the world order, are readers of this work and its derivatives. They see the world divided into races, they see themselves as Aryans, and they see the Iranians in Iran as impure, adulterated by Arabs.
Iran meanwhile has moved on, with a state and society that are the product of a revolution that occurred in 1979, sending their children to win medals in things like math olympiads and wrestling. The 1979 revolution affirmed everything despised by the Aryan race intellectuals: Shia Islam, justice for oppressed Arabs in Palestine, confrontation with the European masters.
Steeped in these readings and ideas, the monarchists dancing to celebrate the deaths of 168 schoolgirls and an 86-year old religious leader see themselves as purer, superior beings to those killed.
But there are no chosen peoples or superior races. Just like their Zionist masters, it turns out the people who believe they are Aryans are mere mortals like the rest of us.
Notes
Alireza Ashgharzadeh. Iran and the Challenge of Diversity: Islamic Fundamentalism, Aryanist Racism, and Democratic Struggles. Pg. 85. Cites Farrar 1878 (Farrar, 1878, pp. 306–307) citing William Jones.
Asgharzadeh: “In a book titled Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808/1849), Schlegel asserted that the Sanskrit-speaking Aryan race had brought civilization to India, Egypt, and Europe from their Himalaya homeland. In 1819, Schlegel used the term Aryan to identify this discursively emerging Indo-European race who had presumably brought culture and civilization to the world. The term Aryan had been derived from Herodotus’s Arioi and Sanskrit’s Ariya. He associated the root Ari with Ehre, the German word for honor and gave a new dimension to the rising importance of language by connecting it to racial and national issues.”
Renan, quoted in Reza Zia Ebrahimi’s 2016 book, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation.
Quoted in Ebrahimi pg. 114.
Asgharzadeh pg. 69
Gobineau, 1915/1967, pp. 209–210 quoted in Asgharzadeh
Akhundzadeh and Kermani are the main subjects of Ebrahimi’s book. All quotes from these two over the next paragraphs are from Ebrahimi.
Asgharzadeh: “As early as 1933, the Nazis began to publish a racist journal titled Iran-e Bastan [The Ancient Iran]. The journal was financed by Siemens-Schuk-kert, and Major von Viban of the Political Department of the NADFA in Berlin handled the editorial issues. A pro-Nazi Iranian intellectual named Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Seif worked as coeditor of the journal (Blucher, 1949, p. 137)… “Iran-e Bastan played a very important role in advocating Persian racism among the Iranian elite and intellectuals. It provided a starting point for Persian nationalists to launch their chauvinistic attack on whoever they did not see as Aryan. Following the Nazi journal, all kinds of chauvinistic magazines, journals, and newspapers such as Iranshahr, Mehr-e Iran [The Love of Iran], Partow-e Iran [The Light of Iran], Anahita, Takht-e Jamshid [The Seat of Jamshid, imaginary Ancient Persian King] dominated the Persian literary scene. All these publications highlighted the past and the pre-Islamic glories of the Persian nation and blamed the supposedly “savage Arabs and Turks” for the backwardness of Iran.” (pg. 11).
Iran’s Constitutional Revolution was in 1905, but the British are there and bent on colonizing it. The struggles of the last of the Qajjar Shahs, the British occupation during WWI, and the British imposition of the hated Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919, which no Iranian government can survive…
During the first few rounds of Chomsky Epstein revelations – indeed even before – I’d been seeing, from leftists on social media, various versions of the meme that Parenti was the real leftist and Chomsky, mere controlled opposition.
As the revelations rolled out, many said that they knew it all along, that they had long resented Chomsky’s anarchist / libertarian politics, the things that he said against the Bolshevik Revolution and the USSR, against “conspiracy theories”, against BDS and the right of return, in favor of the “two-state” dead end.
But Parenti wasn’t my pathway to activism. Chomsky was. I didn’t know it all along.
Discovering Chomsky
I grew up reading the Canadian daily newspaper my dad subscribed to, The Globe and Mail, every morning, for as long as I can remember, in disgust without knowing why. As a teenager, I stumbled on Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire in my public library; Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in a shopping mall bookstore. I wrote a high school history essay about Mao Zedong. I read about the life and death struggles of the revolutionaries of the past. But these people were literally leading warriors into battle. I couldn’t see a way to emulate them in my own life. About a year later I found Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy in a university library. Even after reading about revolutionaries, there was something new in that experience. It felt like the mainstream media that had been playing in the background my whole life had encased my mind in glass and Chomsky’s writing shattered the glass. I didn’t know it was possible to write like that, in that style, without the reverence and deference for American power that was an invisible part of every word and image on cable TV and newspapers at the time. I tracked down all the books I could find by Chomsky: Turning the Tide, Year 501, Culture of Terrorism, World Orders, Old and New, Towards a New Cold War, American Power and the New Mandarins. I got into Fateful Triangle and co-authored books like Manufacturing Consent and The Political Economy of Human Rights, later.
It’s only recently that I’ve been hearing people who say that Chomsky never said or did anything special. This is not my experience. To me, there was a lot he did that was special, and I’ll try to get specific about that below. But it wasn’t just what he said and how he went about the writing, but the fact that I could actually imagine trying to do what he did – not leading a guerrilla movement or a satyagraha, but working in science and then trying to make a political contribution through writing. I saw it, and I did it: I’d always liked science and been interested in history and politics and writing, and seeing that Chomsky had done it, I thought I could try to do both.
Searching for Chomsky’s name, I found ZNet on the 1990s internet. I joined their online forum community, volunteered for their website, started my political writing journey there, attended their summer school, taught at their summer school, and became friends with people who were also major political and intellectual influences on me. This became my main political engagement for more than a decade and a half. It’s hard for me to express how proud I was to be associated with Z and with Chomsky specifically. It’s difficult to put into words how much of Noam’s ideas, methods of working, teaching style, and even interpersonal and activist approaches I consciously tried to absorb. If there was such a thing as a “Chomskyite”, I was one. Maybe I still am.
An elite defector
I never had the delusion I would reach either the scientific heights or political influence that Noam did. Everyone’s capacities are different, we were from different eras, and we started in different places. These are realities of class society. In my life I’ve met people who started with fewer privileges than I have had who couldn’t get a break: getting a ride somewhere or transit fare, fixing a broken computer or getting a form printed became huge challenges. I’ve also known people for whom everything works out, who could easily do things that would never occur to me as being possible or feasible.
This is a fundamental thing I don’t think people understand about Chomsky: He’s a member of the elite who became a dissident. He was always going to have a high academic and public profile. He published his writing in elite journals. When he talks about even the most genocidal US policies with total disgust, he uses the first person “we” to describe the US – “we bombed”, “we overthrew”, “we slaughtered”. Back in 1967, when he was a decade younger than I am now, he was on a panel with Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag – on the stage with the most prominent intellectuals of the time. Coming from where he comes from, there is something of the magician that betrays his illusionist profession to reveal how the tricks work backstage. He focuses his criticism on US imperial intellectuals, because he knows (and hates) how they think. Not, again, something that others who are not of his background could emulate.
Chomsky has argued – I took his word for it then and I disagree with him now – that US elite culture didn’t really support Israel until after the 1967 war. In his words, he was “driven out of the mainstream” over the Palestine Question around 1970, after – according to his analysis – the post-1967 consolidation of Zionism in the US. By then he was already so prominent that his being “driven out of the mainstream” helped to generate an alternative media ecosystem, with Z Magazine’s growth in the 1990s being due in significant part to the fact that they were publishing Chomsky. And not only Z.
Chomsky’s enormous standing in the US intellectual class and in the Jewish community meant that when he took up opposition to Israel, it had the effect of giving the rest of us some kind of permission to do the same. Thanks to decades of struggle by Palestinian activists, the Palestine movement has reached the maturity to follow Palestinian voices. But in the early 2000s, those of us “Palestine people” who were neither Palestinian nor Jewish, found ourselves looking to Jewish voices like Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, and others, to quote [1]. When I went to occupied Palestine in 2002 with the International Solidarity Movement, it was after reading an article by Chomsky’s student Tanya Reinhart called, simply, “Stop Israel!” Thankfully, the movement is finally moving beyond the need for this and recognizing this as an issue for all humanity – for all of us Basel al Araj called “Palestinian in the broad sense” [2]. But in those years, Chomsky had a role in creating that space, at least around here. His punishment for breaking this taboo was being “driven out of the mainstream”.
The US establishment may have regretted driving Noam from the mainstream. Many decades later, they absorbed him back in.
Demystification
No one can decide where they come from nor the talents they’re born with. There’s nothing wrong with being from an elite family, especially if you become a dissident. Or a revolutionary – wasn’t Castro from a big family? Nor is that something that can be learned, or emulated. What then, are the elements of the “Chomskyism” that I am lamenting?
Reading Chomsky’s books, you’ll come across phrases like, “as any six year old would know”, “a three year old could understand”. These kinds of statements are popular in the natural sciences, when trying to distinguish between easier and harder concepts. Chomsky’s agenda was to demystify social and political affairs. He didn’t want ordinary people to be intimidated by academics or elites who claimed to rule because they were so much smarter. No, Chomsky always argued, these were things anybody could learn and do, and you didn’t need complex social theories. His scientific ideas, which I know only a little bit about, were also along these lines – that human capacities like language were the endowment of everyone.
First Principles
Another famous phrase of Chomsky’s is the “elementary moral truism”, which was that “we should judge ourselves” (“we” meaning the US) “by the same standards we judge our official enemies.” Chomsky also repeatedly referred to the “elementary moral principle” that it’s only moral to focus on things one can affect – hence, people of the US ought to focus on US crimes, which they are supposed to have responsibility for, and not the crimes of enemies, which, however awful they may be, are not your responsibility any more than lamenting the crimes of Genghis Khan is your responsibility. In 2026, it is pretty clear that ordinary people in the US have much less ability to affect foreign policy than is implied in this principle and that the crimes committed by the genocidal, pedophilic Epstein class might as well be being committed by foreign occupiers or aliens since ordinary people have zero ability to influence them. Nonetheless, Lenin also held something like this idea [3] in the lead up to WWI, arguing that instead of joining their respective ruling classes in going to war against other workers, socialists ought to take the battle to their own national ruling classes.
Like building a mathematical system, Chomsky wanted to present a small number of “elementary moral truisms” which reveal the injustice and immorality of US foreign policy. Demystifying elites is a good thing to do. Teaching that understanding politics is within the grasp of anyone is also a good thing to do. It’s possible to overdo it – if you tell a student that something they are struggling with is actually simple, it might be empowering, but it might also be disempowering. Chomsky also overreached when he claimed that Marx’s political economy was overcomplicated by a class of Marxist intellectuals. As Chomsky knew, some elements of political economy are complicated and take long and difficult study to understand. It isn’t always mystification.
Using their sources
Another “Chomskyism” is to use establishment sources to refute establishment propaganda. The most devastating critiques are delivered by quoting US and Israeli officials themselves. This was a powerful technique worth using, but it can be overused and devalue local sources and people on the ground.
The Analogical Method
In his tribute to Noam for his 95th birthday, Z Magazine publisher, 1960s antiwar activist, and former MIT student of Noam’s Michael Albert described what he thought admirable and remarkable about Noam. In terms of his work and teaching style, Chomsky was remarkable for giving time to everyone who approached him with a sincere question, answering emails all day, every day. He especially supported activists and activist groups. Michael also talks about how, in addition to reading fast and a lot and remembering a large amount of what he reads (qualities that others have, if perhaps to a lesser extent), Chomsky has a skill with employing analogies:
“He would switch from talking about the U.S. in Vietnam (then obscured by emotional preconceptions and prejudices that the U.S. could do no wrong) to the role of Russia in Eastern Europe (where an American could see invasion and imperialism more clearly). He would switch from discussing the possibility of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (which deeply-held axiomatic U.S. beliefs biased against recognizing since the U.S.was never the bad invader) to the possibility of Iran invading Afghanistan (easier to conceive for someone from the U.S.). He would switch from assessing the criminality of the U.S. punishing Afghanistan’s whole population for their country housing terrorists who attacked the U.S. (confused, after all, how could we be criminal) to Britain (if it had done so) punishing the U.S. for housing and financing IRA acts in Britain (easy to analyze since of course anyone else can be criminal). Or he would compare the media emphasizing 9/11 as terrorism but not seeing the U.S. embargo of Iraq as chemical and biological warfare waged on civilians. He would move from discussing U.S. media dynamics to discussing old Soviet media dynamics, or from discussing U.S. foreign policy to discussing the behavior of Mafia dons, and so on. The analogies would bypass confounding biases to reveal core features and then he would switch back to see them in more difficult to accept circumstances like scientists with thought experiments more generally.”
This, one of the trademark “Chomskyisms”, was certainly useful for breaking through propagandized thinking. Chomsky would use American hatred for Russia or Iran to stump audiences as to why they don’t have that same energy when the US is committing crimes. He compared the silence on the US-sponsored Indonesian massacres in East Timor with the wall-to-wall coverage of Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia. For people who didn’t like him, these analogies were the ammunition to insinuate he was an apologist for the Khmer Rouge, or for tankies, to say he hated the USSR. I believe he did sincerely oppose the USSR and in his reading of history, the Bolsheviks prevented a libertarian socialist or anarchist revolution from happening (a reading of history I don’t share, and for which Parenti’s reading in Blackshirts and Reds etc. is much better) but the point of these analogies was much more tactical and pedagogical: it was always to show that if, as you’ve been taught, you hate these actions by official enemies, you should hate these actions by the US (which he would say, “crimes that we are committing”) that much more.
Even though my first exposure to this analogical method was Chomsky, I learned later that Marx used it a century before when critiquing the British Empire’s second opium war. The British used as a pretext that the Chinese attacked their fleet as it headed to the capital where the British Ambassador wished to set up. In an 1857 article in the New York Daily, Marx asked: “Does the right of the French Embassador to reside at London, involve the right of forcing the river Thames at the head of an armed French expedition?”
The Chronological Method
Another key element of Chomsky’s method was the fact that he read the New York Times every day for many decades and was able to hold details, quotes, and historical events. He also freely read primary sources, classic texts, and archives, without any intermediation. Simply by holding on to the chronology, Chomsky was able to debate propagandized people even when they claimed to have life experience. The link is dead now, but one of the most memorable moments for me was a lecture he gave at MIT that I watched on video in 2000 (“The Current Crises in the Middle East: What Can We Do?” MIT. December 14, 2000). An angry Israeli settler in the audience told him she’d suffered under shelling from Lebanon during certain years in the 1970s. Chomsky told her there was no shelling in the relevant years and she’d been raised to believe something that wasn’t true – directly refuting someone’s claimed “lived experience”. When some new round of Israeli atrocities would happen in Palestine and Israel would claim they were retaliating, Chomsky would always show up with a chronology of the many Israeli atrocities that had preceded the current one. The lesson for me was that there is tremendous value in simply knowing what happened when.
It turns out, again, that this power was also exercised a hundred years before by Marx. During the so-called “Indian Mutiny”, Marx wrote extremely detailed military reports for newspapers and refuted British propagandists by showing they were nowhere near the atrocities they claimed to have witnessed.
Limitations
Because Chomsky did indeed read a great deal and write at least a bit about every place where the US committed crimes (which means everywhere in the world), it’s easy to miss the fact that he did, actually, specialize in a few places and times: The later stages of the Vietnam war. The Central American wars of the 1970s-1980s. Iraq from the first Gulf War onward. Israel/Palestine especially from the 1970s to the late 2000s. Even when talking about other situations, these would be the main examples he would reach for. His book Year 501, published in 1993, spends most pages on the second half of the 20th century. For the most part, when Chomsky uses history, it starts in WW2. People who liked Chomsky or disliked him may not have realized these limitations.
With Israel/Palestine in particular, not really looking at the early Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration, the so-called Arab Revolt, and the Nakba, but starting history in 1967, leads to massive distortions. The limited window misses how the Zionists, mostly from Germany and Russia, worked with the British Empire before they went over to the US. Chomsky argued firmly that the US was in charge and Israel subordinate, and the Israel Lobby irrelevant. It’s probably time to revisit all of these views.
Too many interviews
Another limitation: Famous for answering every email, accepting every invitation, and taking every interview, Chomsky probably took too many interviews (we could call Chomsky of the interviews, Chomsky-I). Most of the “gotchas” people have about Chomsky, most of the “I knew it all alongs”, are things Chomsky said in interviews. No matter how good you are in interviews, a claim in a piece of writing that you sat and composed and edited will be of a higher standard (this includes lectures you wrote up beforehand). One writer I met because of Chomsky and Z once said something like “we’re never any better than what we write”.
Chomsky did start slowing down in the late 2000s. I think the last single-authored book that Chomsky wrote – as opposed to collections of articles or interviews – was Failed States, in 2006. I had often written to him – mostly through the Z boards but sometimes through email. I mostly stopped writing to ask him questions, not wanting to add to the burdens of someone in their 80s, whose wife had died in 2008. I can’t understand or relate to people who tried to co-author books with him when he was in his 80s and 90s.
After all, I’d read his books. I should be able to figure out what he would think of a new situation without asking – and I should definitely be able to figure out what I think.
As I became more of a “tankie”, I thought, if Noam were younger, and in these times, he’d probably be one too.
The Consent of the Governed
Chomsky’s theory of politics, explicitly stated throughout his writing, is that all elites, even the most violent, must depend to some extent on the consent of the governed. This theory is why Chomsky’s political work was so focused on attacking propaganda – for it is through propaganda, not solely force, that consent is won.
Gandhi said something similar in his time. How could hundreds of thousands of British rule hundreds of millions of Indians, he asked? Only with the cooperation of Indians themselves. Hence, for Gandhi, and for Chomsky, social struggle was about organizing the withdrawal of consent. When Chomsky himself participated in militancy, it fit this theory – organizing tax resistance against the Vietnam War. Whether seeking reform or revolution, the role of the activist was to threaten or actualize the withdrawal of consent until elites gave up what the people wanted.
It’s a compelling theory and I truly thought it was how the world worked. Chomsky counterposed (again more or less explicitly) the theory of withdrawal of the consent of the governed against what he called “Leninism”, the organization of the working class to overthrow the capitalist (bourgeoisie) through unions, the Party, and ultimately armed struggle. The theory of withdrawal of consent was also counterposed against the idea of national states using armed force to defend their sovereignty (which I think Chomsky understood to be a necessary evil).
In this sense, even if he is on record saying he was not a strict pacifist, the author of an essay praising “The Revolutionary Pacifism of AJ Muste” could be understood to be a proponent of nonviolence theory.
For my part, I have come to the conclusion that most nonviolence theory and ideology is ultimately aimed at the Palestine question and specifically at the delegitimation of Palestinian armed resistance to genocide. I have also come to the conclusion that the Palestinian experience, and specifically the 2018 Great March of Return, are as close to a controlled experiment as exists in human affairs, proving scientifically that nonviolence theory is false.
Through the genocide, the response to the encampments, and the Epstein revelations, Western elites have been open that they don’t give a shit about the consent of the governed. We are cattle to them.
I don’t want to convince or wring reforms from these genocidal pedophiles through the threat of non cooperation. I want them gone. I will be discarding this tenet of “Chomskyism”.
Chomsky-B and Chomsky-E
The Chomsky of the books (let’s call him Chomsky-B) was gone before Chomsky befriended Epstein (let’s call the post-Epstein version Chomsky-E).
From Chomsky-B, I will keep the first principles, demystification of intellectuals, the use of establishment sources for critique, the scientific outlook, the analogical method, and the chronological method. I will discard the theory of the consent of the governed and the nonviolence theory.
Chomsky-E is someone I don’t recognize, someone I never knew.
At the end of Robert Barsky’s 1997 biography, Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent, the biographer describes Chomsky in 1990 at a bar in Scotland after giving a talk to activists and unionists. There were 330 who attended the talk, and Chomsky wrote about them that many were “unemployed working class, activists of one or another sort, those considered to be ‘riff raff’, the kind of people that I like and take seriously.”
What a contrast to flying the private jet with Epstein, the photo with Epstein’s butler in Paris, the Manhattan hotel, the “lovely apartment” in New York, “fantasizing” about the Caribbean island, chatting with Ehud Barak, dinner with Woody Allen, “a great artist”. Michael Albert described Chomsky as honest to a fault, which was also my sense of Chomsky-B. What a contrast with telling journalists that his association with Epstein was “None of your business. Or anyone’s.”
Even with a sharp mind, Chomsky needed to retire, and he did. He should have retired sooner. He retired back into the elite from which he emerged, and that elite turned out to be even more vile than any of us believed.
Notes
1- One evening around 2006 or 2007 a Palestinian academic and I were giving a talk in a small room at an Ontario university. During Q/A, a member of the mostly Arab audience asked us why we hadn’t also included a Jewish speaker on our panel. This wasn’t unusual.
2- Even though the Palestine movement has plenty of quarrels with Chomsky, over BDS, the one-state solution, and the right of return, the fact that Israel/Palestine was a central focus of Chomsky’s meant that most of us found ourselves relating to and reacting to Noam more than Parenti – whose politics on the issue were good, as far as I know, but for whom it was simply not as much of a focus.
3 – With important differences since for Lenin, “we” was always socialists, whereas for Chomsky “we” was the US itself.
Before a military analysis of the demonstrations of January 1-15, let’s look at Iran’s economic problem and the origin of the December 28 demonstrations.
Iran faces a unique set of problems. Surrounded by US military bases, facing both the US and Israel that have stated that they want not solely its surrender but its destruction and partition, its scientists and military personnel facing assassination wherever they go in the world, its economy under one of the most severe sanctions regimes in the world with its oil and ships periodically stolen on the high seas. All the same, the people still need jobs and incomes and development.
Some Iran watchers fantasize that if Iran could convince Israel and the US of its peaceful intentions, that the West would lift the sanctions and Iran could have a normal economic life. Iranian American Virginia Tech professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani expressed such a fantasy in a January 9 article, “The Economic Roots of Iran’s Protests”. The economist concludes: “Iran’s government cannot credibly promise to stabilize exchange rates or tame inflation any time soon. The one move that could offer relatively quick economic relief – and to which the government could credibly commit – is a cessation of hostilities with Israel and the US.” Leaving aside the moral bankruptcy of normalizing with genocidal Israel as a means of sanctions relief, the absurdity of thinking that a unilateral cessation of hostilities from the Iranian side would be met with anything but increased violence from the US and Israel should be apparent to anyone that has been awake for any amount of time in the past several decades (never mind since 2023). Salehi-Isfahani’s prescriptions – predictably for a mainstream US-based economist – are for “free-market” remedies: basically, letting the Iranian currency float. Like all neoliberal cures, this remedy would be fatal for the patient (which could be why the US prescribes it to its enemies). Netherlands-based economist Kayhan Valadbaygi argues that Iran has built a “welfare-warfare state”, but the problem is that it has done so “without a firm economic basis to maintain it.”
Many Iranian policy makers were educated in these US schools of economics and believe that if they can play by Western rules they can get sanctions lifted and enter a free market utopia. But as Nahid Poresa told Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone in an interview on January 22, a more realistic approach would be to accept the sanctions as a permanent fact of life instead of having false hope that they would be lifted, and commit fully to a “look east” economic policy with Russian and Chinese (also sanctioned) partners. To, instead of accepting the de facto dollarization of the Iranian economy, use the local currency to run the national economy and limit foreign exchange through capital controls. Iran already does many of these things: its multiple-exchange rate system is an evolution based on the sanctions situation. Industries have built a certain resilience in spite of – or perhaps because of – the sanctions regime which effectively shielded local industries from exposure to competitors. There is a barter trade with neighbours. There are subsidies for gasoline and bread. The Pezeshkian government’s challenge to these latter policies and the threat to cut some of these subsidies and to unify the exchange rate system – these are what led to the collapse of the currency and to the December 28th protests. Western-based economists looking at Iran argue the exact opposite: that the neoliberal reforms are the one good thing the Iranian government wants to do, and that the heterodox adaptations that have enabled people to survive the sanctions are deviations from orthodoxy that need to be removed. Like Israel and the US, these economists are trying to kill Iran.
Why would Iranian economic and political leaders go along with this? Financialization is the fashion and Iran’s banking system is growing more complex with a greater role for private banking and therefore opportunities for truly magical profits, as one Tasnim article from November argues (I read an auto-translation). A harsher assessment is provided by sociologist Yousef Abazari, who laments the naivete of Iran’s economic policy makers who don’t understand that economics isn’t science, that there are very different schools of thought in the field, and that the economics “experts” at the helm of Iran’s economy have the same fatal prescriptions that the Americans want – austerity, misery and oligarchy. Abazari asks sardonically, what’s the point of resisting America if Iran implements the same economic policies on its people? Iran has been attacked by many Western weapons, but among the worst weapons seems to be giving a Western economics education to many of Iran’s leaders.
Still, the most orthodox free-marketeers will turn to things like rationing, planning, barter, and capital controls as a matter of survival. Iran’s policies of solidarity with others in similar situations like Venezuela expose people to a diversity of methods for dealing with economic warfare. What most free-market oriented Iranian officials and Western Iran watchers agree on is that neoliberal austerity is the right direction, which is why it doesn’t come up as a subject of debate. It is the wrong direction.
Iran also needs a tech stack like China has to replace Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. so that people aren’t using US tech companies obsessed with their overthrow and assassination to communicate with one another. Iran has several allies that aren’t bent on its destruction and is full of educated scientists and engineers who make things work and can take the reins away from the Chicago boys. Iran could get out of this one yet.
The economic and university protests
On December 28, facing the end of the multiple exchange-rate system that immediately tanked the value of the local currency, economically motivated protests began against the loss of their purchasing power and a proposed austerity budget. There were more protests the following day and on December 30th, including at universities, where students also protested for their right to protest.
The Iranian president and other officials stated that they would change some of the proposed policies and look at better solutions to the economic problems.
That is the end of the economics discussion and of the economics protest. Beginning January 1, the nature of the protests changed.
January 1-15: A review of NYT and WaPo coverage
I reviewed the main news articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post on the protests from December 30 through to January 15. I was looking in particular at events described and the sourcing of the claims. NYT and WaPo are outlets that are against the Iranian government and in favor of US and Israeli policy towards Iran (regime change, destruction of the state, partition, etc.) I also reviewed all of the videos and comments posted by the pro-Iran aggregator @AryJeay on twitter, “Fotros Resistance” on telegram. I took screenshots of each important video and saved important text from the articles as a slight hedge against the impermanence of the internet.
There is little different between NYT and WaPo coverage in terms of politics, depth, or sourcing. None seem to have reporters present in Iran and bylines are from Beirut, Istanbul, or Jerusalem. Sourcing is often to “according to videos posted on social media”, which is a cheap way of covering world events. Both NYT and WaPo also quoted (if somewhat mockingly) Iranian news outlets such as Tasnim and Fars. There are also interviews with pseudonymous people who tell their ordinary stories of what they’ve seen, with last names not provided. Finally, for the all-important casualty numbers, US- and German-based human rights organizations are cited. The most frequently cited is HRANA, the Human Rights Activists News Agency. Alan MacLeod of MintPress news reported that the Fairfax, Virginia based organization received $900,000 in funding from the United States’s National Endowment for Democracy in 2024 alone. Also frequently cited is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (ABCHRI), also funded by NED, and the Center for Human Rights in Iran, also funded by NED.
On January 1, the NYT cited “footage circulating on social media” to describe protesters pulling a gate open in Fasa, chanting “death to the dictator” in Hamedan, closing their stores in Tehran chanting “don’t be afraid, we’re all together”. NYT supplemented their “videos showed” with an interview with “Yaser”, who saw protesting shopkeepers first hand at a bazaar in Tehran. On January 2, NYT stated that a 21-year old Basij militia member had been killed – the first casualty, on the government side, which the NYT sourced to Iranian government news agency Tasnim. On January 3, the NYT led with Trump’s Truth Social post: “If Iran violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” NYT also cited Israel’s minister of innovation, Gila Gamliel, who posted to X, “Israel is with you, and we support you in every way possible.”
On January 4-5, coverage was dominated by the US raid on Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and first lady.
On January 6, the NYT reported that things had calmed down, and was reproducing Iranian news outlets describing the organization and violence of the protests of the previous day, mentioning “videos on social media” showing protesters firing assault rifles into the air while chanting “Death to Khamenei”. “But in Tehran, with the exception of the bazaar downtown, the university campus, and a few working-class neighborhoods, the city seemed normal, residents said in interviews and videos on social media suggested. Ski resorts north of Tehran were packed with affluent day trippers.”
But Reza Pahlavi made a call and an op-ed on January 6, calling people to overthrow the regime and calling on the US to intervene.
The peak days of the campaign were January 8 and 9, covered in the NYT on the 9th and 10th. On the 9th, the NYT was estimating 27-36 had been killed up to the 8th; also, citing NetBlocks, NYT noted that the internet in Iran had been shut down on the 8th. Notably, NYT cites no organization, no manifesto, no political demands, no slogans, no placards. Here is their description of the protests on the January 8th:
In telephone interviews, more than a dozen witnesses said that they saw large crowds forming on Thursday night in neighborhoods across Tehran, the capital, and in cities around Iran, including Mashhad, Bushehr, Shiraz and Isfahan. They said the crowds were diverse, with men and women, young and old. The people interviewed inside Iran asked that their names not be published out of fear of retribution.
One resident of Tehran said that the crowds were chanting, ‘’Death to Khamenei,’‘ referring to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and ‘’freedom, freedom.’‘ The chants could be heard from several blocks away in the affluent neighborhood of Shahrak Gharb in Tehran, which had until now sat out the protests.
Videos filmed on Thursday night showed government buildings on fire across the country, including in Tehran, as protests grew. While the protests were mostly peaceful early in the evening, violence broke out later in the night in Tehran, with demonstrators setting fire to cars, buildings and items in the street. A video verified by The New York Times shows fires in the streets of Kaj Square in the capital, with thousands of protesters flooding the area.
In Karaj, a suburb west of Tehran, a video verified by The Times showed protesters fleeing after gunshots were fired, though it is unclear from the videos whether it was security forces firing.
On January 10, citing HRANA and others, NYT said deaths were in the “dozens” (up to January 9th).
After January 11, NYT depends increasingly on “Videos shared” as their primary source. On the 11th, notably, the highest estimate printed for numbers killed was 65 protesters. The Washington Post ran an op-ed by Reza Pahlavi stating that he was ready for a transition.
As the protests died down, the casualty numbers leapt. On January 12, WaPo cited a HRANA figure of 490 protesters killed. They backed this up with “A senior Western official who was briefed on the matter”, who “said hundreds were killed”. The official “spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media” (!) On January 14, WaPo came back with a HRANA figure of 2,000 killed, an anonymous source speaking from the suburbs calling it a “full-on war” but who couldn’t see properly because she “didn’t have my glasses or contact lenses”. On January 15, WaPo came back citing Bari Weiss’s CBS in an editorial by Marc Thiessen, “There is no US downside to striking the Iranian regime”, with new casualty figures of 12,000 and potentially as many as 20,000. Diminutive German-Iranian lobbyist for Reza Pahlavi, Amir Parasta, gave a figure of 30,304. Parasta also tweeted offering Iran’s assets to Turkey, and of course praising Reza Pahlavi.
January 1-15: A review of the videos
In order to fill out their pseudonymous interviews, NYT and WaPo freely cited Iranian news agencies. In the same period, pseudonymous pro-Iran social media account AryJeay / Fotros Resistance aggregated a comprehensive set of videos from Iranian news, cellphones, and CCTV footage. One aggregator, IntelonIran, estimated a peak of 11,000 demonstrators on the streets on the night of January 8, before the internet was shut down. According to this source, 11,000 was the highest number of people on the streets. The economic protests were long ended and the violent riots had been ongoing for a week, so it is safe to assume all 11,000 of these were people working for regime change.
The five ways of attack
Rather than repeat a chronology, I will compile the five different kinds of attacks that appear in these videos. I made a rough map of the locations of the attacks as well.
The Jump. A crowd jumps a single bystander or security, beats him and/or burns his vehicle
January 1, location unspecified, rioters throw rocks at the home and burn the car.
Hamedan, January 1, rioters jump a security guard and beat him down (CCTV).
January 2, location unspecified. Shop owner, Ali Azizi, killed by 6 rioters.
January 2, Qom. Rioter sets a shop on fire.
January 4. Hamedan. Rioters jump a police officer and beat him.
January 5, Isfahan. 2 rioters jump a police officer and beat him with an iron bar. Cellphone footage.
January 7. Colonel Shahin Dehghan, Malard County near Tehran, stabbed to death.
January 7, Kermahshah. Rioters kick a man on the ground with his pants pulled down: this is a standard procedure, pull their pants down and then beat and kick them on the ground.
January 8, location unspecified, rioters jump a man and kick and beat him.
January 8, Ahvaz City. CCTV footage of a group of rioters overpowering an elderly man, beating him, and burning his car.
January 8, Noorabad County, Lorestan. Cellphone footage of rioters destroying a car.
January 9, Gohardasht, Karaj. Group of rioters jump a man and beat him. Cellphone footage.
January 9, Tehran. CCTV footage of armed rioters attacking a police officer.
The attack on first responders. Rioters attack ambulances, fire, buses or emergency response vehicles
January 2, Tehran. Rioters attack an ambulance.
Between January 6-9, rioters burned several Red Crescent centers throughout Iran.
January 9, Mashhad. An Iranian firefighter burned to death.
January 9, Mobarakeh, Isfahan. Photo of a torched fire truck.
January 9: authorities report 15 buses burned on January 8-9, 600 signs and railings, and the Metro stormed in Mashhad.
January 9: authorities report 50 fire trucks nationwide – a fire station in Mashhad, 15 vehicle in Isfahan, 5 in Ahvaz, a fire station in Shiraz, and the Red Crescent Building in Izeh, all attacked over Jan 8-9.
January 10, rioters attack and burn a bus in Isfahan. CCTV footage.
January 10. Rioters burn several buses in Mashhad.
Gun battles. A street gun battle between rioters and law enforcement
Kudasht, December 31. 13 officers injured, 20 armed rioters arrested, 1 police officer burned, one Basiji (22 years old Amir Hesam Khodayari-Fard) killed.
January 3, location unspecified. Cell phone footage of a rioter using a flamethrower against a police motorcycle convoy.
January 5. Yasuj. Armed rioter shoots at bypassers and security.
January 5. Koushk. Armed rioters attack a pro-government march.
January 6. Tehran. Clash between police and rioters in front of Sina hospital. Both sides claim the other threw tear gas on the street.
January 7, Charmahal, Bakhtiari. Close up footage of a masked rioter with a keffiyah covering his face and baseball cap shouting Marg Bar Khamenei and shooting off-frame with a shotgun.
January 8, location unspecified. Shooters ambush a police motorcycle convoy, shooting them as they drive by.
January 8, Kermanshah. Nightvision camera / CCTV captures shooters shooting (but not what they’re shooting).
January 8, Hamedan. Rioters kill a police major, Mohammed Javed Bakshian and 6 civilians. A news item on the aftermath shows destroyed buildings and some CCTV footage of the riots.
January 9, Tabarsi Boulevard, Mashhad. Rioting leads to deaths, including security forces’ Mostafa Abufazeli.
January 9, 8:50pm. Shushtar videos of rifle man and shotgun man, and of a female rioter with a machete.
January 10. Police claim to have killed 1 rioter in a firefight in Mashhad.
January 10. Police claim to have killed 1 and arrested 6 rioters in Ilam.
Attacks on buildings or on people. Rioters shoot or throw Molotov Cocktails at public or private buildings or at security personnel or other people
Arak, December 31 night time, cellphone video.
January 3, Zahedan. Masked rioters loot a grocery store. CCTV footage.
January 6. Abdanan. Protesters loot a supermarket, Ofogh Kourosh, dump all the rice in the street, and take selfies (does this remind you of anything?)
January 7. Location unspecified. Rioters burn down a religious bookstore.
January 8, burning of a Basij seminary. Location unspecified.
January 8, Alireza, 17, shot and killed.
January 8, 2-year old Bahareh, shot in Shahid Beheshti street in Nishapur, died January 15.
January 8, 3-year old Melina in Kermanshah, going to a pharmacy with her parents shot by armed rioters.
January 8, location unspecified. CCTV footage of rioters vandalizing a bank.
January 8, rioters burn the shrine of Sabzeqaba, CCTV footage from various cameras.
January 8, rioters burn the Shahid Montazeri mosque in Shushtar.
January 8, 15th Khordad Square in Shushtar, rioters attack a passerby on a truck.
January 8, Ardebil. Phone video of armed masked rioters attacking a grocery store and a Sepah bank.
January 8, Ilam Province, village of Lumar. Rioters attack the Keshavarzi bank. Cellphone footage.
January 9, Mahdieh Mosque in Karaj. Rioters burn the mosque and Qurans in the mosque. Whose operating procedure is that?
January 9, Sabzevar, Khorasan. CCTV footage shows a Molotov attack on a civilian house.
January 9, Mobarakeh, Isfahan. Torched a grocery store, totally burned.
January 9, Sabzevar, Khorasan. CCTV of children running from a Molotov attack.
January 9, Gorgan, Golestan. Several shops and other areas torched.
January 9, location unspecified. Rioter throwing a Molotov at a civilian home.
Attacks on state symbols. Rioters attack a governor’s office or police station.
Fasa City governor’s office December 31. Cellphone video.
Azna, Lorestan, January 1. Several police vehicles set on fire, 3 killed, 7 injured.
January 1, 9am. Lordegan Governor’s office. Masked rioters throw stones and shoot at police.
January 2, Police Station 11 Marvdasht (Fars Province), rioters try to seize the station and are scattered when police fire into the air.
January 3, Tabriz. Rioter uses Molotovs to try to set the Tabriz Chamber of Builds building on fire. Cellphone footage.
January 4. Malekshahi, Ilam Province. Rioters attempt to storm a Basij outpost and are scattered when police fire into the air.
January 8, 200 rioters with molotov cocktails attack the residence of Salam al-Zawawi, the Palestinian Ambassador. Who would want to attack the Palestinian Ambassador in particular?
January 8, attack on police station 126, Tehranpars. Police and Basij were killed.
No politics, organized on the internet
AryJeay commented: “In this year’s riots, we see no prior statements, organized gatherings, formal protests, or specific pre-announced locations. Suddenly, a group pours into the streets and riots in specific locations that are close to sensitive, infrastructural, vital, and security-military sites. They then steer the riot toward these locations in order to gain access to firearms and ammunition.”
Rioters always dressed in black and were masked. They moved around at night with confidence and fluidly knew how to burn motorcycles, take the rods off of street signs, wield machetes and swords, and use shotguns and rifles.
In confessions shown on Iranian TV, arrested rioters say they were recruited based on their online behavior and what kinds of posts they “liked”, then messaged and organized and trained via Telegram and WhatsApp, paid specific rates based on what kinds of attacks they could prove they did (using video evidence), and some were ultimately told they were of no value and shot by their handlers. “They had precise intelligence of coordination with separatists and terrorists on the part of US and Israel. “They even planned for each separated region to draft its own constitution, and they directed arms smuggling, as well as financial & logistical support.” The rates are around $6000 for killing people, $2375 for burning each vehicle, $850 for burning police stations, $175 for any other disruption.”
Other arrested rioters told news agencies that they felt they had been set up to die in fires, sent up into buildings to set fires only to find their planned exit blocked. Iranian authorities called this “project killings”, in which riot organizers killed other rioters with the intent of blaming the state for the deaths.
One arrested rioter said: “The same person who called for the unrest attacked me, and after some time passed, he shot me and said, ‘You’re no longer of any use.’” Team leaders pursued manufacturing deaths and provoking public emotions by killing their own operatives and rioters with close-range shots to the head.”
By January 10, likely due to the internet shutdown on the 8-9, the tide had turned and on January 12, there were massive demonstrations in support of the government (there had been these all along, including mass funerals, but this was the largest culmination).
Iran also jammed the Starlink network and reported arrests and unraveling of networks, safe houses, and seizure of massive numbers of weapons over the following days, before finally restoring internet connectivity more than a week later.
The Iranian medical authorities gave the following summary of all damage: 184 ambulances attacked and damaged. 6 completely destroyed and burned. Directly hit with bullets in Teheran. Molotov cocktail attack on an ambulance in Rafsanjan while on active mission. 54 injured. 4 hospitals attacked.
AryJeay gave the following roundup of property damage: 250 mosques damaged. 20 religious centers. Imamanieh mosque in Golestan province. Hundreds of vehicles burned in Teheran. 364 large stores. 419 small stores. Damage reported across 30 provinces. $5.3 million in fire department vehicles. $14 million in bank damages. 317 bank branches destroyed. 4700 bank branches damaged. 1400 ATMs damaged. 250 ATMs permanently out of service. $6.6 million in damages to electricity sector. 265 schools damaged. 3 libraries set on fire. 8 cultural heritage sites damaged. 4 cinemas (Tehran, Nishapur, Boruejd, Shahin Shahr).
Ayatollah Khamenei explained in a speech the state’s theory of how the riots had unfolded: ‘one group of individuals carefully selected, identified, and trained abroad. Others, malicious elements and criminals. And others, naive teenagers: “These are the foot soldiers. Their mission is to go and attack a place, like a police station, a house, an office, a bank, an industrial center, an electricity facility. That is their mission. The ringleaders gather in groups of 10, 20, or 50 people each, guide them, and tell them: You must go here, do this, and commit crimes, and they do.”’
The final Iranian government tally of those killed in the insurgency was over 3,000. AryJeay estimates ⅔ of these were pro-government security forces and civilians, and ⅓ were rioters. This is higher than the 1,000+ Iranians killed in the 12-day war with Israel and the US in 2025.
What was this? A military analysis
The US and Israel were open about Mossad’s support for the rioters and for their goal, the destruction of the Iranian state. Mike Pompeo tweeted “happy new year to the protesters and to Mossad walking beside them.” Mossad told protesters “we are with you, in the field.” Trump posted to protesters that help was on the way, and as the riots unfolded – attacking groceries, emergency responders, government buildings, mosques, and random people on the street to sow insecurity and terror – a US armada approached Iran. As that armada approached, the US-backed regime in Syria made a final push in the Northeast to reach the Iraq border, releasing thousands of Islamic State prisoners.
The riots may have been envisioned to have achieved more than they did – and they might have done, had the state not shut down the internet and starlink – causing the state to approach collapse just in time for a US invasion to finish Iran off.
The state didn’t collapse, but the war may be coming regardless.
In the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish Revolutionaries regrouped. We trace their path through armed struggle against Britain, negotiation, the formation of the Dail and its role. The larger than life characters including Michael Collins and events like Bloody Sunday. How England’s first colony fought the Empire between the world wars.
In the early morning of January 3, 2026, the US bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its president and its first lady. As of Day 1 of the war, Venezuela’s government is intact and popular mobilizations are calling for their president’s return. Trump has said that the US will run Venezuela and take its oil. Some insights from various analysts and some thoughts on the long war (or massacres, in the event of a surrender) that the US has begun.
Our last episode of 2025. Did you know that Amanullah’s decision to wage war for Afghanistan’s independence from the British Empire had everything to do with Amritsar and the struggle underway in India in 1919? Some details on this war that you may not have heard, including the British besieging Peshawar, displacing whole towns full of people, and claiming victory while accepting a ceasefire on Amanullah’s terms.
