The Spectre of "The Innocent Protestor"

And reflections on my reflections from January

The moment two police officers were set on fire in Alikhani sq, Esfahan, 8 Jan 2026

Every time there’s a new cycle of news that harkens back to the January protests in Iran, like there is now with the executions today in Esfahan, there’s a fresh round of attacks on my platforms from people who cry foul about how I don’t “speak about January” or about the “innocent protestors being executed” and only care about the war.

Those people don’t know that in late January, the very first chance I got to connect to the internet, I posted my reflections on the Jan protests, from the perspective of having been in Tehran during those days, having lived through two weeks of internet shut down, and about the things I saw and heard.

Reflections on the Events of Jan 8-9 in Iran

But their problem isn’t why I don’t speak up (which I do), but why I don’t deny the evidence before my eyes and repeat their talking points. And that’s something I will never do; so they are free to complain.

After January, it took a long time for those of us who searched for the facts to know what had really happened on those awful days, which is why my original post is the way it is. But since then so many videos and first person accounts have emerged that prove a few key points about the protests that fly in the face of the simplified narrative pushed by the Western and Zionist media.

Most importantly, the videos have since proven that there were armed agents and provocateurs among the crowds. They killed innocent protestors, bystanders, and passersby and blamed it on the police; They shot at the police from amongst the crowds to bait the police into shooting back; and they provoked and carried out the mob killing, maiming and burning of police and security personnel, or anyone who looked like them, in the most gruesome ways. [video of burning of police in Esfahan CW] Many innocent people were caught in crossfire. Also most recently, even the pro-Zionist Persian speaking media has retracted their claims of tens of thousands killed and have admitted that the verifiable number is much closer to the official number released by the Iranian government, i.e. just over 3000 (which is already very high, so why do you exactly need to lie and inflate it, especially if you claim to care about Iranian lives at all?).

Still, a tireless chorus of loud and obnoxious pro-Zionist voices have been active since day one trying to establish the idea that Iran gunned down tens of thousands of protesters in a span of days for no reason other than the regime’s intolerance towards dissent and its devilish thirst for the blood of anyone who dares to “criticize” it. Funnily enough, many of these obnoxious voices support the Pahlavi regime who is well-known for treating dissenters and critics exactly that way.

But for instance one such enlightened “critic” from January, who was executed in Esfahan this morning—who was sentenced to death for his involvement in the killing of four police officers in one city square in Esfahan—had previously in a public video pledged his support for the terrorist group MEK and was captured in his home/bomb-making lab/weapons storage with all his stash put on display and confiscated in front of the cameras. So at this point, if you’re a serious person, you should not be repeating those outrageous claims about the number of the dead, or about the “protestors” being unarmed, or about how the “innocent” protestors are now being executed just for “speaking up against the regime”.

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I have spoken in the past and continue to do about the outright criminal economic policies pursued by the current Iranian administration which led in the first place to the Jan crisis—with the help, nonetheless, of the American maximum and sanctions and the blockade of the Iranian money in the UAE. I continue to hold that the head of the central bank of Iran and the finance minister, among others, must be impeached, tried and held accountable for their complicity in the killing of several thousand innocent people.

And I also really don’t see any good logic behind executions, especially public executions, when they clearly have failed to have any kind of deterrence and only serve to refresh the collective wound. But I know the law enshrines an eye for an eye policy in such cases with the added symbolism, due to the public nature of the crimes, of holding the executions at the same square where those four police officers were killed. I suppose one can criticize this law and the symbolism and other choices that have led to the events today in Esfahan. But some are opting to make that into the main issue; And as things are currently, with literal armed agents killing innocent people on the streets of our cities and the very real threat of a repetition of that in the near future and also the bombs and the continued economic crisis and continued betrayal of the economic team of the government…yeah, I find such positions deeply hypocritical and hard to take seriously.

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Mossad has been hard at work trying to dumb down the acceptable discourse around what happened in January so that the voice of reason and the facts of what happened could never be heard. All we have been hearing for six months has been the shrill cries of regime change agents that parade as political activists and Iran experts. At this point, you are either someone who accepts the Mossad narrative wholesale and takes their side or if not you must find in yourself a capacity to comprehend things beyond the black and white narratives of “regime bad” and “regime killed its own citizens”, which inevitably leads to “please bomb bad regime”, and instead admit that the situation on the ground was far murkier and messed up than you’ve been told and it should never have been weaponized for any kind of political agenda.

P.S. From Esfahan’s Alikhani square case of the killing of four police officers (perpetrators executed on July 28): [CW] “The accused in this case tied the police officers to the board with rope, and after injuring them with stones, they poured gasoline on them, and while the officers were still alive, they set them on fire and then dragged them on the ground and inflicted numerous on their bodies with knives and machetes. They dragged them on the ground and cut their bodies into pieces even after the officers were killed.”