The Islamic Republic of Iran has just carried out one of the deadliest assaults on its own people in recent history — yet you would hardly know it from mainstream media coverage.
This silence is not accidental, nor is it simply oversight. It is the product of decades of unresolved history, uncomfortable responsibility, and narratives that no longer align with realities on the ground.

Western governments played a consequential role in the events leading up to Iran’s 1979 Revolution, and that legacy still shapes how policymakers and media institutions approach Iran today. Rather than clearly separating the Iranian people from the Islamic Republic, coverage often defaults to a simplified regional framework — one that prioritizes the “Arab Street,” centers Islamist movements, and treats Iran as a monolithic religious state rather than a diverse, secular-leaning society under clerical occupation.

This discomfort is compounded by Hollywood and celebrity culture’s vocal alignment with the Palestinian cause, which has further narrowed the lens through which Middle Eastern conflicts are viewed. Acknowledging that Iranians are rejecting political Islam en masse — and paying for it with their lives — would force a reckoning with narratives that cast Islamist movements as representative of popular will.

The cost of this reluctance is not reputational or political. It is human. And it is borne by Iranians whose voices are too often muted at the very moment they most need to be heard.

  • Iran is not a Sykes–Picot project. It is one of the oldest continuous nations in the world, home to more than a dozen ethnic groups that identify primarily as Iranian, not as sectarian or colonial constructs.
  • Iran was Zoroastrian until the 7th century, and while Islam has since become intertwined with Iranian society, Iran remains — paradoxically — a deeply secular, liberal, and Western-leaning civilization, albeit one that also retains conservative social traditions.
  • Iran’s history is inseparable from monarchy. From Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, Iran developed dynasties that lasted longer than many empires elsewhere in the world.

20th Century Foundations

  • In 1905, Iran adopted a constitutional monarchy, known as Mashrooté, to curb the power of the Qajar dynasty — a dynasty widely viewed as disastrous for Iran’s sovereignty and development.
  • In 1925, Reza Shah seized power. Though he initially considered establishing a republic, he retained the monarchy and founded the Pahlavi dynasty, first under himself and later his son, Mohammad Reza Shah — also known as The Shah or Aryamehr.
  • The Pahlavi era modernized, industrialized, and secularized Iran. This included redistributing land previously owned by religious clerics — or mullahs — to ordinary citizens, a policy that naturally bred resentment among the clerical class.
  • In 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh — described by some as the heir of a Qajar princess and by others as having married into the Qajar lineage — served as prime minister under the constitutional monarchy. Time magazine named him Man of the Year when he sought to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.
    This move prompted the UK and the U.S. to back forces seeking to curb his growing power. Importantly, Mossadegh was not democratically elected by popular vote (one of the many misconceptions and myths of Iran and Iranians, but not the biggest one of all), but appointed within the constitutional system.
  • During this same period, the rise of Soviet communism fueled the growth of Marxist movements inside Iran.
  • The Shah’s reign was, by a wide margin, a net positive. While Iran remained a constitutional monarchy, even supporters acknowledge authoritarian features — including the SAVAK secret police, comparable to security services elsewhere at the time. Ironically, many prisoners SAVAK spared would later play key roles in the 1979 Revolution.
    Still, Iran advanced socially and economically, including granting women the right to vote.
  • After the 1973 OPEC crisis, the Shah’s growing confidence and leverage unsettled Western powers — as seen in interviews such as those aired by CBC — alongside his independent foreign policy views, including criticism of Israel, even while maintaining diplomatic relations globally.
  • By the Guadeloupe Conference, Western powers withdrew support for the Shah and naively viewed an exiled cleric — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — as a manageable alternative. Ironically, the Shah had previously advised SAVAK not to assassinate Khomeini, who had relocated from Iraq to France.
  • In 1979, clerics allied with Marxists to topple the Shah. Refusing to open fire on his own people and suffering from cancer, the Shah left Iran and later died in exile in Egypt.
  • From 1980 to 1988, Iran fought a brutal war against Iraq, whose leader Saddam Hussein invaded with backing from Western powers. Iraq used chemical weapons, while the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran fought largely alone. The war ended in a stalemate.
  • Ali Khamenei, not fully credentialed as an Ayatollah, was elevated by power brokers like Ali Akbar Hâshemi Rafsanjâni to become Supreme Leader under the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih (faghih) — a system placing a cleric above all state institutions.
    Iran had effectively replaced a secular monarchy with a theocratic autocracy masquerading as a republic — a republic comparable neither to France nor the United States.
  • Khomeini preserved Iran’s national military, the Artesh, but created the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) to “protect the revolution” — in practice, to protect clerical rule.
  • Traumatized by foreign interference, the regime pursued an Axis of Resistance strategy. Despite sitting atop vast oil and gas reserves, the Islamic Republic plundered national wealth to fund proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
    Ironically, the Palestinian cause was embraced despite historic distrust of Shiite Iran by Sunni Palestinian factions, including Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat, who had aligned with Saddam Hussein.
  • Iran remains a secular nation where a majority admire America and share Western values, yet lacks constitutional protections such as a Second Amendment, leaving the population ruled by clerics enforced through the IRGC. Over time, IRGC leaders infiltrated and hollowed out the Artesh.
  • From 1979 to today, Iran’s currency has collapsed more than almost any other country’s, while tens of billions were spent on foreign proxies and trillions lost in opportunity cost due to a confused nuclear policy — despite the previous supreme leader Khomeini issuing a fatwa banning nuclear weapons. Put simply, the regime gets a failing grade, with many blaming the current supreme leader Khamenei himself.

The Facts

  • One overlooked factor shaping media coverage is scale and proximity. Since 1979, the global Muslim population has grown dramatically, especially in Europe and North America, where communities once marginal now hold significant cultural, political, and media influence.
    This doesn’t explain everything, but it helps clarify why many outlets and celebrities tread carefully — often conflating Iranians with the Islamic Republic, avoiding nuance, and minimizing dissident Iranian voices.
  • In the UK especially, criticism of Islam is routinely dismissed as Islamophobic, regardless of context.
  • Many who hold antisemitic or anti-Zionist views have embraced the Palestinian cause — a position most Iranians reject, chanting: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, My Life for Iran.” Polls consistently show roughly 80% of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic. Of the remaining 20%, fewer than 5% are clerics, about 15% are tied to the IRGC — half ideologically, half economically.
  • Iranians complain about Iran being turned not just into a kleptocracy, but a kakisocracy, with the IRGC looting the country for personal, financial gain.
  • Iranians have repeatedly protested unarmed — in the 2000s, again in the 2010s, and beyond.
  • Despite this, the Obama administration signed the JCPOA, aiming to prevent nuclear proliferation, which many Iranians disapproved of, as it gave a lifeline to a regime it viewed as illegitimate.
  • In 2022, the murder of Mahsa Amini sparked the Women, Life, Freedom movement, briefly embraced worldwide — before many supporters quietly reverted to apologizing for the regime.
  • On October 7, 2023, regional dynamics shifted dramatically.
  • In 2025, Israel and the Islamic Republic engaged in a 12-day conflict, with Israel killing senior IRGC leaders and nuclear scientists. The regime justified its nuclear ambitions after Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA.
  • In January 2026, Iran’s bazaaris – the merchants – protested currency instability, triggering broader uprisings demanding freedoms enjoyed in the West.
  • Foreign intelligence services — including Mossad, and possibly MI6 and the CIA — reportedly saw an opportunity to topple a regime that had spent 47 years chanting “Death to America.” But, after the regime restored Internet access, mounting video evidence proved that the vast majority were indeed ordinary, unarmed civilians tired of a regime that could not even provide stable electricity and water needs to the nation’s 95 million population.
  • For days, regime forces were overwhelmed. BB guns and tear gas failed.
  • At that point, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei allegedly ordered live fire. Official figures cited 3,000 deaths; Iran’s own Health Ministry suggested up to 30,000, with independent estimates as high as 100,000 — making it one of the deadliest state massacres of its own citizens in modern history.

Judgment Day

  • This is why Western media and celebrities — many of whom championed the Palestinian cause and condemned Israel, while accommodating the Islamic Republic — now face a reckoning. Their framing of Iran may have been misplaced at best, misguided at worst.
  • Further complicating the willingness of Western media and institutions to listen to — let alone amplify — Iranian voices is the fact that, while there are dissidents abroad and opposition figures inside Iran, the overwhelming majority of Iranians have so thoroughly rejected theocracy — and become disillusioned by the regime’s distortion of what a republic is meant to be — that many have gravitated toward the exiled Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi, the son of Mohammad Reza Shah.
  • Given the role the United States played in the Shah’s fall, this creates deep unease within U.S. administrations about openly endorsing or supporting the Crown Prince, even symbolically.
  • By contrast, other opposition groups such as the MEK have attempted to buy legitimacy by paying American political figures — including the dismissed Mike Pompeo and the disgraced Rudy Giuliani — yet the MEK’s historical alignment with Saddam Hussein, and its involvement in killing Iranians from abroad during the 1980s and 1990s, has made it nearly as despised among Iranians as the Islamic Republic itself.
  • After a decade in which the regime pinned its survival on so-called “reformists,” the brutal January 2026 massacres definitively exposed the illusion of reform. They reinforced why Iranians overwhelmingly reject the regime, its reformist factions, and the MEK altogether.
  • Given this history of distrust, no other dissident or opposition figure commands the same broad appeal as Reza Pahlavi, the son of Aryamehr — creating an outcome that is awkward for Western policymakers, but increasingly difficult to avoid.
  • The current Iranian counter-revolution — a Restoration of Iran — also challenges a dominant media narrative centered on the so-called “Arab Street,” which is hardly surprising given that Iran is neither Arab nor Semitic. Iranians are an Indo-European people who, since Alexander the Great’s defeat of the Persian Empire, have endured successive periods of foreign domination — by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Russians, British, Americans, and now a clerical ruling class rooted outside Iran.
  • Today’s regime draws its ideological lineage from Najaf and Karbala in Iraq — where Ali Khamenei’s father was born and where several senior figures, including members of the Larijani family, also originate — and was later institutionalized through religious training in Qom.
  • What more than 80% of Iranians are now rejecting is the rule of this narrow minority, which has retained power not through popular legitimacy, but through intimidation, violence, rape, and murder.
  • When journalists from CNN, the BBC, or The New York Times acquiesced to regime demands — such as compulsory hijab to conduct interviews — many Iranians saw this as yet another betrayal of liberal values, let alone platforming the regime talking points.
  • Paradoxically, many Iranians now stand with Israel and America, openly thanking leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and urging Donald Trump to strike IRGC bases.
  • The regime once labeled such Iranians traitors. But with the Supreme Leader now linked to mass murder, that tactic has lost its power. Other fear-mongering tactics include the spectre of territorial disintegration, even though most ethnic groups identify as Iranians and Iranians chant from “Tehran to Zahedan, I give my life for Iran.”
  • As the U.S. builds a larger military presence near Iran, the media’s day of reckoning is coming — even if Hollywood remains silent.