Iran's regime may have held Khamenei supporters at gunpoint during slain leader's funeral

[00:00:00]there has been to me an absolute nauseating way of covering this funeral from Western outlets. So, here in Australia we had the ABC. We had a reporter go around who did say, you know, I'm I'm I'm only allowed where the government is going to let me.

[00:00:14]To me that didn't go far enough. She's showing us billboards that are apparently very popular in Tehran that had English subtitles. So, you know, is it is it for the Iranian people or for Western outlets? Over in the New York Times, again they do acknowledge that they were only allowed where the regime let them. But here is the first paragraph of what the New York Times reporting was from Khamenei's funeral.

[00:00:33]They arrived from every direction, flowing toward the heart of Tehran in streams that gradually turned into rivers and then something larger. A human currents of mourners with enough collective force that individual will seem to dissolve into movement itself.

[00:00:48]Now that is an extremely flowery way of describing mourners for a tyrannical despot who killed thousands of protesters. And to be honest, let's just let's not pretend the mourners are either in many cases getting paid to be there or are mourning at the point of a gun. So, when you read stuff like that, how do you feel?

[00:01:09]>> Ah, James, I've been covering this is my life's work, right? Not only as an Iranian-American who's been hearing this at the dinner table since I was a young child, but also somebody who's been covering this very closely in in Persian language for many many years. This is the MO of the regime and the Western media fed right into it, given my a gift. Actually, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Post in the middle of this war about how the Iran regime uses the the the media and the West as their useful idiots and they do it so willingly. The fact that they that was so poetic what you read that the New York Times also covered the 30 to 50,000 Iranians who were slaughtered in January by the regime. They cover the flow of mourners that were trying to bury their children, their teenagers that were only out to ask for the basic freedoms that you and I take for granted. Did the New York Times cover that? Did they write about it so eloquently like poetry, the way that they wrote about this funeral?

[00:02:06]Look, it This is what the regime does.

[00:02:08]They put it under a microscope. They know that the the eyes of the world are on this funeral.

[00:02:13]Uh they show masses of people that were either there at like you said, getting a free lunch, or there because they were forced to from work. If they didn't go, they would be deducted salary. Or a small percentage of people who are actually with the regime. Out of 92 million people, even if a million attended, which I don't believe they did, that would be 1%.

[00:02:35]You know, it's not No one's impressed by this except for those who want to be impressed, like the influencers who got on a plane and actually went there and were saying death to America on a microphone. Why? Because they come back to the United States and they're able to do that. Because they take freedom of speech for granted, and they are just traitors. Uh you know, I'm I'm I'm watching this. I'm laughing. Of course, they're having it over 4th of July weekend. Of course, all the death to America uh banners are up, and they are just having a field day with this. But again, the only thing the takeaway for us here in the West should be that, that this rhetoric from day one, death to America, death to Israel, is not just a slogan. They continue to use it. They continue to make it a central part of their ideology. And this is the way they want to continue being and dealing with their political dealings and their social and cultural dealings. And even since this war began, they have rounded up thousands of their own. Thousands of their own who don't have freedom of speech there, on Iran's soil, but yet from Tehran, they are controlling our college students, or they're controlling the algorithm on TikTok and on Instagram, so our young people can be influenced by their rhetoric and by their ideology. That's why you do have college students here in the United States who are pledging allegiance and protesting and having encampments in in in allegiance to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iran regime.

[00:03:57]This is this is what we're up against, this hypocrisy of them using the internet so freely, having X accounts, but not letting the Iranian people have the same.

[00:04:06]>> But the journalists that are in Iran and you know, they say, "Okay, well, we're only allowed." But like, how does it not set off your blinkers as a journalist that you've got the government officials saying, "Okay, interview this person, but not that person. Go down this street, but not that street." Shouldn't that set off the blinkers that you are being given a very distorted view of how Iranian people are feeling and a very distorted view of what the situation is in Iran. I mean, again, I'm coming back to this ABC report cuz it's been rattling in my head for a full week now.

[00:04:33]But she shows us this billboard that says, you know, that showing how the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed. She shows us another billboard which has English subtitles on it and she says, "These are popular in Iran." How do you know that if you are only speaking to people that the regime let you speak to? Of course they're going to say that this billboard is popular and we all reflect on it every day. Like of course, because that is what the regime wants you to report.

[00:04:58]>> Absolutely. And for years and years CNN was the only one that was able to go inside Iran and actually go inside the parliament and ask softball questions.

[00:05:08]Why isn't a journalist like myself allowed to go to Iran? I'm allowed. I'm sure they would love for me. They they'd put me right in prison. I have death threats against me here on American soil as an Iranian journalist who tells the truth. Why? Because they don't want anybody to tell the truth. That's why when a journalist goes there, they are controlled. They're absolutely controlled in what they are allowed to report. And guess what? Even if they see something and they come back and report on it, they won't be allowed to go back.

[00:05:33]So even their their reporting is completely filtered because they want to have access back into Iran because they believe it's a bragging right that they were able to go into a country where other journalists cannot go. But to your point, we We to start telling the truth and we have to start making it a you know, a a known thing that if you are reporting from Iran, obviously, this is not the truth. The problem is not everyone's getting their information from shows like yours, James. They're getting information from these little bits, whether it's on on on you know, the internet or social media or wherever they get their information from, but anybody can be a journalist, and that is that is really the bottom line is that there's no integrity and ethics in this field anymore. And and when you see people like this that are going there and basically you're pledging your allegiance to the Ayatollah when you go there and you're you're going to report what they want you to report. You become a mouthpiece of the regime.