Skip to main content

Iran’s unrest triggers explosion of fake news

Some of the most incendiary accusations made against Iran’s government by corporate media, celebrity influencers and Western leaders in the past months are little more than fabrications. And most remain uncorrected.
 
by Setareh Sadeqi and Christopher Weaver
 
Part 7 - Former footballer Ali Karimi scores hat trick of blatant lies
 
A former Iranian football star with 14.4 million followers on Instagram named Ali Karimi has played an especially influential role in the current unrest in the country of his birth. He has also contributed to three widely disseminated lies. Despite his lack of credibility, the Scrooge-like Karimi was warmly received by the German President this week in a bid to bolster support for the unrest.

Ali has claimed the picture below shows an Iranian protester shot dead by a DShK heavy machine gun. The Dushka or DShK 1938, fires 12.7×108-millimeter rounds, which are nearly ten percent larger than .50 caliber rounds which are so devastating that their shockwave can cause lethal neurological damage. 
 
Ali’s bogus image was immediately debunked by one of his own fans (see the text above circled in red). “I loved and still love Ali Karimi,” the fan stated, “but to be honest, this is a picture of my friend in the neighboring village, after he had a motorcycle accident a few months ago”. The fan then posted the picture on the right side and stated, “This is the full picture from my own phone.”

The man in the picture turns out to be Ali Hamidvand, a resident of the village of Varineh in Hamedan Province. His leg was amputated after a motorcycle accident which took place on July 13, 2022. In a December 2022 interview, an indignant Hamidvand asked the judiciary to take action against Ali Karimi, accusing him of exploiting a photo of Hamidvand to advance his cynical regime change campaign. Hamidvand stated that Karimi had dishonored him and his family during an agonizing and traumatic experience. 

Next, Ali Karimi took images of a bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2016 and falsely portrayed them as an Iranian state-sponsored massacre in the Kurdish city of Javanrood, Iran. 

In another case of blatant deception, Karimi snatched a photo from the 2012 holiday fundraiser of a Pakistani charity showing a distraught young girl cradling her younger brother in her lap in the midst of a scorching heat wave, and falsely portrayed its contents as depicting Baluchi children abused by Iran’s security forces. He wrote: “These people’s rights have always been violated throughout their lives. They didn’t deserve bullets. #MyIran #Sistan_Baluchestan”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

State surveillance and court cases: The lonely fight for press freedom of Greece’s independent media

by Alessio Giussani   Part 1  A new ecosystem of small, independent organisations is bringing a breath of transparent, in-depth reporting into the Greek media landscape but their work is being hindered by costly court cases and the threat of state surveillance. This comes as media freedom is continuing to decline in Greece. The country ranked 108th out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2022 Press Freedom Index — the worst-performing European country, triggering a furious response by the authorities. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis dismissed the ranking as " crap ", adding: “ We have a vibrant press, you can read everything you want in Greece ." Nikolas Leontopoulos, an editor at Reporters United, sees it differently: " We do have freedom of opinion, but there are some very sensitive issues that don’t even make it to the news ”. Until recently, at least. Source, links: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/02/20/state-surveillance-and-court-cases-th
Post a Comment
Read more

European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates

Europeans are storming the streets in unprecedented numbers to protest NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine and their own declining living standards. The Grayzone has covered demonstrations and interviewed protest leaders in several countries since the war erupted.   by Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal   Part 1   This February 21, several thousand Greeks filled Athens’ streets to denounce NATO and the United States in the wake of Antony Blinken’s Greece visit, where the US Secretary of State applauded the Mediterranean country for being amongst the first European countries to support Ukraine, thus leading to way for “ the support of democracy. ” It was just one action among many protest actions across the continent as the NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine approached  its first anniversary. European citizens are growing agitated as their leaders appear set on extending the war at least another year: they’ve approved several rounds of sanctions on Russia, provided billions of euros in assistance t
Post a Comment
Read more

State surveillance and court cases: The lonely fight for press freedom of Greece’s independent media

by Alessio Giussani   Part 2 - Greek 'mafia' and 'Watergate' Athens-based investigative outlet Reporters United disclosed in January that a high-ranking police officer had been promoted while being investigated in a corruption case called “Greek Mafia” – something journalists in the field had known for a long time, Leontopoulos claimed. It was not the only time a major story remained unreported for months. At the beginning of 2022, Reporters United revealed that a controversial change in the law on the privacy of communications had been made nine months earlier. The amendment, introduced last minute into a pandemic containment bill, prevented citizens from being informed if they had been placed under state surveillance for national security reasons. At the time, the wiretapping scandal that later became known as “Greek Watergate” was yet to emerge. “ Many jurists and well-networked journalists had known about the amendment for months, and we found out some had even info
Post a Comment
Read more

West is out of touch with rest of world politically, EU-funded study admits

Geopolitical Economy Report   A study by the elite EU-funded European Council on Foreign Relations found that the West is increasingly out of touch politically with the rest of the world. Most people in China, India, and Türkiye see Russia as an important ally, and they want multipolarity, not continued “ American global supremacy ”. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

     ‘Team Jorge’ unit exposed by undercover investigation     Group sells hacking services and access to vast army of fake social media profiles     Evidence unit behind disinformation campaigns across world     Mastermind Tal Hanan claims covert involvement in 33 presidential elections   by Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr and Jason Burke Part 3 - ‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’ No less alarming were Hanan’s demonstrations of his team’s hacking capabilities, in which he showed the reporters how he could penetrate Telegram and Gmail accounts. In one case, he brought up on screen the Gmail account of a man described as the “ assistant of an important guy ” in the general election in Kenya, which was days away. “ Today if someone has a Gmail, it means they have much more than just email, ” Hanan said as he clicked through the target’s emails, draft folders, contacts and drives. He then showed how he claimed to be able to access accounts on T
Post a Comment
Read more

Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

     ‘Team Jorge’ unit exposed by undercover investigation     Group sells hacking services and access to vast army of fake social media profiles     Evidence unit behind disinformation campaigns across world     Mastermind Tal Hanan claims covert involvement in 33 presidential elections   by Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr and Jason Burke Part 2 - The undercover footage Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters. Journalists using conventional methods have struggled to shed light on the disinformation industry, which is at pains to avoid detection. The secretly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, therefore provide a rare window into the mechanics of disinformation for hire. Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a p
Post a Comment
Read more

Day 1415: Julian Assange still in prison and under slow-motion execution by the Anglo-American imperialist criminals

failed evolution   On 11 April 2019, the Ecuadorian government of traitor Lenin Moreno, invited the Metropolitan Police into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and they arrested Julian Assange . Since then, Assange is kept in Belmarsh high security prison in London, without actual charges.   The real reason world's number one political prisoner is still kept in this high security prison, is because he exposed horrendous war crimes carried out by the US imperialists and their allies.   The ruthless Western imperialist regime wants to punish the No1 real journalist in the world and make him an example for any Whistleblower or real journalist who will attempt to expose its big crimes in the future.   And the Anglo-American axis has now become officially a fascist coalition , framed by the rest of its Western pets. UK's Home Secretary Priti Patel, one of the most ruthless ever, decided to extradite Julian Assange to US. No surprise of course. The only question we had in mind is
1 comment
Read more

US hegemony and its perils

Report by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China   Part 1 - Introduction Since becoming the world's most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community. The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage "color revolutions," instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights.    Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as
Post a Comment
Read more

How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline

The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now   by Seymour Hersh   Part 3 - THE OPERATION   Norway was the perfect place to base the mission. In the past few years of East-West crisis, the U.S. military has vastly expanded its presence inside Norway, whose western border runs 1,400 miles along the north Atlantic Ocean and merges above the Arctic Circle with Russia. The Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway. The new works included, most importantly, an advanced synthetic aperture radar far up north that was capable of penetrating deep into Russia and came online just as the American intelligence community lost access to a series of long-range listening sites inside China. A newly refurbished American submarine base, which had been under construction
Post a Comment
Read more

Nordstream blame game begins

The Grayzone   Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss the controlled leaks aiming to deflect blame for the Nordstream attacks onto "pro-Ukrainian" elements, the failed attempt by Republican populists and Democratic progressives to withdraw US troops from Syria, and the dramatic congressional Twitter files hearing.  
Post a Comment
Read more