Devoid of real sympathy, foreign media exploit Iranian ‘dissidents’

Rouhollah Zam, who was the administrator of the now-defunct anti-Iran Telegram channel Amad News (file photo)

When Rouhollah Zam was executed in Iran in December last year, foreign media outlets saw an opportunity, one of many they have exploited to advance a pseudo-journalistic agenda against a country they wish to see held down. The 42-year-old Zam, the son of a pro-revolution cleric and named after the founder of the Islamic Republic, was hanged for carrying out “corruption on earth” by actively inciting anti-government street violence on instant messaging application Telegram.

The foreign media described Zam, who uploaded exclusively anti-Iran content on a Telegram channel called Amad News, as a “dissident journalist” whose conviction and subsequent execution proved the Iranian government was resorting to brute force to silence dissidents. Accounts of Zam’s incitement of street violence, brutality, and subversion against the Iranian government were almost entirely absent from the dominant foreign media narrative and the numerous reports that were prepared about him.

In reality, Zam was a political agitator instigating his audience — a portion of them unknowing Iranians inside Iran — to take to the streets and take up arms following a government hike in gasoline prices in 2019. The fuel price hike had sparked some opposition; Zam intended to use that perceived opportunity to lead people to take down the government through armed conflict.

He published material he alleged to have obtained from Iranian government insiders to imply distrust and infighting within the Iranian government and provoked ordinary people to seize the moment and move quickly toward confrontation. He notoriously published guidelines on how to build Molotov cocktails to use against police and other security forces.

While Zam’s appeals for urban warfare went unheeded, his all-out attempts to provoke violence did not. He was arrested after walking into an intelligence trap and was put on trial for his calls to violence and anarchy and was executed before sunrise on December 12, 2020.

The twopenny-halfpenny war by Reuters & ‘Iranintl’ on Iran

This article is the second in a series called “The Islamic Republic at 40” to mark the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, which falls on February 11, 2019 on the Gregorian calendar.

Although Zam’s case was permanently closed on that day, Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Tuesday, February 2, 2021, published what was presented as a new account of his departure from France into detention by Iranian security forces.

The article, whose language was couched to sound like a tragic human story, provided no new details about the intelligence operation that led to Zam’s arrest, but it did provide a telling description of the Iranian “dissident” when, in one untypical instance, it referred to his “growing radicalism” as one of the reasons for the “undoing” of his attempts.

That minor description, coming at a safe distance, well after Zam’s death, was nevertheless a vivid departure from the “dissident journalist victim” narrative that has been used by foreign media outlets when speaking about Zam, including elsewhere in the AFP article itself. And it was a remarkable sign of how those media withhold the truth from their audiences when reporting on Iran until after a development has lost its appeal.

Iranian experts interviewed anonymously for this article said there was no disputing of the fact that Zam’s “growing radicalism” was the reason for his “undoing.” One pointed out that if Zam had promoted armed opposition to the government in France — where he enjoyed state protection for promoting opposition to the Islamic Republic — he would have been charged with and tried for terror-related offenses.

Another said foreign media outlets have established a pattern of goading individuals to raise their voices against the Islamic Republic without offering the minimum sincerity that their apparent relationship requires. A number of Iranian individuals are currently working for anti-Iran foreign media outlets such as Manoto TV and Iran International. “Do the TVs — the governments that pay for them — care about these individuals as ‘human beings’ with personal stories of their own who fight for ‘a noble cause’? Or as mere human ammo in a fight with Iran?” one media source said. “I think the case of Rouhollah Zam and the AFP article offer only the latest response to that question.”