Raeisi and his entourage, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, ascended to martyrdom on Sunday after the helicopter carrying them crashed as it was on its way to Tabriz, the capital of Iran’s East Azarbaijan Province. The tragedy was followed by millions-strong funeral processions across Tabriz as well as the north-central city of Qom and the capital Tehran, where the bodies lied in state.
Mainstream Western media outlets, however, sprung into action with a flurry of misreporting and understatement meant to underplay the immense grief that gripped the Iranian nation in the immediate aftermath of the crash.
At the other end of the scale, social media subscribers have been raging against the media campaign, posting images and videos of the heavy-hearted nation’s thronging the streets to bid farewell to their president.
X, among several other platforms, has been abuzz with posts by those trying to relay the reality on the ground.
Many of those debunking the anti-Iranian campaign have included journalists, activists, and others with first-hand experience of attending the countrywide funeral processions.
British independent journalist Richard Medhurst, who had joined the processions, said the Western media campaign was aimed at propagating “lies.”
Researcher and author Denijal Jegić scoffed at the anti-Iranian drive, saying no Western political personality would receive such popular support.
Shaykh Azhar Nasser, a cleric, said Western media outlets would intentionally avoid projecting a true picture of the popular reaction to Raeisi’s martyrdom as this would “not align with the narrative they seek to propagate.”
Danny Haiphong, geopolitical analyst and journalist, chimed in and posted an impressive picture of the funeral processions.
A researcher and writer identifying himself as Arya described the contradiction between the reality and the anti-Iran media furor as risible, and posted more than a dozen pictures of the processions.
Mohamed al-Shami, Fulbright scholar from Yemen, blasted the anti-Iran reports as “wrong,” and posted footage of the funeral procession in Qom.
Another netizen identifying as Aliyu Jari said, “Western media misinform their audience” and asserted that President Raeisi “refused to be a Western lackey.”
Hassan Mafi, a journalist, noted how a German reporter had tried to “film an empty street in Tehran” to try to claim that nobody was attending President Raeisi’s funeral.
New Rules Geopolitics, an examiner of international affairs, cited University of Tehran Professor Mohammad Marandi as saying, “This enormous display of national solidarity exploded Western regime change fantasies.”
Nadira Ali, writer and activist, posted a panoramic view of Raeisi’s funeral in Iran, which she said, Western media “will never show you.”
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