The Anti-Iran Human Rights Bazaar

Karim Sharara, Orinoco Tribune

A compilation of images showing: the Center for Human Rights in Iran, VOA Farsi (Voice of America), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US State Department, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), HRANA (Human Rights Activists in Iran), Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, members of the former Iranian royal family, Reza Pahlavi and his wife Yasmine Pahlavi, and so-called “human rights activists.

Mainstream media’s reliance on US-funded “Iranian human rights” NGOs reveals a recycled regime-change pipeline, where anonymous activists are used with opaque finances to treat propaganda like facts.

“2,000 protesters killed, activists say.”

My, my, it seems anonymous activists are really all the rage in Western media, with this headline being parroted (in multiple forms, no doubt). Because if it’s in The Guardian, BBC, and CNN, among others, it has to be “true”, particularly when it’s Iran they’re talking about.

But really, journalistic integrity is about citing sources, and if these “unbiased”, “professional”, and “objective” outlets are good at anything, it’s choosing the proper organizations to cite, which are in no way affiliated with suspect sources.

After all, it’s not suspect if it’s the CIA or the US federal government, right?

Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA)

Take HRANA, for instance, which is THE go-to “agency” cited by Western media.

Arrest figures? HRANA.
Death tolls? HRANA.
Names of the arrested? HRANA.
Claims of repression cited by Reuters, AP, the BBC, CNN, and The New York Times? HRANA.

According to its website, “Human Rights Activists in Iran (also known as HRAI and HRA) is a non-political and non-governmental organization comprised of advocates who defend human rights in Iran. HRAI was founded in 2005.”

Contrary to the name, the Human Rights Activists in Iran organization is not, in fact, in Iran, but rather operates from the comfort of Virginia, in the United States. Kind of like when you buy Brussels sprouts expecting something European but then find out they were “imported” from California.

HRANA also makes this claim: “Because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from either political groups nor governments.”

Oddly enough, no Western media source has disclosed that HRANA is being funded by the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which was established to keep CIA funding covert, according to its co-founder Allen Weinstein, who had said, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

HRANAwas founded by Keyvan Rafiee in 2006, in Virginia, and according to tax filings dating back to 2012 (when Rafiee only got $59,000 in tax-exempt donations) he is now raking in a comfortable $1 million dollars in donations.

In total, Rafiee has taken $10.7 million from 2012 to 2025, no doubt from “good Samaritans” donating funds to his Patreon.

CHRI

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), much like HRANA, is also being cited by mainstream media as a credible source, amassing “over 7,000 international media citations in 2022,” according to its own website. Also like HRANA, it identifies itself as an “independent, nonpartisan” nonprofit organization (seems like it’s a mantra they all use).

With nonprofit being the keyword here, Hadi Ghaemi, CHRI’s founder and executive director, gave himself more than $200,000 in compensation from US taxpayer money just last year for his tiring work in advancing human rights, almost double the $105,000 he received in 2013.

It’s noteworthy that Ghaemi had claimed in 2009 that he had never received any sort of funding from the US government or NED, speaking in particular regarding his work for United4Iran, another organization he founded.

From 2012 to 2024, CHRI, registered as Campaign For Human Rights Inc and tax-exempt since 2011, has received $16.3 million, also in tax-exempt donations. However, because of the lack of transparency regarding the organization’s finances, the source of the funding could not be ascertained.

Tavaana

One of the most active organizations among Iranian dissident groups is Tavaana. On its website, it brands itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative.” You’d think to yourself it’s based in Iran until you’re hit quite boldly in the next sentence with “Launched in 2010 with a seed grant from the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) at the US Department of State.”

Going through tax files related to Tavaana will net you nothing; that’s because the taxes are filed under the name “E Collaborative For Civic Education,” Tavaana’s parent organization, which has been tax-exempt since 2011. The tax filings show that the organization received grants totaling $250,000 in 2011, which quickly skyrocketed to a high of $1.9 million in 2014. In total, from 2011 to 2024, Tavaana received a total of $15.9 million in donations.

Looking at the scope of activities it’s involved in, and how its online courses are about sharing articles similar to eHow on circumventing internet restrictions in Iran, it’s difficult to see where those millions of dollars went… Either that or they were contracted to write the most expensive compilation of e-brochures.

According to a NED booklet authored by Sherry Ricchiardi for NED’s Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and published on March 13, 2014, “The Tavaana project’s parent organization, the E-Collaborative for Civic Education, has received support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United States Agency for International Development.”

“Program Manager Layla Attia listed some of the project’s accomplishments, including 29 e-courses and 47 webinars on such topics as women’s rights, digital safety, gay rights in Islam, social entrepreneurship, democratic institutions, and power searching on Google. Participants connect securely from Iran to anonymous e-classrooms, and so far none have reported being compromised, according to Attia.”

Imagine being an American and finding out that $100,000 of your tax dollars was spent to teach “power searching on Google.”

Tavaana’s co-founders are Akbar Atri and Mariam Memarsadeghi. Atri has largely been inactive on social media since 2018, but Mariam Memarsadeghi paints a different tale. She is an avid supporter of “Israel”, as seen in her bio, which features an Israeli flag, and has even called for US and Israeli strikes on her own country, the last time being just a few days ago:

This is not a time for nuance.

It is a time for American B2 bombers all over Iran. pic.twitter.com/5MuZNk9l0j

— Mariam Memarsadeghi (@memarsadeghi) January 13, 2026

Perhaps more interestingly, she is also an avid monarchist, who advocates giving power to a man whose sole claim to fame is being born with a saffron spoon in his mouth and who has gone on record saying he doesn’t know what he’ll be going back to, if he ever returns to Iran, suggesting he may live between the US and Iran because he has spent his entire life in the US.

This is the same man who thought showing pictures of himself doing yoga would somehow give him better optics.

One prominent Iranian dissident, Ruhollah Zam, who was involved in directing anti-Iran operations (including teaching rioters how to make homemade weapons through his Amad News Telegram channels), and later captured and repatriated in an intelligence operation, has also gone on record years ago telling people in a video call that he’s seen the late shah’s son practising inspecting troops in front of his bedroom mirror.

Iran Disinformation Project

One short-lived project started directly with US State Department funding was the Iran Disinformation Project, after, according to The Guardian, “it was found to be trolling US journalists, human rights activists and academics it deemed to be insufficiently hostile to the government in Tehran.”

Once @IranDisinfo began targeting mainstream journalists for not being radically anti-Iran, buzzers went off, and their funding was cut. “The bulk of the work by @IranDisinfo has been in line with the scope of a project with the Department of State. We have, however, identified recent tweets that fall outside the scope of the project to counter foreign state propaganda or disinformation,” one State Department spokesperson said.

The tweets in question were then deleted, but funding was not restored. The page can still be seen on Twitter, inactive since 2019.

Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran

One of the most effective organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy is the Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, co-founded by dissident sisters Ladan and Roya Boroumand. Its board of directors features prominent neocon-turned-something-or-other Francis Fukuyama (post-neocon liberal institutionalist is what my search tells me he is, and for some reason, that’s an actual thing), and prominent Iranian celebrities, such as Nazanin Boniadi.

In 2024, NED presented its “partner” Roya Boroumand a medal “in recognition of her leadership and dedication to the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran.”

In particular, the NED statement read: “Roya along with her sister Ladan Boroumand, a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at NED, have dedicated their lives to upholding human rights in Iran.”

From 2011 to 2024, the Boroumand Center received $13.5 million in tax-exempt donations in the US. Before that, information suggests that it was bankrolled by contributions from foundations, such as the influential right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each year per donor.

The Boroumand Center has also collaborated with and received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Curiously, the Center’s What We Do page reads: “Our goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”

One would think that people who are so avid to preserve democracy and democratic practices, even being honored with prestigious awards for their work, would do better than to amplify a call for the firing of Iranian academics in the US asking questions about the Mossad’s involvement in the riots, particularly ones as distinguished as Hamid Dabashi.

On Jan 12, Ladan Boroumand also amplified a post by Iranian dissident Omid Shams in which he discussed how an attack on Iran can be justified under “humanitarian intervention”.

It seems that a recurring theme of Iranian dissidents abroad is how hard they all cheer for strikes on their own country, but none have taken it as far as Masih Alinejad, who seems to have spearheaded the opposition, much to the chagrin of many dissidents who call her an opportunist.

Through her work in VOA Farsi (VOA meaning Voice of America, because it’s an American network), which is directly funded by the State Department, through which Alinejad has called for strikes, regime change, sanctions, and all manner of actions by the US against her country, she has catapulted into the frontlines of the opposition. She has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments for her work with VOA Farsi.

A regime-change ecosystem

So the next time you’re told, very solemnly, that “2,000 protesters were killed, activists say,” it may be worth asking a dangerous question: which activists, funded by whom, operating from where, and with what openly stated political objectives?

Because what emerges here isn’t an ecosystem of independent human rights advocacy, but a tightly interlinked industry of regime-change NGOs, generously financed by US government cutouts, recycled endlessly through Western newsrooms that treat “Virginia-based Iranian activists” as a substitute for on-the-ground verification.

Maybe the real miracle isn’t that these figures are uncritically repeated, but that after Iraq’s WMDs, Libya’s humanitarian war, Syria’s “moderate rebels”, and every other CIA-flavored moral crusade, we’re still expected to gasp in awe when someone from the mainstream has “trust me bro” for a source.

Tehran defeats a new color revolution: What does this mean for the world?

The Iranian lesson must be heeded by all counter-hegemonic countries in a scenario where color revolutions are once again becoming a common tool for imposing the will of the unipolar hegemon.

 Raphael Machado, Strategic Culture Foundation

We are practically accustomed to it by now. Despite the many protests in recent times falsely categorized as color revolutions, when we see particularly violent and organized protests in Iran, we generally know we are dealing with a color revolution.

Western reactions are so predictable and automatic they seem mechanical. Regardless of the concrete circumstances behind the events, the West always frames protests in Iran as something related to “oppressed women,” even when there is no connection. It’s as if the West hasn’t truly gotten over the failure of the last large-scale color revolution attempt in 2022-2023, following the death of Mahsa Amini.

That’s why, although the protest waves that began on December 28 were led by unions and shopkeepers and were related to concrete recent problems—such as the water crisis caused by years of mismanagement of Iranian aquifers and the economic instability caused by the unthoughtful economic policies of President Masoud Pezeshkian—images more likely to resonate with the distorted Western imagination and with its scarcely disguised perverse yearnings for sexual tourism and pornographic profanation of Iranian women’s bodies quickly spread on social media.

Now, however, it is quite clear that when we refer to the disturbances in Iran over the past two weeks, we are necessarily talking about two different “waves.” The first days saw mostly small, peaceful demonstrations. Starting on December 31, however, some small groups began trying to invade police stations or occupy government buildings, as well as attempting to turn peaceful protests into violent actions. For about a week, these efforts seemed isolated, were repelled by peaceful protesters, and quickly suppressed—although cases of police or security personnel being lynched had already begun to appear.

Suddenly, in a manner that can only be considered coordinated, masked elements began setting fire to mosques, shops, public buildings, and cars, as well as using firearms and bladed weapons against public officials, including firefighters. Reports indicate that 250 mosques, over 800 shops, 182 ambulances, 265 schools, 3 libraries, and 4 cinemas were damaged or destroyed. Worse than that, hundreds of police officers, firefighters, Revolutionary Guards, and even simple bystanders were murdered, some beheaded.

Now, videos are beginning to appear showing the coordinated and far from spontaneous actions of masked elements retrieving weapons from backpacks and orchestrating the destruction of buildings and violence against others. The coordination for these actions, obviously, was done via the internet.

And this is where we can witness how the color revolution was suppressed. Because as soon as the Iranian government realized the protests had been co-opted by insurgents acting in a coordinated manner, the internet was deactivated at the national level. What a surprise it was when, suddenly, some “points of light” began to appear in the Iranian “virtual darkness.” It turns out “someone” was distributing Starlink devices to the color revolution leaders.

From then on, the government only needed to track these few internet users and reach them, even in their homes. Having identified the Starlink users, the government then simply jammed the Starlink signal, and within just 2 days, the acts of vandalism and destruction ended. What is “revolutionary” here, fundamentally, besides the strategy used, is how Iran managed to jam Starlink.

Some say Iran used the Russian Murmansk electronic warfare system, others mention the Russian Tobol system, and others claim the use of Chinese technology. What is known for sure, however, is that it was brilliant for the Iranian government to simply let the terrorists act and even connect to Starlink to identify them more easily.

Immediately afterwards, moreover, the government called on the Iranian population to take to the streets to protest against the terrorist attacks and in defense of the country. And indeed, millions of people went out. And it’s important to highlight this to talk about the Western media coverage of this entire process.

The world has rarely seen so much absolutely fallacious propaganda produced simultaneously about events. The lies ranged from the number of rioters (Western media spoke of millions, when in Tehran there were never more than 40,000 protesters in total, both peaceful and violent), to reports that Khamenei had fled the country or that the government had lost control of several cities. And when it became clear that the subversives were being suppressed, “black propaganda” began, accusing Iran of killing up to 20,000 protesters, without presenting any evidence.

In parallel, the US brandished military threats against Iran. Until they suddenly stopped and backtracked, even emphasizing that the Iranian government had only executed dangerous criminals who were shooting at the police.

What explains the change in behavior?

Everything indicates that the US expected the color revolution process to last longer. The idea was to keep Tehran in constant tension, forced to use violence without effectively managing to suppress the enemies. This would build the casus belli for military action. But Iran simply liquidated the armed insurgencies in a matter of few days, before allowing “momentum” to be generated that would enable a significant military attack on Iran, facilitating a regime change.

The fact that today the Iranian police seized 60,000 weapons on a ship, which had entered the country clandestinely, shows that a scenario similar to Libya or Syria was projected for Iran. We recall here, by the way, that in Libya, the US embassy itself acted as a hub for the international arms trafficking to Wahhabi rebels.

These weapons would probably have been distributed to the “protesters” in an “ideal” context of a stalemate between the government’s repressive efforts and the intensification of anti-government forces, potentially radicalized by the police repression itself, in a dialectical movement.

Without assets on the ground, it would make no sense to undertake military action against Iran. And the tragedy seems total for Israel and the US regarding the regime change objectives. It’s as if they have lost all local assets. Without looking back at the war between Iran and Israel in 2025, we will remember that the initial moves involved infiltrators using drones to destroy air defense systems and radars up close, the same tactic used in a terrorist attack carried out on Russian territory.

With the rapid and efficient Iranian action, there was no one left to deactivate Iranian defenses, no one to receive the trafficked weapons to try to turn vandalism into armed revolt, no one to take advantage of the chaos caused by a massive airstrike by the US Air Force.

The Iranian lesson must be heeded by all counter-hegemonic countries in a scenario where color revolutions are once again becoming a common tool for imposing the will of the unipolar hegemon.

In This Dystopia You Can't Vote Against Wars But You Can Gamble On When They'll Start

Caitlin Johnstone 

I can’t get over the fact that people were casting bets on whether the US would bomb Iran the other day. It just says such dark things about the type of civilization we are living in.

In this dystopia, Americans are never given the option to vote for a president who won’t bomb foreign countries in wars of aggression. But they do have the option to gamble on when those bombs will be dropped.

They’re not allowed to vote against war, militarism and imperialism, but they can go to an app on their smartphone and place bets on how the war, militarism and imperialism will unfold.

Preventing your government from raining military explosives onto foreign countries full of civilians who are just trying to live their lives? No. Thumbs down. You don’t get to do that.

Pouring money into “prediction market” scams like Kalshi and Polymarket with bets on when those military explosives will end the lives of those foreign civilians? Yes. Thumbs up. You are encouraged to do that.

You’re allowed to get rich making an app which lets westerners gamble on military atrocities of immense humanitarian consequence.

You’re allowed to get rich starting a company that manufactures missiles, sells those missiles to the US government, and then pays think tanks and lobbyists to convince US decision makers to use those missiles in gratuitous acts of mass military violence.

You’re allowed to get rich buying stocks in the arms industry and then funding the political campaigns of politicians who pledge to help start wars.

As long as it’s profitable and sits within the extremely broad parameters of acceptable liberal norms, it’s perfectly legal. But when it comes to doing anything that might eat into those profits by making the world a less violent place, there’s not even a viable option at the ballot box.

Our world looks the way it looks because our entire civilization is driven by the mindless pursuit of profit.

It’s profitable to start wars, so the wars never end.

It’s profitable for corporations to destroy the ecosystem and offload the costs of industry onto the environment, so it keeps happening.

It’s profitable for capitalists to keep wages down and worker’s rights at a minimum, so wealth inequality gets worse and worse.

It’s profitable for plutocrats to manipulate legislation and government policy using campaign funding and corporate lobbying, so the government gets more and more corrupt and oligarchic while society gets more and more unjust and oppressive.

As long as we have systems in place which cause mass-scale human behavior to be driven by the pursuit of profit, things are going to keep getting more and more violent, abusive, poisoned, polluted, unjust, unhappy, and dystopian.

This will continue until we as a collective decide we’ve had enough and force new systems into place. Until then the object in motion shall remain in motion.