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.

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.

Venezuela and Iran: A Shared Struggle

By Seyed Mohammad Marandi

In a move that stunned the world, the United States military launched attacks across the Venezuelan capital, bombing multiple sites, including a major academic and scientific center and a medical warehouse, as if to stress the similarities between US and Zionist troops. The operation culminated in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and the murder of roughly 100 people.

This shameless act followed months of escalation. It began with threats over fabricated allegations of drug shipments, followed by a military buildup in the Caribbean. Then came a series of deadly missile strikes on boats, strikes that legal experts worldwide decried as unlawful, murdering over a hundred people, not all of them even Venezuelan. Most victims were likely ordinary fishermen or others simply struggling to feed their families.

Then, predictably, the narrative shifted to the real objective: oil. One hour after President Maduro was abducted, the White House made its announcement. The world looked on with disgust and shock to see a shackled head of state, albeit in high spirits, alongside his wife, who had been badly beaten by US troops.

The US president declared that Venezuela’s oil, the planet’s largest proven reserves, was now an indefinite American asset. From here on, its many billions in sovereign wealth were to be funneled through and stolen by Washington.

In Caracas, the response was a nation’s fury. The vice president and now acting president of Venezuela denounced an illegal, illegitimate kidnapping, a blatant violation of the UN Charter and all norms of human decency. Global condemnation was swift and widespread, emanating from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It came from every corner except the capitals of Washington’s closest allies: the Israeli regime, the European Union, and other pro-Western regimes.

A new line was being drawn in real time for the whole world to see. A world leader abducted by a foreign army. A nation’s wealth declared the permanent property of another. The so-called rules-based international order torn to shreds. But the story is far from over. Resistance in Venezuela is alive.

This brings us to the Iran-Venezuela partnership, an alliance branded from the outset by the empire as a global threat. It is no coincidence that Zionists and neoconservatives target Iran and Venezuela simultaneously. Their partnership represents a formidable challenge to this era of predatory imperialism. Its significance lies not only in economic and political cooperation, but in the awareness, solidarity, and understanding forged among the global majority, a force whose power cannot be measured in material terms. The demonization promoted by the empire and its media machine loses much of its potency as most people across Latin America and West Asia recognize their shared truths, ideals, and aspirations. This recognition is poison to the empire.

Despite Western asset theft, sanctions, violent regime-change operations, color revolution projects, and even war, the empire’s crafted narrative remains singular and dark: a strategic menace, an axis of anti-American authoritarianism, a marriage between two so-called pariah states. Within this frame, allegations build into a manufactured climate of fear. The partnership is branded as a pact for authoritarian cooperation. But in truth, it has become the world’s most advanced laboratory for evading illegal sanctions, sanctions deployed by the US and its allies to strangle nations, collapse economies, destroy jobs, increase poverty, break families, kill the sick for lack of medicine, unravel the fabric of societies, and bring nations to their knees.

The empire portrays a somehow sinister shadow economy conducting its business in the dark, on the high seas. This characterization is then made to morph inevitably into the ultimate security threat: military advisers, Iranian drones on Venezuelan soil, culminating in some alleged Hezbollah link. Here the narrative makes its decisive leap, transforming the threat from mere economic into something framed as existential, an illusion of danger to the United States itself. Finally, it is presented as a grand conspiracy: two isolated regimes plotting to invade the US with immigrants and refugees, kill its population with drugs, and other accusations that, while insane, remain tragically believable to a large segment of the heavily propagandized American public.

This is the narrative. It has been used to justify many years of barbaric sanctions against women and children. And now it has justified the abduction of a sovereign nation’s president and the massacre of roughly 200 people. This so-called criminal partnership is, of course, something else entirely. It is a determined collaboration between two nations forging an alternative path, a practical blueprint for preserving their independence in the face of aggression and collective punishment by the United States.

The relentless focus on an alleged global terrorist threat is a strategic distraction. This framing is designed to obscure the tangible daily realities that truly bind these brotherly nations: the engineers reviving refineries, the agricultural technology feeding cities, the 20-year strategic plan signed in Tehran. This is the real struggle, not merely to survive, but to sustain a modern state against a comprehensive and barbaric economic siege.

Let us interrogate the architecture of the story itself: how a narrative is weaponized, brick by brick, until the wall it builds is so high it conceals the human reality on the other side, justifying any action taken behind it. In the struggle for a multipolar world, who defines terrorism? Who defines legitimacy and morality? And what price are nations forced to pay to write their own history?

For Iran, this relationship is more than a mere strategic or economic alliance. It is the execution of a national mission, a principle engraved into the very foundations of the state. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran is explicit. It contains a revolutionary mandate committing the state to the defense of the mustaz’afin, the oppressed and the downtrodden wherever they may be. This principle provides a lens through which the struggles of the Palestinian, but also the Bosnian, the South African, the Cuban, and yes, the Venezuelan, are seen as one and the same: a unified struggle against imperial domination and oppression.

This is not theoretical. It is a record of action. When most of the world’s governments were still conducting business with apartheid South Africa, the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran immediately severed all ties. It became a vocal champion of the ANC and other resistance organizations, offering critical support to the anti-apartheid struggle while the West backed white supremacist rule. In the 1990s, as Europe stood by and watched a genocide unfold in Bosnia, Iran acted. It defied a UN arms embargo to provide the Bosnian army with crucial weapons, supplies, and military advisers, a lifeline that was key to ensuring the nation’s survival.

So when Iran looks at Venezuela today, an independent nation under brutal economic warfare, its assets stolen, its leader now abducted, it does not see a mere strategic partner. Iran sees a shared struggle against oppression. This constitutional and ideological imperative makes its principled stance more than a byproduct of the alliance. It is the soul of the alliance. And it is from this bedrock principle that, despite threats, cooperation has grown: a partnership forged in the urgent practical need to breathe life into an economy under siege. This reveals the real story, not of a dark axis, but of a blueprint for economic sovereignty forged in defiance of a brutal hegemon.

The partnership between Iran and Venezuela is neither ancient nor inevitable. It is a modern creation, forged by a shared vision of a multipolar world and hardened in the relentless pressure cooker of economic siege. For most of history, Tehran and Caracas were distant acquaintances. That changed at the turn of the century with a powerful fusion of ideologies: Bolivarian socialism and Islamic revolutionary thought, united by a single towering conviction, resistance to unipolar dominance.

The strategic bridge between Caracas and Tehran began construction in the early 2000s under Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Iran’s Mohammad Khatami. Their diplomatic courtship started in earnest in 2001 and was cemented through reciprocal state visits and major cooperation agreements in energy and construction. The partnership evolved further under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, solidifying from 2005 onward into a declared axis of unity against US imperialism.

The scale of cooperation for two heavily sanctioned nations was quite remarkable. They signed more than 270 bilateral deals. In 2007, they announced a $2 billion joint fund to invest in other countries attempting to liberate themselves. The commitment was underscored in 2006 when Chávez pledged that Venezuela would stay by Iran at any time and under any condition. By March 2005, the expanding partnership and Venezuela’s backing of Iran’s nuclear program was causing alarm within the US administration.

On the ground, Iranian firms built ammunition and cement factories, opened a car plant, and launched direct air links between their capitals. The value of Iranian industrial projects in Venezuela reached $4 billion, and bilateral trade had grown significantly by 2008. The bond held firm under Nicolás Maduro. However, the relationship soon faced its most severe challenge: comprehensive, crushing sanctions from the United States. This external pressure transformed their axis into a vital practical lifeline. Vision alone does not keep the lights on. Consequently, the alliance evolved from a union of rhetoric into a pragmatic pact for survival and development.

By 2020, Venezuela’s refining industry had collapsed. In response, Iran dispatched five tankers carrying 60 million gallons of gasoline on a defiant 15,000-kilometer voyage, with both nations warning the US against interference. This was a bold rescue mission for energy sovereignty, later formalized into a €110-million contract to repair Venezuela’s El Palito refinery. The cooperation, however, expanded far beyond oil. An Iranian supermarket chain opened in Caracas, and the two nations even launched joint nanotechnology research. This was a comprehensive project for building sovereign capacity, encompassing everything from food security and industry to advanced technology.

Critically, the cooperation extended into the cultural and scientific realms of both nations. Ministers of science, culture, and education traveled back and forth. This was no longer merely about trade; it was the forging of a long-term intellectual alliance. But this tangible, multidimensional success did not go unnoticed. In Washington, alarm solidified into formal counter-strategy. As early as 2012, the US Congress held hearings and drafted legislation specifically to counter Iran’s growing presence and hostile activity in the Western Hemisphere.

A peaceful partnership dedicated to improving lives had been officially designated an adversary in American law. And with that gaze fixed upon it, the dark narrative intensified. Mossad spread false reports of a planned Iranian naval base at a Venezuelan port. In Washington, and bizarrely across the obedient US media, the partnership was no longer framed as a regional challenge, but as an existential security threat on America’s doorstep.

Nevertheless, in 2022, the two countries defiantly signed a 20-year strategic cooperation plan in Tehran, inked by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Despite the escalating threats, each phase of the relationship built upon the last. It was this shared vision that made practical cooperation possible. It was this unyielding commitment to sovereignty and freedom from domination that ultimately led to the murders in the Caribbean, the bloodshed in Venezuela, and the kidnapping of its president.

But this is not a fleeting alignment. It is a structural alliance, a resilient network that has survived the passing of its founder, the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. It has persevered and thrived despite political transitions, over two decades of US pressure, and direct congressional action to counter it. These two nations concluded early on that when you are excluded from the system, you do not plead for re-entry. You build an alternative, piece by piece.

But when a new blueprint for independence is being written, what does the old power do? It seeks to erase the architects, and more importantly, the architecture. The attack on Venezuela was a message delivered to every nation seeking independence: “You are not safe. Your sovereignty is conditional. Your resources are forfeit.” The applause from the Zionist regime in response to murder and aggression confirmed the quality of the Venezuelan–Iranian relationship and the identity and nature of the antagonist.

The persistent rumors, often sourced to Israeli regime intelligence, of an Iranian military outpost or a Hezbollah hub in the Caribbean were more than ammunition for a hostile narrative. They revealed the power behind the curtain. To the supremacism of Zionism and its neoconservative allies, who are in fact one and the same, this is the ultimate threat. The very existence of independent nations pursuing their own dignity and honor and demanding equal rights is an existential threat to their domination. For them, such a threat justifies any response.

But the planners of this operation made a critical miscalculation. They believed that by severing the head, the body would collapse. They did not understand the roots. This alliance was the vanguard of a multipolar world and was founded upon a deep-rooted ideological belief in the shared dignity and honor of both peoples. It sought to challenge the architecture of a unipolar order even before the rise of antagonism between the West and Russia or China. It asserted the right of nations to chart their own independent course. This brotherhood helped ignite a fire that cannot be quenched by a dying empire, no matter how violently it lashes out.

The solidarity and comradeship between people of different continents, races, and religions have been a beacon of hope for the post-American era. This alliance was never merely bilateral. It is a cornerstone of a broader constellation within BRICS and the Global South of nations determined to write their own rules, to live on their own terms, and to reject the exhausted logic of colonialism in a new guise.

Anti-colonial sentiment is not a relic in Caracas or Tehran. It is the very fuel of their people’s resolve to resist piracy, looting, and, most importantly, the colonization of the mind. Time will prove that the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro has not cowed the Venezuelan people into submission. Instead, it has made their resistance a global inspiration, illuminating for the entire world the strength of a nation determined to defy an empire.

Across the world, people now witness men and women marching in defiance, refusing to be colonized by Washington. Meanwhile, their allies in Iran, likewise struggling against Zionist terror and aggression, will continue to stand by Venezuela through thick and thin. So, the collective march toward liberation from empire will continue.