The misrepresentation and Islamophobic projection
*Dr Mathew Alford (academic, University of Bath)
**Syed Mohsin Abbas (journalist and political commentator)
*** Francis Hughes (author and activist)
Since its Revolution in 1979, Iran has been despised by some regional and Western powers. Yet, the political system that replaced the Shah has survived for 46 years amid confused policies and attitudes among its foes. In the past two decades the country has developed its infrastructure, industries and, to a certain extent, its image. But in the past year it has also suffered serious downturns in its regional influence. It may be time to read Iran from outside the box in order to really understand the dynamics of an evolving power in a troubled region.
Tuesday 18th February 2025
Dr Matthew Alford: An evil dictator is on the brink of making a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside the Zagros mountains. With no option, the American military deploys jets and, against all odds, destroys the factory — then flies home to the strains of “[Highway to the] Danger Zone”.
An evil dictator is on the brink of using a nuclear bomb. With no option, the American military deploys secret agents and, against all odds, triggers a democratic revolution by blowing up the dictator in his helicopter to the strains of Katy Perry’s “Firework”.
I‘ve just outlined the plots of “Top Gun: Maverick” starring Tom Cruise and The Interview starring Seth Rogan.
But it also describes real world aspirations — here towards Iran and North Korea — from top policymakers across Nato.
These parallels are no coincidence. Because each film was actually subject to script changes imposed by Washington. In our new documentary Theaters of War, we show how the CIA and Defence Department have exercised editorial control over thousands of films and TV shows in exchange for lending equipment like helicopters to producers to use on screen.
Such films reflect and construct the paranoid fantasies of our imperial masters, most of them with direct script input: Iran taking Western hostages in Ben Affleck’s “Argo”; kindly marines unjustly slaughtered for handing out grain to hungry Africans in “Black Hawk Down”; US politicians too innocent to realise that arming Islamic terrorists will lead to 9/11 in the Julia Roberts hit “Charlie Wilson’s War”, and the Gerard Butler film “Kandahar” in which an evil dictator is on the brink of manufacturing a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside a mountain. With no option and against all odds…
Is it any wonder that 30 per cent of Americans in a poll said they want to bomb Agrabah, the capital city in Disney’s “Aladdin”?
Is it any wonder that our politicians, as though clutching rosary beads, prefigure Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the word “illegal” with no sense of irony and “unprovoked” with no sense of history?
When was the last thing you saw depicting Russia which didn’t have it crawling with tyrants? “Red Dawn”? “Rambo”; “Air Force One”; “Hunter Killer”; “James Bond”; “Jack Ryan”; “24”; “Homeland”; “Stranger Things”…”The 6 O’Clock News”?
The US government has suppressed scripts — but on others it has overturned their original messages. In the “Iron Man” screenplay, Robert Downey Jr’s hero was opposed to his father’s arms business. After rewrites he became the ultimate evangelist for a bloodless industry: “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”
For four decades, almost all script changes in Hollywood had been suppressed until our team used the law to acquire large bundles of government documentation. Regardless, the Defence Department’s entertainment boss compared his role in the “court” of Hollywood to that of a “minor eunuch.”
This from a man who controlled hundreds of titles including 12 of the top 20 grossing film franchises — more than Steven Spielberg. His army of Little Hitlers have ensured none of the scripts passing their desks depict: war crimes; coups; assassinations; torture, or indeed anything that “reminds the public” of the “nasty conspiracies” in which America has engaged.
Now, let’s face it – Hollywood producers and celebrities are terrible on foreign policy issues even without such state interference.
Consider Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the 2013 film “Fifth Estate”. Assange tried reasoning with Cumberbatch, saying the studio will use him as “a hired gun, to assume the appearance of the truth in order to assassinate it.”
Sherlock scoffed: “As if I am an easily bought cypher for right-wing propaganda” and “I’ve worked far less hard for more money on other projects.” Cumberbatch demurred when asked to oppose the 35-year prison sentence for Assange’s colleague Chelsea Manning, pontificating: “Isn’t it hypocritical to say, we should know everything about you as a government, but the government can’t know anything about us?”
Curiously, while “Fifth Estate” presents Assange as a shifty egotist, it is Cumberbatch who claims “there is only personal truth” and wanted to play the Assange lead because “I’m a vain actor.”
Or consider the state affiliations of another “nice” celebrity, Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen’s production company claims they lied to the US military to gain entry into a base in Alabama but the scenes there feel staged, setting up Cohen’s character Bruno for a series of one-liners. Cohen apparently escaped by squeezing under a rapidly closing gate while guards yelled in pursuit. Utterly implausible – he will have cooperated with the military.
Another time, Bruno interviewed a “terrorist” discovered through Cohen’s CIA contact. This was in fact a Palestinian greengrocer who said Cohen told him the interview would be about his peace activism. The resultant case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
In Israel, actually, Bruno was beaten by a crowd of Israelis, who, angered by his camp clothing, started to stone him on camera. For the first time, Cohen broke character. He desperately yelled that he was an Israeli Jew, not a homosexual foreigner and fled for his life.
The footage has never emerged even though it would presumably highlight racism, supposedly something Sacha Baron Cohen is concerned about. Wrong racists.
Call this propaganda, soft-censorship, or threat construction — whatever — it shapes attitudes to foreign policy and it is ridiculous: in 2003 the Americans said Iraq had 5,000 tonnes of mustard gas but after 13 years of sanctions we didn’t even find mustard. Or remember when the Americans invoked the terror of China’s spy balloon. Gee, I hope the Chinese don’t send any more party paraphernalia. I’d hate for them to make us sit on a Whoopee Cushion.
Of course, outside the political fiction projected in the blue glow of our spooky little monitors, there is a real threat — it is us. On Ukraine alone, leaks by people of conscience indicate over a million casualties in a deadlocked war and yet still we insist we “weaken” Russia, detonate our own gas supply and bring the fight to Crimea.
Even international specialist John Mearsheimer, propelled to fame by his opposition to the war, does so on the grounds that we should be allying with Moscow to threaten China, oafishly asserting that if not Beijing will end up stationing missile systems in Mexico and Canada to target the United States.
Ours is a demented political culture, egged on by hubristic visions of its own righteousness. We urgently need to be a purposeful peace movement, with our eyes open to how the media holds diplomacy in abject contempt.
This 2025 speech was based on a talk first delivered for TEDx in 2023, here with minor updates.
Syed Mohsin Abbas: The Islamic Republic of Iran. My disclaimer is that I have a natural affinity to it because of my ancestry. We originate from Mashad in Iran but we settled in Kashmir and the Punjab. But there are links between even our region in Iran in terms of food, culture and language – there is no real aspect of our life in Pakistan or large parts of India that is not influenced by Persian culture. It was Iranian culture, Iranian artisans, Iranian thinkers and philosophers which influenced the Mughal civilisation. They also influenced the Ottomans.
So the input of the Islamic Republic of Iran is completely impossible to over value. We cannot have an Islamic world that developed culturally, intellectually, scientifically and spiritually without the people of Iran being at the heart of it.
Fast forward to 1979 a revolution took place which was not to the liking of US imperialism. Maybe 20 years earlier they also prevented democracy from emerging in Iran by supporting the 1953 Mosaddegh government and trying to replace it with the despotic monarchy of the Shah.
This has to be noted because most of today’s relationship with America and the West that Iran has is rooted in that time. Maybe also in the tobacco revolution in the early 20th century. At the heart of it there has always been a religious and spiritual objection to what America and the West was doing in terms of its imperials design.
The resistance culminated in this revolution. My own reading of it is that nobody had any expectation that a religious democracy or a spiritually led religious movement would emerge from this revolution. The Americans expected that secular liberals like Bani Sadr would have taken power and the Americans would have supported that kind of establishment if it had emerged.
But it quickly became clear that the public and the youth in particular and the masses who were not necessarily urban based were very much behind the idea of an Islamic revolution. They were behind a leader who related to them because he led according to the example of Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) and the Ahl Al Bayt. Specific to Iran is the fact that they are one of the only majority Shia Muslim nations. Azerbaijan is the other one.
Iran is therefore very unique. The Iranian culture makes Iran very different from any other Islamic state. It is also different in the way that it handled everything since 1979. There is a real pride. The Iranians are proud of their millennia long civilisation. They would regard themselves as Persians. They are not a power that emerged yesterday like the Americans.
So I think the Iranians do have a sense of patience in being able to see out any great powers in terms of what they try to do in the region. We are seeing now that the success and failures of Iran. Like any country they have their successes and their failures. I would rate the successes first.
Going through them briefly the fact that vilayet e faqih as a political system, a religious democracy, has survived in this period of time under the constant psychological operations regime change, false flags, counter revolution, call it what you like. It has been incessant. I don’t think there was a day when the planners and the plotters in London, Washington or Tel Aviv have not been working to destroy vilayet e faqih, to destroy the religious democracy.
Why? Because at heart of vilayet e faqih they have role models which the West does not know about. You can have all the artificial aspects of a revolution or a nation but at the heart of it if it lacks the spirit or the morals or the virtue ethics based ideology it cannot last. If it lacks authenticity in terms of a culture it also cannot last.
Iran has an incredible advantage. It has all of these ingredients. I don’t trust all Iranians. People are people. We all have our frailties; we cannot be a paradigm of virtue all the time. But Imam Khomeini spent his life fighting for this faqih. But to get a follow on from that is incredibly difficult. With many revolutions there is a counter revolution. And you have to be able to give people something which has integrity and which can offer its people a true sovereignty.
Ayatollah Khomeini achieved this during the three or four decades that he was there through his own personality. He had this unique combination of metaphysics, mysticism, culture and politics: a polymath. A man of letters – a poet, a man who also had huge political acumen when he served as president. He met Nelson Mandela and virtually all political leaders. That was very unique because in the West you won’t find somebody who has a spiritual and meta physical base. Very rarely. You might find the other qualities but the virtue ethnics have to be in line with the notion of the perfect man. He has done an incredible job. People may want to malign him with all sorts of propaganda and hasbara which the Israelis and Zionists are very good at pumping out.
He has held a nation together with his own personality. He is still regarded very much as the father figure who guards the essence of the revolution. Within that there are divisions. The Iranians are not stupid and they are not blind. Every time I have been to Iran it is a very vibrant political culture, there are very strong views. They are very intelligent.
For me they place to much emphasis on meritocracy, concentrating on Phd’s. This is not in the real spirit of Iranian spiritual culture in the spirit of Rumi and Hafez and all those other greats. They need to have confidence in their own culture. They are being attacked by soft power and media coming from Western backed sources, pumped by hundreds of news channels which are funded largely by the Americans and neo liberals. That is so incessant. They are firing secular neo liberal culture at Iran to sell them the idea that they should get rid of the originality of their own culture.
The vilayet e faqih represents the model for that. The ayatollah has criticised his own country. He said we have got corruption, we are mismanaging. We are falling for some of the things the Western establishment says and we should not believe everything they say.
The discussion to reign in Iran’s nuclear capability was a classic example of that. For years Iran worked on that contract. The Europeans evaded it and Trump pulled out of it. So the Western establishments speak with forked tongues. You can’t blame Ayatollah Khamenei because they have been violated every time. But still the Iranian people, some of them, have a little bit of faith in the West. I probably wouldn’t share that optimism. They are still doing it now. The current establishment is one of those reformist establishments. They have been in power more than the principalists who people regard as the gung ho types who want no relations with the West.
So there are dynamics which are working critically. There is democracy. It may not be of the kind we have here in the sense that there are parameters which are based Islamic divine law. But there is a lot of compassion within that law. There are a lot of things which Sharia is never credited with by Western propaganda that we generally hear about.
The only thing that the West is interested in is whether women wear hijab or not. They are not bothered that women make up 60 – 70 percent of the university population. They are not bothered that more universities have been opened in Iran during this period than virtually any other country I can think of. They are not bothered that Iran has a science and technology advancement which is absolutely phenomenal . They have robotics and bio medical engineering abilities. They work with all these scientific advancements and they are also technologically capable of building infrastructure. They have the capability to make ballistic missiles. Without those they probably wouldn’t be there now. They would be where Qadhafi is and where Syria is probably.
The one deterrent that has kept this revolution alive is the IRGC. In this country they are a proscribed organisation yet they are the vanguard of those millions of Iranians who sacrificed themselves on the battle fields of the Western sponsored Saddam Hussein attack and invasion of Iran. They survived that. They created an entire mechanism which is based on self defence: the basijis the people on the ground who pledged to maintain the revolutionary system and spirit and the IRGC which is the military wing.
And the military wing’s success is that Iran still exists. If it was not for them Iran would have been attacked by Israel and America and Iran would have been finished. So their success lies in survival. That is a miracle in itself.
They learned very quickly that what the West does is to destabilize your country. So they send in insurgents and terrorists. So what Iran quite legitimately did was to go by Ayatollah Khomeini’s recommendation that they do what Islam says and protect the oppressed. And around West Asia they support oppressed people. Yemen today would not be resisting Iranian assistance. The Palestinian resistance would not be able to fight without Iranian asymmetric training. Hezbollah in Lebanon.
There has never been a defeat of the Iranian supported movements. It happened only in Syria where Iran did not have a real ground force or real commitment. Assad was with Russia rather than with Iran. Only there has there been a set back.
The only reason Iran is not being attacked is because of the nuclear capability. They can make a nuclear weapon but Ayatollah Khamenei has said actually we should not make a weapon of mass destruction which kills children and birds and bees and what not. That is not part our warfare doctrine. They are at this stand off point.
Coming back to successes. Reluctantly Iran has had to adopt a resistance economy. There are 360 degree full spectrum sanctions by America and its allies. Iran has never been able to prosper. Was it not for the sanctions Iran would never be in the kind of problems it is in.
The other issue is that most of the Iranian elites and bureaucracy are a problem to a great extent. They have not changed the old bureaucratic systems. Ayatollah Khamenei tells them off about that. They have also failed in the soft war defence capacity. The film, arts and cultural brethren need to up their game to protect Iran’s cultural and spiritual identity more if they want to survive. The soft power attack of the Anglo Zionist empire.
The military attack is not a problem. The real issue is can Iran build a soft power deterrent. Can they really get their own people to buy into the spirituality of Islam on a political level and to actually go to the root of lifestyle. Iranians have an advantage. They are family orientated. They are not into the 2030 nonsense of depopulation and fake equality. They are not easily brought into what the neo-Western liberal globalist agenda. They resisted that.
But they let the International Atomic Agency in. This reliance on international agencies like the United Nations. It is a diplomatic strategy. They don’t really trust them but they do it just to give them a channel to calm things down against the Israelis.
But by and large and I think everybody knows that these institutions serve transnational, corporate and Zio-Western interests. They have no other purpose and they are advancing those interests. And that is why Iran is on the defensive but at the same time surviving.
In Iran on personal level there is the love, the manners, the hospitality, the family-orientation, the simplicity of that society. It is really refreshing to see. They ruined Tehran. They should have left it as a green city but somebody decided to build high rises and make money out of that. You can’t stop all the corrupt people but the intention is there.
We have seen what neo liberalism does to the family and to Western society as a whole. They reject it on the basis of a compassionate Islam not the Western manufactured Islam of the Ikhwan Muslimin, the not Western manufactured Islam of Al Qaeda or of ISIS. Those are not Islam. Those are manufactured strains of cults in order to create divide and rule scenarios in West Asia. If the Islam is Sufistic, funny, metaphysical you would find that Iran would have an awful lot to offer the world if they were not constantly attacked and hampered.
Francis Hughes: Hollywood is utilised as a weapon of mass destruction.
Like the mainstream media, its purpose is to distract, disrupt and misinform its target audience firstly in its sphere of influence in the West and secondly, as a propaganda tool to promote Western hegemonic foreign policy for regime change destabilisation and the manufacture of consent for wars and military intervention.
Hollywood should not be seen as a stand-alone vehicle for an attack upon those sovereign nations and governments who are the targets of American and European imperialism it is just one component of a very sophisticated machine used to control and brainwash intelligent people into believing a narrative that is in the interests of globalists and warmongers and to the detriment of every single human being on the planet.
Hollywood portrays the American dream of freedom ambition and the false notion that hard work leads to riches in a nation of possibilities. It projects its soft power in its movies of a country where the population drive expensive cars, lives in beautiful homes, follows well-paid careers and lives in middle suburban luxury. It creates a false reality that we can all live the dream of a secure life filled with family fun and wealth. The actors are usually well groomed, modelling handsome looks and athletic bodies.
The reality for tens of millions of Americans is the exact opposite. A country of food banks, homelessness, drug addiction, violence, poverty, racism, extortionate health costs and education fees. The utopia of American life as portrayed by Hollywood is as fictional as the stories it presents in cinemas and on our television screens. America is indeed the belly of the beast, a nation of white privilege Anglo-Saxon domination prejudice and increasing rancour.
A country that is falling apart as society becomes more fractured and disintegrated where the disparity between rich and poor is greater now than at any time in history, where the class struggle between the elite and the worker has been transformed into confrontation for services between with the most disadvantaged in society leading to the ghettoisation of the most impoverished encouraging fascism against the other as the oligarchs laugh all the way to the bank.
The basic wage in America, much like parts of Europe, has stagnated since the financial collapse of 2008. How the average American worker survives is beyond me. The dream of each generation surpassing that of their parents is over if it even existed.
America’s 1950s to 1990 could be described as the halcyon days for the middle class. The destruction of Europe created a huge market for American companies to exploit. Those days are gone. Hollywood today is a hotbed of distraction.
There have been many books written to explain why the CIA and others of the deep state promote their messages of change through highly paid in some cases immoral actors who care only for the money trappings of success and little for their participation in a well-financed propaganda machine.
Throughout the last few decades, we have seen the demonisation of Iran Iraq Cuba Venezuela Lebanon Palestine Yemen Libya. We have witnessed regime change, colour revolutions, coups and wars of intervention camouflaged behind the banner of human rights and freedom.
Gaddafi Assad Hussein. Does anyone remember the weapons of mass destruction? Now that was pure theatre. The Kuwaiti nurse spoke chillingly of watching neonatal babies being taken from warm incubators and being left to die on the cold floor by Iraqi soldiers. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United Nations. Pure fantasy is a masterpiece in deception.
Hollywood like mainstream media exists to entertain the masses while simultaneously when required used to control the public narrative and cajole the populace to accept the prevailing orthodoxy at that time.
Iran has been the focus of this disinformation since 1979. The Iranian revolution which disposed of the dictator Shah imposed on the people of Iran in 1952 by a CIA M16 coup at the best of the Anglo-Dutch oil conglomerate has been an itch the West is keen to scratch. A sovereign nation anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian at its core with resources of oil and minerals has long been a focus for regime change by consecutive American and European administrations.
As an integral part of the Axis of Resistance and a bulwark against Zionist fascist expansionism in the region, it is subject daily to attacks upon its character, its civil and administrative structure, its culture and societal values.
It is portrayed as a theocratic dictatorship run by Mullahs who enforce strict Islamic law on the populace. A country where men rule and women are subjected. A country of conservative non-progressive dictators who hold civil society to ransom. A backward-looking religious cult that enslaves the people to enrich itself and has no regard for freedom of speech for dissent or opposition. The airwaves are saturated with vitriolic commentators demanding Iran must change, the government must fall western values have to be accepted, and the old order must make way for a new liberal elite.
In reality, the war on Iran from the propaganda bastions of CNN Fox News BBC Le Monde Die Welte is simply a manifestation of Western imperialism’s desire to rape Iran and other targeted nations of their natural resource for the benefit of billionaires in the West and the impoverishment of the people of the global south.
We are witnessing 17th century colonialism using 21st-century weapons, finance, military intervention, sanctions propaganda and Hollywood 3d heroes. During the cold war we were treated to films about how America and Britain were victorious in the second world war.
The Battle of Britain, Anzio, Battle of the Bulge, then we had the Vietnam War The Green Berets, We Were Soldiers, Apocalypse Now all describing the enemy as subhuman evil sadistic monsters torturing prisoners raping women and our Western heroes the very epitome of honour sacrifice and valour.
Well, we all remember Guantanamo Bay Abu Ghraib, Julian Assange? The more I witness the carnage acts of barbarity and inhumanity displayed proudly for all to see by the Western carpetbaggers by the Zionist baby killers I believe what we are witnessing is projection.
It is the foot soldiers of Biden Trump Netanyahu and Zelensky who are carrying out crimes against humanity from gang-raping prisoners to sexually abusing women and children from using starvation carpet bombings genocide and ethnic cleansing as their chosen methods of subjugation It is the West, not the East that I accuse of violence against the innocent in their war of terror of denying freedom of speech freedom of assembly freedom of opposition and freedom for the right to live in peace.
Hollywood and increasingly the mainstream media is being saturated with Islamophobic tropes. Having created war destruction death and tens of millions of refugees with its wars of avarice in West Asia Africa Latin America and the Caribbean the huge tidal wave of human relocation due to these abhorrent unnecessary wars is being used to reconstruct fascism around one single goal.
I urge you to consider carefully what is happening now and potentially what is going to happen in the near future. Immigration is being used by Western states be it North America or Europe to create civil strife and pit the poor of America and Europe against the immigrant instead of people uniting together to take control of the means of power and the distribution of wealth they are being led into a cel de sac to slug it out over school places, hospital waiting lists ,low paid casual insecure employment, inadequate housing stock and provision of services.
We are being told its immigration legal or illegal that is the root cause of the fragmentation of British society. Fascism is being rebranded as patriotism. It is stalking the streets from Kiev to Kensington. All over Europe we can see the opposition to neo liberal failures in government is being led by the right.
Racism is the glue that holds these organisations together. Make America Great Again is now Make Britain Great Again, Make France Great Again, Make Austria Great Again I dare say Hitler once said let’s Make Germany Great Again.
The inherent danger to every Muslim country and every Muslim living working or being educated in the West is that Islamophobia is promoted as the danger to Western civilisation. We have all heard to rhetoric they are grooming our children there are more mosques than churches Sharia Law will be forced upon us they will stop us eating pork and we must convert or die.
This is now the mainstream discourse for fascists all over Europe including the UK and Ireland. Zionism is funding some of these far-right groups and individuals. It’s a case of looking over there to see what the Muslims are doing . It’s a distraction , its misdirection and it’s dangerous. I tell you brothers and sisters I believe the Zionists want Christians and Muslims to fight each other while they sit in the background and eat popcorn.
The danger is Hollywood the danger is MSM the danger is real but the media is only but one tool of the elite and they mean to use everything at their disposal to divide us to separate us to emasculate us and eventually to enslave us again as in feudal times
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”. Malcolm X much like Nasrallah and they assassinated him too.
Vigilance is the cornerstone of security and unity is the foundation of a cohesive nation. We need both to circumvent the interventionist designs imperialism has for Iran and the rest of us.
* Dr. Matthew AIford is a writer, speaker, and producer specialising in propaganda, power, and global politics. His PhD thesis applied Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model to contemporary Hollywood and his subsequent research similarly concerns the representation of Western power. Dr. Alford co-produced the films Theatres of War (2022) and “The Writer with No Hands” (2014). Both films won ‘Best Documentary’ at numerous international festivals. Dr. Alford’s books have been translated into Chinese, Persian, & French. In 2023, he presented on Julian Assange’s legal case for the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights at the UN in Geneva.
**Syed Mohsin Abbas is a TV Journalist, Broadcaster and Documentary Producer with 25 years of experience. He is an expert in Political, Religious, Counter terrorism, Education, Arts and Culture project delivery experience. Mohsin has a track record in event management of large and small scale concerts, festivals and sports events as lead coordinator. He has extensive experience in Muslim communities and cultures of the Islamic world. He worked with Press TV and Hidayat TV.
***Francis Hughes was born in Belfast and is a journalist and author. He is the Director of Palestine Aid, a registered charity in North of Ireland. He is also the author of two books: “My walk With Palestine” and “Voices from Donbas”. Frances also writes articles which are published in the Arabic daily newspaper “Al Mayadeen” and other outlets. He joined one of the siege-busting convoys to Gaza in 2010. Francis contributes to Hedayat TV and The Muslim Channel.
