The Laundering of a Murderous Narrative
Babak Payami
The Islamo-Fascist regime in Iran does not need your agreement. It needs your uncertainty. It
turns atrocity into “complexity” through three laundries: credentials, prestige platforms, and
covert influence networks. Western institutions can stop being part of the machine by applying
one boring, radical rule: evidence before amplification. Principle over ideological expediency.
Humanity over all.
Confusion is the product
For decades the Islamic Regime in Iran has run a disciplined influence operation aimed at one outcome: moral confusion. Not persuasion. Confusion. Confusion numbs outrage, delays action,
and buys time. When time is bought with bullets, confusion becomes a weapon. This machinery runs on the laundered financial resources of one of the world’s richest countries
but the gears that it turns, are in the misinformed, credulous, western pseudo-liberals who patronize the people of Iran and instrumentalize their suffering for their own, misguided
objectives.
The mechanism is visible in real time. A regime kills, then cuts communications and kills more. That is not public order. It is evidence control. Amnesty International has documented a current
pattern of unlawful killings, sweeping arrests, and an internet and telecom shutdown that
obstructs documentation and accountability. The UN Human Rights Council has called for an
urgent investigation into allegations of serious violations linked to protests that began December
28, 2025.
Death toll figures are disputed, and that dispute is the point. Officials cite numbers in the low
thousands, while independent documentation and reporting describe far higher totals, including
estimates that reach into the tens of thousands. A blackout is designed to keep the final number
unknowable.
Meanwhile, no one in the west, those bleeding heart humanitarians setting up tents on university
campuses, asks how come this regime can arrest a dissident for sending a private message but
can’t account for how many were killed on the streets?
Three Laundries, One Result
The regime’s message moves through three filters. Each one makes atrocity sound less like a
crime and more like a “situation.”
1) Credential laundering
Credential laundering is when a title becomes a sterilizer. A media ecosystem treats “professor”
or “expert” as a guarantee of good faith. The regime exploits that reflex, and Western institutions
indulge it.
This is not about policing opinion. It is about basic standards. If a guest is presented as an
authority, the audience deserves more than posture. It deserves evidence, relevant affiliations,
and hostile questioning when claims track a violent state’s talking points. To add insult to injury,
is when the host, so-called champion of free speech and journalism, is devastatingly uninformed
about the situation at hand and stands like a deer in headlights when propaganda and
misinformation is shamelessly laundered through their outlet.
Names matter because systems are made of people. Hamid Dabashi at Columbia and Mohammad
Marandi at the University of Tehran illustrate the pipeline: academic branding can grant instant
legitimacy to narratives that would be rejected on sight if delivered by an official spokesperson.
The chyron does half the work. The viewer is trained to trust the credential before interrogating
the claim. The machinery that has produced this mud has become invisible through years of
infiltration and the palimpsest of ignorance filtered through ill-informed ideological fervor.
A title is not a truth serum. It is a marketing asset.
2) Platform laundering
Platform laundering is worse because it trades in prestige.
In January 2026, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Iran’s foreign minister Seyed
Abbas Araghchi defending the regime’s crackdown. An op-ed is not a neutral container. It signals
legitimacy. It implies the author is a normal statesman participating in a democratic marketplace
of ideas.
That is the moral inversion. When a regime is accused of mass killing and concealment, and a
leading outlet offers its official a prestige lane unchallenged by facts, the outlet is not “hearing
both sides.” It is helping power rewrite the incident report.
Even NetBlocks publicly urged the Journal to add context because the op-ed ran during an
ongoing communications blackout. When a watchdog has to remind an editorial board what a
blackout is for, the problem is not “balance.” It is judgment.
3) Network laundering
The third layer is operational, not rhetorical. Influence operations are not a conspiracy theory.
They are documented practice. The U.S. Department of Justice charged two Iranian nationals in 2021 for a cyber-enabled disinformation and threat campaign linked to the 2020 U.S. election. Microsoft has reported on Iranian cyber-enabled influence activity targeting political discourse, including around the 2024 U.S. election. Meta has reported disrupting covert influence operations originating from Iran. Reuters has reported on OpenAI blocking Iranian-linked accounts used to generate and spread
influence content, and OpenAI published its own disruption report. So this is not merely “bias.” It is infrastructure. Network laundering feeds content into the credential and platform laundries, then the laundries feed it into polite conversation.
“Anti-imperialism” as a moral solvent
Now the part that Western progressives avoid because it implicates their self-image. A segment of the Western left treats “anti-imperialism” as a loyalty test. In that worldview, the
primary sin is the West. Everything else becomes secondary, excusable, or strategically ignored. This is how Islamo-fascism gets repackaged as “resistance.” Shared grievance becomes mistaken for shared ethics. Complaining about empire is cheap. Governance is the test. The Islamic Regime’s governing
record in Iran is a long, documented pattern of repression and murder, now escalating again behind an information blackout. When Western commentators reflexively frame Iranian uprisings
as foreign plots, they are not being sophisticated. They are making themselves useful to the regime’s narrative.
Influencers make it worse. A megaphone plus ignorance is not neutrality. It is amplification. And when “Iran discourse” becomes a stage for domestic score-settling or ideological theater, Iranians become props in someone else’s identity performance. Here is where celebrities like Roger Waters launder the same blood-soaked misinformation as political charlatans such as Dimitri Lascaris. Their blind anti-imperialist posturing is instrumentalizing Islamo-Fascists agenda to launder their antiquated, self-righteous crusade at the
expense of the lives of innocent Iranians fighting for freedom. This is nothing new, mainstream
leftist alignment with fascism goes back to the beginning of modern times shaped by two world
wars.
The 1930s warning label
We have been here before. In the 1930s, fascism was treated as just another side of the story. It was wrapped in myths of efficiency and order. The Mussolini line about making the trains run on time is famously false, but it survives because it invites a shrug in the presence of brutality.
The press also struggled with the same cowardly impulse we see now, treating a moral
emergency as conventional politics. A serious review of American press coverage of Nazi
Germany shows how “normal reporting” can become moral failure when it downplays what is
happening in plain sight.
Neutrality toward fascism is not neutrality. It is assistance. The blackout is the tell
When the regime kills and then cuts communications, it is telling you it fears documentation
more than condemnation. Everything else is noise management.
This is why credential laundering and platform laundering matter most during massacres. While
Iranians try to upload a video before their signal dies, Western studios provide clean stages for
narrative sanitizers. Blackouts are a cover-up. Everything else is messaging.
What responsibility looks like
This is not a call for slogans. It is a call for hygiene.
Stop laundering credentials. Make guests defend claims with evidence, disclose relevant ties, and
stop outsourcing judgment to titles. Stop laundering platforms. Do not publish regime officials as op-ed contributors while the regime is accused of large-scale killings and concealment. If you cover their statements, frame them as claims under scrutiny, not as essays worthy of prestige.
Name sharp power. Authoritarian influence is not persuasion. It is manipulation of the
information space, what democracy scholars have described as “sharp power,” a mode that
penetrates and distorts rather than attracts. Treat “both sides” as a method, not a religion. When one side controls prisons, guns, courts, and the telecom switch, symmetry is a lie. When you do not know, do not improvise. Instant certainty is the influencer economy’s drug. Propaganda loves addicts.
Lives are at stake, so wake up and decide
The Islamo-Fascist regime has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will murder and maim on a mass
scale rather than surrender power. The Iranian people have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they
seek freedom with extraordinary restraint and courage. Yet the same grotesque demand keeps resurfacing in Western discourse: do not ask for international help, do not “interfere,” let them handle it alone.
That demand is not solidarity. It is abdication dressed as principle. When the playing field is a
slaughterhouse, “stay out of it” is not purity. It is complicity. The time has come to wake up. Either stop serving as the regime’s narrative infrastructure, or answer publicly for why you spent your credibility defending the indefensible while Iranians were hunted in the dark.