GOP Neocons Protect NED Which Shapes the Iran Narrative

By
Richard C. Young
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By Sean Gladwell @ Adobe Stock

After reports that the Trump administration has called off any attack on Iran, oil prices have fallen. At the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed point the finger at the National Endowment for Democracy for being a propaganda unit intended to inflame sentiment against Iran and encourage the Trump administration to take action against it. They write:

Western media has ignored a growing trove of video evidence showing terrorist tactics deployed across Iran by protesters described by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “largely peaceful.” Recent videos published both by Iranian state media and anti-government forces reveal public lynchings of unarmed guards, the torching of mosques, arson attacks on municipal buildings, marketplaces and fire stations, and mobs of armed gunmen opening fire in the heart of Iranian cities.

Instead, Western media has focused almost exclusively on violence attributed to the Iranian government. In doing so, they have primarily relied on death counts compiled by Iranian diaspora groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the regime change arm of the US government, and whose boards of directors are filled with committed neoconservatives.

The NED has taken credit for advancing the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests which filled Iranian cities throughout 2023 – and which also featured gruesome acts of violence ignored by Western media and human rights NGOs. Today, the NED is far from alone among the intelligence-aligned actors seeking to fuel the chaos inside Iran.

The timing of these claims is interesting because Congress just voted to fund NED, despite DOGE marking it for defunding.

Read more from Blumenthal and Reed here.

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