Kamelia

Six months ago, tonight, Tehran went dark. All of Iran went dark. And into that darkness, millions of Iranians walked out of their homes anyway. January 8th and 9th were not just two nights of protest. They were the night Iran's silence broke. Millions came into the streets, into the squares, onto their rooftops — but the regime answered them with bullets. Tens of thousands of my compatriots were killed in those forty-eight hours. Tens of thousands more have been arrested, tortured, and sentenced to die since. They came out, determined and brave. I think of them every day. On those two nights I lost countrymen I will never get to meet. I do not hear a statistic when I hear the number 40,000. I see a son who did not come home to his mother. A daughter who will not sit at her family's table again. I think of each of them the way I would think of my own child, my own brother, my own sister. I carry the weight of every one of those names. But the families of the fallen I meet with, week after week, hearten our nation's will to carry on. Their children did not die in vain. They died for freedom, and they died with pride. History will remember what these men and women did; I will make sure of it. Like the resistance who stood against tyranny in occupied Europe, and like the revolutionaries who fought for liberty in America. But theirs was a particular bravery. They had no army, no air cover, nothing but the belief in what they stood for. They stood anyway. A united nation choosing to face the guns together rather than live one more day in fear. The men and women of the 8th and 9th of January will be remembered in Iran's history as the greatest generation that preferred to die free and standing than to live cowered on their knees. To the international community, I ask this: do not let a negotiating table in Geneva or Islamabad erase what happened in the streets of Tehran, Mashhad, and Kermanshah. They died for freedom. And when they are free, the Strait of Hormuz will open. The nuclear threat will end. And we will have true peace. I have told my compatriots: what you did on January 8th and 9th cannot be undone. Together, we will reclaim our country’s rightful place in the world, our national dignity, and honor the lives of our heroes. Now is the time to reassess, regroup, and rededicate ourselves to victory. We honor the fallen by finishing what they started. A free Iran is no longer a matter of hope. It is a matter of fact. And know that my brave compatriots are not just fighting for their own liberation but for the peace and stability of the world.

Recent reports by Western media outlets, including the BBC, CNN, Financial Times (FT), and the Guardian regarding the Islamic Republic’s state ceremonies represent a profound failure of journalistic integrity. By echoing regime narratives, these outlets repeat a dark historical pattern: acting as megaphones for totalitarian propaganda while ignoring state-sponsored atrocities. In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documented how Western journalists visited the Soviet Union and repeated Soviet propaganda as reality, completely omitting daily deaths and torture.  Often this is the natural, toxic byproduct of access journalism. Seduced by the professional prestige of “reporting from inside,” these journalists accept a devil's bargain. Their access is tightly controlled and weaponized by the Islamic Republic, permitted only so long as they echo state narratives and ignore the blood on the streets.
 We must ask these self-proclaimed impartial journalists: Did the regime allow you to cover the massive demonstrations of January 8–9, 2026, across hundreds of Iranian cities calling for the overthrow of the regime? Could you report inside Iran on the black body bags filling the morgues, or the wounded protesters targeted in hospital beds? Were you permitted to attend the 40th-day memorial ceremonies of the slain protesters?  Whitewashing state spectacles while ignoring ongoing executions and torture is not journalism; it is complicity. And sadly, it is nothing new. Iran is only the most recent, troubling case.
 Malcolm Caldwell, the Scottish academic and Guardian contributor, staunchly defended the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and dismissed reports of massacres. Writing in The Guardian to dismiss the testimonies of those escaping the Cambodian genocide, Caldwell infamously claimed: "A refugee may give an honest account as far as he knows, but it is not necessarily an accurate one." In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documented how Western journalists visited the Soviet Union and repeated Soviet propaganda as reality, completely omitting daily deaths and torture. Walter Duranty became infamous for his defense of the USSR and whitewashing of its crimes in the New York Times. Today, too many  Western correspondents deploy the exact same cynical tactics to dismiss the raw testimonies of the Iranian people.  We call on the editorial boards of the  Western media institutions to cease the dissemination of state-vetted propaganda, grant equal weight to the voices of the Iranian democratic opposition, and accurately report on the systematic human rights abuses taking place across Iran.