This is a good question and this article is actually a very interesting example of how something can be misleading without necessarily being untrue - sry in advance for this being a very long post.

First, anyone deserves the right to a fair trial and not be shot in the street, and the Iranian government itself has acknowledged that several thousand people died in the January protests (though significantly less than masih claims).

Whatever the real number is we will probably never find out, but at least for analyzing this article it is beside the point, and ill explain why.

The dominant western narrative, which masih alludes to, is that people went on the street to protest against the economic oppression of the Iranian regime.

It started with protests from shop keepers, then average consumers and activists joined due to rising prices and out of control inflation. This is not disputed.

What is left out of the western narrative is that this situation was directly and deliberately caused by the US, for which US Treasury Sec Bessent has openly and publicly taken credit several times: that it was the US that directly caused the uprising by tightening US sanctions.

So first, the uprising wasnt organic - it was manufactured by a foreign entity.

Second, as many anti-regime and anti-intervention activists from within the country have reported, the protests started peacefully and the Iranian regime was ready to negotiate with the protesters. Then, predominantly described as „suddenly“, the protests turned violent.

Following and during the protests, several leaders and institutions, again openly and publicly, acknowledged - or should I rather say bragged about - the violence being driven by Israeli agents. This includes former CIA director Mike Pompeo, reports by the Israeli conservative pro-Likud Channel 14, netanyahu himself, as well as studies done by Kings College in London.

This ties back to the original narrative: that the regime was „killing its own people“ for „protesting“.

This is a very hard thing to wrap our heads around I think as, again, all killing is bad, so we must put it into perspective: for example by seeing how the US has indiscriminately killed civilians like Alex Pretti and Renee Good justified by there being a „foreign invasion“ of immigrants.

Does this killing of protestors justify calling for another country to bomb your country? I dont have an answer to that.

But if we read her article close enough, it quickly becomes clear that while decrying the deaths of civilians on one side, more civilian deaths are acceptable to her so long as they occur at the hand of the government she favors.

How do we know this? By way of the examples she uses, such as NATO intervention in serbia and Kosovo (yugoslawia), which she says „prevented humanitarian catastrophe“.

NATO intervention in yugoslawia has been described as an absolute travesty by all human rights groups that I am aware of.

Conservative estimates place civilian deaths at 500, inofficial numbers rise to over 5000. NATO deployed cluster munitions and depleted uranium, and destroyed the majority of its civilian infrastructure, from power plants to schools and hospitals.

The aftermath of NATOs intervention is an area that to this day has been struggling to rebuild, where extreme poverty and as a result addiction and human trafficking reigned.

So what masih names as „positive“ examples for potential intervention in Iran are, quite literally, war crimes that have devastated the lives of millions of people.

Second, masih compares the IRGCs killings of protestors with genocide - again, a tactic that is highly misleading.

Leaving aside whether the regime killed its own people or foreign agents (again we dont know and Im sure there were a good number legitimate protestors killed even if we do believe the foreign agent narrative), a genocide by definition is the deliberate targeting of a *national*, *ethnic*, *religious*, or *racial* group of people.

This is true for several of the examples she names, sa for the muslim minority in sebrenicq or for the situation in sudan.

But it is *not* true for what the Iranian regime did to protestors in January. Even if we believe that all of it is true and we leave out the foreign orchestration, these people were not targeted for their nationality, race, religion, or other belonging to a certain group. It is awful, but it is not genocidal by definition.

Lastly, let us look at where masih stands on actual genocide.

If youve been following her work, youll know that she is a stark supporter of the Israeli government.

Actions that by both the ICC and the ICJ have been qualified as genocide. Actions that have killed over 100,000 people, that have displaced almost the entire gazan population, that leave thousands and thousands of children without parents, scarred for life - actions that currently continue to expand into lebanon.

Im not saying this to be whataboutist btw - i dont believe you need to speak out on every conflict in the world to be taken seriously when you speak on one - but i do think that speaking about genocide while literally supporting another is at the very least some fairly incredible cognitive dissonance.

So the TLDR is, masih isnt necessarily lying - she is deliberately reframing a situation to mislead her readers into supporting war crimes on her own people, while exemplifying that she has no tear to shed for the deaths of civilians so long as it furthers her political agenda.

Its not lying. Its manipulation. And that is exactly how propaganda works to manufacture consent.