The Underreporting of the Iranian Regime’s Crimes 

This past week offered more examples of the Iranian regime’s criminal behavior. But they have not received the attention they deserved. Meanwhile much of the world’s media chooses to focus on Israel’s nonexistent crimes. More on this phenomenon can be found here: “Too Many in the West Still Look Away — Even as Iran Further Brutalizes Its Own People,” by Micha Danzig, Algemeiner, March 31, 2026:

Start with three facts from this past week.

Not rumors. Not slogans. Not social media noise.

Facts — reported in mainstream outlets, documented by international human rights bodies, and, in part, reflected in the regime’s own conduct and admissions.

First, a 19-year-old wrestler — Navid Afkari — was executed by the Iranian regime after a trial widely condemned by international observers. Hung. Killed. His crime: protesting.

Second, officials tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) advancing frameworks where children as young as 12 can be integrated into war-support roles — patrols, logistics, internal enforcement. Not speculation. Not anonymous leaks. Positions reflected in both external reporting and Iranian media.

Third, multiple independent investigations — and mainstream media reports — documenting the systematic use of rape and sexual violence by the IRGC and Basij against detainees, particularly protesters, as a tool of repression.

Stop there.

You don’t need embellishment. You don’t need a fourth example. You don’t need a roundtable parsing “context.” What you need is to understand what kind of regime produces all three of these facts consistently, predictably, and without apology.

Because in the Islamic Republic of Iran, these are not aberrations. They are not excesses at the margins of an otherwise functioning system. They are the system.

Authoritarian systems do not need to announce what they are. They demonstrate it. Not in their slogans — which are often framed, for many Western audiences, in the language of justice and resistance — but in what they do to people, particularly their own citizens.

For 47+ years under this Iranian regime, the pattern is direct and repeatable. That is not hyperbole or metaphor. It is a description of how the Iranian regime operates.

And yet — and this is where the second scandal should begin — this regime still receives the benefit of the doubt, if not outright support, in significant parts of Western discourse.

Watch almost any show on MSNBC or CNN and you can hear it happen in real time.

The language shifts. It hedges. Or it flips into outright advocacy.

Iran becomes “complicated.”

The regime becomes “reactive.”

We are asked to believe that the Islamic Republic is not itself aggressive, but is merely “reacting” to those who would harm it — the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states that host American bases. It does not oppress its own people, but only “reacts” to street protests inside, or military attacks from outside, that would bring the regime down.

The willingness of large numbers of people in the West to accept the Iranian narrative, to ignore the Islamic republic’s crimes against its own people and its warmongering throughout the Middle East, to continue to see Israel as the threat to peace and stability in the Middle East, will someday be written about as we now write about those who during the 1930s made excuses for the Nazi regime and believed it best to throw Czechoslovakia to the wolves at Munich in order to obtain “peace in our time,” or about those who accepted Soviet propaganda about the building of a brave new communist world that would bring prosperity and economic equality, even as millions died in manmade famines such as the Holodomor in the Ukraine, and more millions were executed or condemned to slow deaths in the labor camps in Siberia.

In Iran, 36,500 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands wounded, by the authorities for the crime of participating in unarmed protests last January. Executions continue for anyone found to have taken part in protests or for having praised them online. Twelve-year-olds are now being encouraged to take on war-support roles, including logistics, patrols, and internal enforcement of the government’s rules. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij routinely use rape as a weapon of oppression, to terrify women and girls who take part in protests. But none of these atrocities have received the attention in the world’s media that they deserve. The media instead focuses on Israel’s strikes on what are routinely and wrongly described as “civilian buildings,” which turn out to be IRGC command-and-control centers, ballistic missile stores, missile factories, nuclear facilities, and Basij barracks.

Just one question about the misreporting and underreporting of events in Iran: why?