Ever since scattered protests broke out in Iran last week, US President Donald Trump has taken time out of his busy schedule of threatening North Korea with nuclear annihilation to bombard Twitter with his eloquent assessments of "Iran, the Number One State of Sponsored Terror".
The gist of the Trumpian analysis is this: "The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime. The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The US is watching!"
Never mind the ongoing huge pro-government demonstrations in Iran, or the fact that, if we want to talk about food, the US happens to be currently backing the forcible starvation of Yemen by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (two entities that apparently don't require much "watching").
As usual, the dutiful Western media has laboured to uphold an appropriately reductionist view of Iran, a country that has long been in US crosshairs for its insistence on challenging imperial designs on the region.
In a 30 December dispatch for the Jadaliyya website, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, an Oxford-based historian of modern Iran, notes the speed at which concerned Western observers gleefully glom onto any peep of public discontent in the Islamic Republic:
"Within the space of some 24 hours [from the start of the protests], nearly every mainstream Western media outlet has inclined to assimilate legitimate expressions of socio-economic distress and demands for greater governmental accountability into a question of 'regime change'."
Iranian protests against unemployment and other legitimate internal grievances, Sadeghi-Boroujerdi continues, are almost inevitably depicted in terms of “a fundamental question of legitimacy about the system; which in turn can only be solved when said system is swept away in its entirety". READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.