‘Do Not Trust The Mullahs’ Apologists In The U.S. Media’: Iranian Dissidents Pay For Giant Billboard Near NYT Building

 

Reuters reported in December 2019 that after massive protests against the despotic Iranian regime in November 2019, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told top security and government officials to do whatever it took to stop them. Reuters continued:

That order, confirmed by three sources close to the supreme leader’s inner circle and a fourth official, set in motion the bloodiest crackdown on protesters since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. About 1,500 people were killed during less than two weeks of unrest that started on Nov. 15. The toll, provided to Reuters by three Iranian interior ministry officials, included at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police.\Iranians disgusted with the mainstream media acting as apologists for the despotic Iranian regime, the largest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet, paid for a billboard near The New York Times building in Manhattan that read: “They killed more than 1500 innocents on the ground and lied about it. They killed 176 passengers in the air and lied about it. Regime of Iran lies about JCPOA too. They intend to harm America. Do not trust the Mullahs’ apologists in the U.S. media.”Human Rights Watch reported in late November 2019, “Iranian authorities are deliberately covering up the scale of the mass crackdown against protesters, Human Rights Watch said today.”

On January 8, 2020, a Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) flight taking off from Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport was shot down by theIranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). All 176 passengers and crew were killed.On January 14, 2020, the BBC reported, “After days of denial – and mounting evidence – on Saturday Iran admitted it had shot the Boeing plane down “unintentionally.’”

After the Trump administration ordered the killing of Iranian general Qassam Soleimani in January 2020, the same man whom the State Department said was responsible for “coordinating” attacks on U.S. personnel, the Times, as noted by The Daily Wire, published a piece lionizing Soleimani:

The New York Times ran a piece titled, “Why Iran Is In Mourning,” in which the Times attempted to put the best face on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, opining of his funeral that there was a “unified national outpouring that is reserved for a small handful of figures in any country, I mean a beloved president, a civil rights leader like Martin Luther King in the United States…” The Times reporter theorized that the Trump administration had “miscalculated the level of admiration” that Iranians had for Soleimani, claiming that opposition figures who had been jailed by the Iranian government had said, “He was a national hero.”

 CAMERA reported in January that the Times identified a columnist, Kaveh Afrasiabi, who had contributed two opinion pieces to the Times regarding the Iran nuclear deal — pieces that CAMERA stated offered a “decidedly favorable view of the Islamic republic”— as a political scientist and expert on Iran’s foreign affairs as well as “a former political science professor at Tehran University and former adviser to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team”

CAMERA noted, “Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department identified the same Afrasiabi as an unregistered agent of the Iranian government.”