Source: iranwire.com
The death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at the end of last month provoked social media accounts and websites linked to the Islamic Republic to release a torrent of hate speech targeting religious minorities.
September saw a 100 per cent rise in hateful posts and propaganda against minorities – a total of more than 78,000 pieces of hate speech content. A large proportion of this content came after September 29, a day after Nasrallah’s killing, and included hashtags around Lebanon, Israel, and Nasrallah, including tags alleging that Israel’s attack against Lebanon amounted to “genocide.”
More than 8,200 pieces of content were published on the day after Nasrallah’s death – or 10 per cent of the month’s total in a single day.
Anti-Baha’i content showed a 65 per cent rise across the month, with 4,000 anti-Baha’i articles published across various channels. And a quarter of all anti-Baha’i content was published just a day after the Nasrallah attack.
More troubling still for the Baha’i community was the staggering 1,230 per cent increase in content targeting Baha’is on websites linked to the Iranian government. More than 1,000 pieces were published on these channels, in total, against just 77 in the previous month. IranWire’s hate speech analyst worries that this titanic spike could be part of a broader crackdown on the Baha’i community, potentially followed by widespread arrests and other forms of persecution.
Several troubling examples of the anti-Baha’i campaign were observed over the month. One instance saw Ahmadreza Shahrokhi, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative in Lorestan province, claiming during Friday prayers that “The Baha’i sect has a wide connection with the Zionist regime and they spy for the enemy and promote immorality and corruption in religious ceremonies.”
Taghrib News and Mehr News published similar claims in their coverage, accusing Baha’is of espionage and colonialism.
Fars News, meanwhile, published a bizarre anti-Baha’i article citing a minister of education before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a Baha’i, whose 1970s textbooks were said to have “penetrated” Iranian educational institutions and society. Rasa News published an interview with an ayatollah who said that the Islamic Republic had tried and would continue to try to “uproot” the Baha’is from the country.
Afkar News, meanwhile, praised the Revolutionary Guards for arresting Baha’is, while the Ahl al-Bayt and ABA outlets promoted “courses” to “review and criticize deviant sects” and to teach methods to “counter” Iran’s religious minority groups.
More than half of all hate speech content (57 per cent) was published on Twitter/X, confirming the platform’s reputation as the go-to place for trolls, bots, and official and semi-official hate speech accounts.
Ten per cent of all posts included the Persian word for “hand” – which in IranWire’s analysis indicates conspiracy theories and similar themes. “Hand” in Persian is used in similar formulations as the English phrase “the hand behind the curtain” and indicates conspiracy theories accusing shadowy parties of being behind the Islamic Republic’s travails and conflicts.
Zoroastrians were also targeted in a particularly bilious attack – this time by a recognized academic, Vahid Bahman, an Iranian historian living outside Iran – after the US-based National Iranian Action Committee official Trita Parsi was spotted at the New York hotel of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. The president was in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly and had arranged to meet a number of Iranian-American figures. Parsi was a “disgrace to the Zoroastrians of Iran,” Bahman said, for attending the meeting.
Whatever Bahman’s political reasons may have been, it was undoubtedly an example of anti-Zoroastrian sentiment to single Parsi out based on his religious background rather than just his politics.
Ayatollah Khamenei, however, took the lead in antisemitic rhetoric. Calling Israel a “Zionist rabid dog” in a tweet on September 28, Khamenei’s post attacking Israel and Jews reached at least 840,000 users on Twitter/X.
Antisemitic hate speech on Persian social channels and websites reached a total volume of about 61,000 posts in September – a 98 per cent rise from the previous month. Official and semi-official channels, such as Mehr News, the Iranian Students’ News Agency, the Islamic Republic News Agency, and the Young Journalists Club, led the charge in spewing this antisemitic material.
And finally, in an important subset of IranWire’s monitoring of hate speech targeting religious minorities, our reporting this month shows that Afghan migrants, who are also members of the Sunni minority, continue to be targeted by online posts and by commentators and other figures.
Hadi Kasaizadeh, editor-in-chief of Maidan Azadi magazine, used hate speech against Afghan immigrants several times during a recent debate. “Afghans in Iran are either criminals or terrorists, unless the opposite is proven!”, he said in the debate.
IranWire’s hate speech analyst also noted that the free hand given to Iranian media to attack Afghan migrants, on the one hand, and the silence of Iran’s security agencies and judiciary in dealing with such attacks, on the other, suggests that the Islamic Republic has played a key role in the recent rise in attacks on Afghan migrants.
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