The Grayzone reports that Western media is flipping the script on the protests in Iran, downplaying attacks on government buildings and national infrastructure while portraying the unrest as one-sided violence against peaceful demonstrators. Instead, audiences are told the Iranian government is targeting protesters for death. But is that an accurate picture of what’s happening on the ground? Western media coverage has largely ignored footage showing violent attacks by rioters on public infrastructure and religious sites. Video from January 10 shows rioters in a central Iranian city attacking and setting fire to a public bus. In Tehran and other regions, mobs have vandalized and burned mosques, including damage to the historic Abazar Mosque, arson inside the Grand Mosque of Sarableh, and the burning of Qurans at religious shrines in Khuzestan. The Trump administration is supporting these events and they are largely absent from mainstream reporting, which focuses almost exclusively on claims of state violence against protesters. Meanwhile, wildly inflated death tolls are being circulated in Western media, with claims that “thousands” of civilians have been killed by the Iranian government. Some figures go as high as 12,000 or even 200,000. None of these numbers can be independently corroborated. Many trace back to the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government–funded organization that openly promotes regime change abroad. If you believe anything the NED says, God help you! One video now circulating widely features a forensic expert suggesting that some protesters may not have been killed by Iranian security forces at all, but by third party snipers. If true, that raises an obvious question rarely explored in mainstream coverage: who would benefit from civilian deaths being attributed to the Iranian government? This is a familiar playbook. Inflated casualty figures, downplayed violence by protestors armed by…who again? Could it be the U.S. and Israel? It is a tactic long associated with U.S. foreign policy advocacy circles, including figures like Victoria Nuland, who played a central role in Ukraine policy and now serves as an ambassador for the National Endowment for Democracy. One wonders whether the architects of these past campaigns would recognize the pattern unfolding once again. And here is another under-reported development. Tens of thousands of Iranians did take to the streets this week, not to protest the government but to support it, not because they love the Ayatollah per se, but because they resist Israeli and U.S. intervention. The post What Western Media Leaves Out of the Iran Protests appeared first on Redacted.