Comment by alex_low

15 hours ago

I'm surprised this has not been mentioned, for context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres

Not surprising - people don't count deaths in the Middle East if they're caused by fellow Middle Easterns, except Israel. Living in Europe I've never heard about a protest against Saddam (250,000 - 1,000,000 dead), Khamenei (30,000 in a week?), Assad (> 300,000 civilians) etc. This is business as usual. It's only news if someone else does it.

Maybe because nobody believes in the "exporting democracy" excuse anymore

  • > nobody believes in the "exporting democracy" excuse

    Has this been argued?

    • That’s the Bush doctrine! A belief that you can invade a country, remove the power center, and democracy will spring forth. You don’t even need to speak the local language, read any books about the country you’re attacking, or talk to any locals! Just go for it and democracy will magically spring into existence.

    • Not directly but OP seemed to intuit some sort of moral justification for this war of aggression ("humanitarian reasons"), and few people believe that to be a key motivating factor for the White House.

      7 replies →

Are you saying those protested actually got funded by Israel and because Iran killed them, now Israel is retaliating?

Now I really wonder if those protests were indeed fueled and funded by Israel, because we have seen videos of mosques being burned down by protestors, which is strange for Shia Muslim country, even if they don't like their government

Compare how much Israel was in the news for targeting militants these past two years in Gaza.

How biased is the press? Iran slaughters 36k people in a week and... crickets. Israel refuses to let its hostages die while Hamas hides out in hospitals and schools and the world is against Israel not Iran.

Yeah, the:

>Trump urges Iranians to keep protesting, saying 'help is on its way'

stuff if pretty relevant.

If you think Trump did that because he cares about Democracy I have some news for you regarding the Jan 6 rioters...

Because HNers are not so gullible to swallow and regurgitate this pretext. The Trump administration doesn't care about the people of Iran, any more than Bush cared about the Iraqi Kurds or Afghan women. Just a pretext for geopolitics.