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“This mullah is causing problems for you, and for me and for all of us. Do you want me to take care of the problem?” Saddam Hussein, military dictator of Iraq, Mohammad Reza Shah in August 1978. He was speaking about Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior cleric who had settled in Najaf and for months had been calling for regime change. The Shah declined Saddam’s offer to assassinate the Ayatollah. It was one of a number of critical decisions that would help turn a fledgling, fractured opposition movement into a revolution.

On the one-year anniversary of the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police, many are asking why the protest movement—the largest in nearly four decades—failed to bring about the changes it demanded and the revolution the diaspora called for. What we should be asking, instead, is why the regime succeeded. In this essay, we turn to the lessons of the fall of the Shah to better understand the actions of the supreme leader and the Islamic Republic regime (nezam).

The “Unite the Right” rally that subsumed Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 will be remembered for its haunting torch-lit rally, massive display of neo-Nazi and white nationalist paraphernalia, bloody riots, and murderous car attack. Despite extensive media coverage, a comprehensive, scholarly, synthetic study of the planning and execution of the Unite the Right (UtR) has yet to emerge. I teamed up with University of Texas A&M Professor Patrick Burkart on a cross-discipline, double blind peer reviewed study designed to fill that gap. 

Drawing from a repository of 5,000 primary texts and digital artifacts that I collected over several years, the paper details how the "alt-right" extremists designed and executed the rally as a military campaign, used propaganda extensively, and may have engaged in two cyber attacks.

These findings coupled with the extended, trans-mediated, multi-theatre nature of the white supremacist terror campaign is what we term “immersive terrorism.” 

The antisemitic wave unleashed by October 7 and the war that followed has not yet subsided, as evidenced most recently in abhorrent developments on college campuses and ugly rhetoric at protests. 

That antisemitism exists at this scale is disturbing enough. But arguably worse is the largely unappreciated prospect that certain countries stoke the fires of hate in the media and online deliberately for their own benefit. The question is to what end. 

Could such activity not be simply ideological, but also strategic? When we look at the activities of Iran and other nations like China, the answer is yes.

It was 7 p.m. on a Sunday in mid-March, and Zach Fisch was ready to go home. He walked down the marble halls of the Longworth House Office Building, where he worked as chief of staff to New York Rep. Mondaire Jones. As he headed to the big double doors of the exit, he passed a pair of Capitol Police officers guarding the entrance, running the X-ray machine and metal detector, and scrutinizing visitors’ bags and bodies for weapons that could be used to harm members of Congress or their staff. Fisch happened to glance over to a table near the officers’ workspace and was alarmed by what he saw: a dog-eared print-out of the world’s most notorious antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

For more than a century, this text has been used to advance a powerful and persistent antisemitic myth: that Jews are plotting to take over the world. From Adolf Hitler to Henry Ford, rabid antisemites have championed the fabricated text as a historical document and published it widely. So what is this nearly 120-year-old lie doing in the hands of a Capitol Police officer in 2021?

Over the last few months, there have been widespread efforts by the Iranian government to preempt and disarm the anticipated protests coinciding with the 1-year anniversary of the brutal murder of Mahsa Jina Amini for “bad hijab.”  International newspapers run stories about authorities arresting journalists, activists, and artists, while police in riot gear roam the streets and the graves of martyrs.

After he returned from exile, Ayatollah Khomeini and his circle wasted no time creating the conditions that would ultimately force women into hijab. Reading the tea leaves, in March 1979, calling for freedom of dress. But to no avail. The new Islamic regime gradually and stealthily forced women to cover their hair and adhere to Islamic laws in their clothing, first in the government buildings, and later in all public areas. Mandatory veiling became one of the most prominent and visible anti-women's rights policies that the new theocratic governing regime enforced. 

That is why last year's unprecedented protests led by women and featuring their removal of headscarves was so monumental for the opposition and dangerous for the ruling establishment. 

 Five years ago, my city was the unwilling host of the largest gathering of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other white supremacist groups in America in nearly eight decades. Six hundred men with flags, shields, body armor and weapons descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally was ostensibly to protest the city council’s planned removal of a statue of Confederate army leader General Robert E. Lee. It was, in reality and intention, the violent coming-out party of the new “alt-right” white supremacist movement in America.

It has been five years since the attack on Charlottesville. I haven’t spoken publicly about my personal experience as wife of the mayor, witness to and participant in the events, historian and media scholar. I feel compelled to now because of the breadth of the problem and the need to act quickly and forcefully against the common denominator of almost all lethal acts of white supremacists in America today: antisemitic conspiracy.

The fog of war isn’t just a pithy phrase—something many of us have relearned in the fighting that followed the October 7 terrorist atrocities against Israel committed by Hamas. Initial reports can turn out to be misleading or disastrously wrong. Uncertainty about unclear events gives dishonest actors the opportunity to inject their preferred narratives into the global media bloodstream while the rest of us sift through the available evidence—usually incomplete at best—to determine what, exactly, has happened.

As a media scholar, I teach my students about such campaigns and how to be a smart consumer of social media products. But the most important thing I teach however is a dark art that goes back centuries and remains a critical component of warfare today: propaganda. 

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) has a problem. It is less powerful than it would have us believe. In attempting to bridge the gap between its real power and the image of power it hopes to project, it makes mistakes. Big mistakes..

The fact is that almost every time the IRGC tries to inflate its power or cover up its misdeeds, it makes such mistakes. The IRGC’s attempts to fudge the facts and manipulate the news is creating a credibility gap: a breach in trust between the people and the government. The IRGC’s constant struggle to maintain its image—for both domestic and international audiences—offers Western policymakers seeking to gain more leverage over Tehran an opportunity in our approach to Iran.

Over the course of less than two weeks, the Trump administration has marched the United States to the precipice of war with Iran. According to news reports, military commanders briefed Trump on the situation at his resort in Mar-a-Lago and presented him with a menu of options for the U.S. response. What made Trump choose the most extreme, most volatile option of assassinating Soleimani? 

Like many of his generation, Trump’s conception of Iran is indelibly linked to the experience of the U.S.-Iran hostage crisis. Viewed through this lens, killing Iran’s top general was just the medicine for a president frightened by Iran hostage crisis redux and bent on exacting revenge.

Iranian presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi is an important newcomer to electoral politics. Last year, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appointed Raisi custodian of the shrine of Imam Reza and chairman of the foundation that manages its extensive complex. This is no minor post. The foundation nets the regime billions of dollars. Before this year, Raisi had never campaigned for public office or debated in the national political spotlight. His inexperience has shown. In the three live nationally televised debates, he lacked charisma, sticking closely to his talking points.

In what has been deemed the “most important conquest of the revolution,” on February 11, 1979, Iranian activists seized control of the headquarters of the National Iranian Radio and Television Service (NIRT), and, with it, command over all Tehran-based radio and television broadcasting...

As we look back at four decades of politics and change in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is worth remembering (or perhaps discovering for the first time) the truly popular nature of the revolution at its origination. It is equally worth remembering how the people's revolution was co-opted by Khomeini’s faction of religious nationalists — a process that Michael Fischer once dubbed “the second revolution” of 1979.

 The term soft war (jang-e narm) has become a common phrase within the ruling establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the 2009 presidential election and its aftermath, state broadcast media and members of the country’s conservative political factions used the term as a euphemism for the spread of foreign ideas, culture, and influences through information communication technology. The target of soft war, according to this usage, was Iranian culture and national identity—the very underpinnings of the modern nation-state. 

While some have deemed soft war a relatively new discourse associated with the contested presidential election of 2009, this article argues that soft war is in fact the latest iteration of a long-standing myth of foreign conspiracy. It promotes a Manichean view of the world in which foreign powers are continuously working to violate Iranian sovereignty through informational and cultural means.