From Maryam Rajavi to Masih Alinejad: No Seizure Allowed
From Maryam Rajavi to Masih Alinejad: No Seizure Allowed. The protests led and guided by the people, women, and the 80s generation cannot be seized. This can be seen from the actions of protesters on social media, especially famous figures, who with smart and timely reactions prevent the exploitation and misuse of these protests by inauthentic individuals and movements. They neither allow themselves to be labeled as affiliated with outside Mujahideen and inside reformists, nor do they let the likes of Rajavi and Alinejad seize the protests for their own benefit. This was also acknowledged in a strange and different article by a Fars News Agency journalist, who stated that the young street protesters have no relation to the groups whose stories we’ve heard repeatedly.
Hashtag Maryam Rajavi Got Hit
The fact that neither of these two, especially Rajavi, has been mentioned or seen in any of the Iranian people’s protest gatherings from 2009 onwards, so as not to delude them into thinking they lead the Iranian people’s protest movements, is so obvious it doesn’t need saying. However, the issue is that in all these protests, the Mujahideen Organization and Maryam Rajavi, with their claims of fictitious support, have always given security agencies an excuse to file cases against protesters and social-political activists. In fact, Maryam Rajavi, who has repeatedly claimed to be the president of Iran, has always sought to fish in troubled waters during the Iranian people’s protests, turning the atmosphere against the protesters.
But this time on social networks, especially on Twitter, no one allowed her and her followers to emerge and they smothered her attempt to churn butter from water at its inception. The widespread attacks from political figures and celebrities, especially Ali Karimi, against her were so intense that almost no symbol or sign of her and her organization appeared on the timeline. She and her organizational members were boycotted and blocked wherever they appeared with their identity and symbol. Attackers on her often used the phrase ‘Maryam Rajavi got hit’ to both show their intense disgust for this movement and to prevent her and her organization from exploiting it from one side and the insiders from filing cases on the other.
The irony is that someone who not only enforces hijab within her organization but also forces them to wear a uniform now claims to support protests against the morality police and compulsory hijab. An organization that interferes in the smallest personal affairs of its members, keeping them like obedient children under the strictest organizational constraints, where the slightest disobedience is punishable, now claims to support a generation whose main demand is freedom in choosing their lifestyle.
The Mistaken Leader
Masih Alinejad has made significant errors in recent days. Her first mistake was claiming leadership of the Iranian protest movement. After that, she instructed attacks and the seizure of Iranian embassies abroad, and a strange mistake or error that some believe is unlikely to be accidental was the deviation in the hashtag Mahsa Amini, ruining the trend. Screenshots of her tweets showed that she repeatedly misused this hashtag, and due to the high feedback on her tweets, it led to the creation of a parallel hashtag trend, causing the main hashtag to fall out of trend. Twitter users made great efforts to trend the correct hashtag again.
Alinejad first claims leadership, then orders a mistaken attack, and even substitutes the video of one protester for another killed protester without feeling the need to verify it. Although due to the intelligence and pressure of public opinion on social networks, especially aided by the democratic and interactive space of Twitter, the attacks on her became so intense that she was forced to retreat from her positions and claims. All these errors in such a short time from someone who has claimed leadership.
In situations where some protests in front of the Islamic Republic’s embassies in Paris and London had led to tensions and arrests, Masih Alinejad was also fanning the flames of this fire. Meanwhile, one Twitter user addressed her, questioning how she didn’t know that attacking embassies, in addition to canceling residency and fines, also results in imprisonment. Some even suggested she herself take the lead in operationalizing her suggestion. Others wrote that we do not need to reproduce the likes of Asgharzadeh.
One social media user categorized the activities of this self-proclaimed leader of the Iranian women’s protest movement over the past two weeks as follows:
- Mahsa Amini Had a Stroke
- We Are All Kurds
- Women’s Revolution
- Creating Parallel Hashtags
- Claiming Leadership of the Movement
- Attributing Another’s Photo to Hadis Najafi
- Creating the Hadis Najafi Hashtag to Diminish the Mahsa Amini Hashtag
- Ordering Attacks on Embassies
Profiteering from People’s Blood
Twitter and social media activists rightly proved to her that the only leaders and guides of the Iranian people’s protest movement are the people inside Iran themselves, and no individual or movement can craft a hat for themselves from this felt, especially as it later becomes clear that Masih Alinejad has defined many of her so-called media actions as projects and receives large budgets from American institutions. Documents related to grants and funds she received for her projects from American government-affiliated institutions have been published in recent days, some of which are very large amounts.
In an audio file released by Salomeh Sadeghnia, a presenter for the Manoto network, it is also mentioned that Masih Alinejad, despite the request of Pouya Bakhtiari’s mother not to broadcast a documentary about him due to pressure from security agencies, released parts of it and even demanded 10,000 pounds from the CEO of Manoto for the unreleased documentary. A media activist wrote that she crossed miles in profiteering by making 10,000 pounds from the tears of Pouya Bakhtiari’s mother.
Meanwhile, Fatemeh Shams, a sociologist and former wife of Hamidreza Jalaeipour, also shared a personal story on Twitter showing that Masih Alinejad is more of a political opportunist than a political or media activist. When it suited her interests, she associated with reformists, and now that the benefit lies in attacking reformists, she attacks them. The whole story can be summed up in this user’s tweet: ‘We don’t want a uniform Maryam Rajavi, we don’t want Masih Alinejad, the leader of sabotage.’
Iran Gate has specifically analyzed and reported on the events of the nationwide protests in Iran in 2022.
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