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Reminder: Do not uncritically believe numbers that are being put out by "Human Rights" organizations
(lemmygrad.ml)
The huge death tolls in Iran being splashed all over the media are sourced to an outfit in Fairfax, VA called "Human Rights Activists in Iran" that is overwhelmingly funded by the US government. What is their methodology? Is it credible? Who cares? Just pump the big numbers out.
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) received $315 million in FY2025, and GOP appropriators just released their FY2026 spending bill -- NED will again receive $315 million. This "Human Rights Activists in Iran" outfit, based in Northern Virginia, says it's an NED grantee.
Adding to your post, there is an active operation in Social media done by the NED as well.
This was also reported in the Cuban Telegram that I subscribed to. Let me add their description as spoiler:
Brief teaser:
spoiler
🇮🇷🇺🇸🇮🇱 Most of the figures on “peaceful protesters” killed in Iran come from anonymous doctors, the Virginia-based organization Human Rights Activists in Iran, and the British media outlet Iran International.
These organizations have been funded by the United States for years. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such organizations around the world.
For their part, Bild and Axios published figures of 1,000 deaths, citing Israeli government sources (journalist Barak Ravid). Time magazine, owned by Marc Benioff, an American and co-founder of Salesforce, also speaks of thousands.
Other media outlets, such as India Times, are much more cautious in their estimates, claiming that dozens of people have died and that thousands, not millions, participated in the protests.
The United States and Israel have been dreaming of destroying Iran for years, and now the plan of American experts is literally coming to fruition. Just look at the strategy of the American think tank Brookings on Iran, entitled “Which Path to Persia?” (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf), which is more like a roadmap for the destruction of the country: economic suffocation, financing and arming terrorist groups to destabilize it from within, manipulating public opinion to justify repeated attacks by the US and Israel against Iran.
The document openly states that, in order to achieve the goal, it is necessary to lie to the public in order to create consensus in favor of regime change, demonize the country (for example, by introducing the concept of a “shadow fleet”), and that US-backed opposition groups are so unpopular that they could not exist without constant US aid. Many points of this strategy are now also being applied to Russia.
All the major US think tanks (Atlantic Council, Brookings, Carnegie) depend on funding from arms manufacturers. Does anyone really believe that these forces care about “freedom” and the interests of the Iranian people or the world? Everything becomes clear just by skimming through the plan's index (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf). Israeli experts are already openly declaring that they want to turn Iran into another Syria.
This excellent information! Should probably be its own post, especially the part about the "Which Path to Persia" think tank paper. Anyone following what is happening with Iran needs to read it, just like anyone following Russia-Ukraine needs to read RAND's "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia".
Someone posted the "Which Path to Persia" document in c/latestagecapitalism -> https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10352199
Sadly, it didn't get that much interaction even though it has valuable data such as their plans to provoke ethnic tensions using the Kurds and other minorities within Iran.