I was listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! the other morning. The segment concerned Amnesty International and its latest report on the worldwide increase in capital punishment. According to Amnesty, the sharp rise in executions was driven largely by Iran.
Fair enough. Executions are terrible. State repression is terrible. No civilized person should celebrate either one.
But as I listened, I kept waiting for the larger context. It never came.
Instead, the report and discussion unfolded in the familiar language Western audiences have heard for decades: Iran represses dissent. Iran crushes protests. Iran executes opponents. So does North Korea, Vietnam, and other official enemies of American empire. End of story.
But it’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning. Fact is: none of this is happening in a vacuum.
Mossad & CIA
There was no mention that the demonstrations in question emerged in the middle of a long-running U.S.-Israeli campaign to destabilize Iran. No mention that the CIA and Mossad have openly and repeatedly funded, armed, trained, and encouraged opposition movements inside the country. No mention that Iran has lived under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, cyberwarfare, and threats of invasion for decades.
And perhaps most glaringly, there was no acknowledgment that the numbers executed by Iran pale beside the numbers slaughtered by Israel and the United States in Gaza and throughout the Middle East. Those numbers represent executions as well — mostly innocent children, their mothers, and grandparents.
That omission matters.
I say this as someone who deeply admires Amy Goodman. For years Democracy Now has been one of the few programs in U.S. media willing to challenge empire, question official narratives, and expose Washington’s lies. Which is exactly why this kind of reporting is so disappointing when it happens.
Because independent journalism is supposed to complicate the picture — not flatten it into another morality play where the official enemies of the United States appear uniquely evil while Western violence fades into the background like wallpaper.
Let me be clear. I’m not arguing that Iran is innocent. It plainly is not. Like every government under siege, it has become increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. Many Iranian protesters are undoubtedly sincere people with genuine grievances about corruption, restrictions on freedom, economic suffering, and political repression.
But it is childish — or dishonest — to pretend that foreign intelligence agencies have not been actively working to exploit those grievances.
Washington has done this for generations. Iran itself is one of the clearest examples. In 1953 the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government under Mohammad Mosaddegh because he dared nationalize Iranian oil. Ever since, Iran has been treated as a target for destabilization and regime change.
The United States openly funds opposition groups and propaganda outlets aimed at Tehran. Israel has assassinated Iranian scientists. Economic sanctions have crippled ordinary people. American politicians routinely threaten military action.
So when protests erupt inside Iran, are we really supposed to imagine the CIA and Mossad simply sit on the sidelines wishing everyone well?
Come on.
Recognizing that reality does not mean every protester is a foreign agent. That would be absurd. It simply means understanding how imperial power works.
Amnesty International
And that brings us to Amnesty International itself.
Amnesty has done courageous and important work over the years. Its reports on torture, disappearances, political prisoners, and state violence have often exposed crimes the mainstream media preferred to ignore. Amnesty has criticized the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel as well.
But organizations like Amnesty also have blind spots.
Too often they examine countries in isolation from the global systems of power surrounding them. An execution in Iran becomes a moral outrage standing entirely on its own. But sanctions that destroy healthcare systems? Economic warfare? Proxy wars? Assassinations? Coups? Occupations? Those realities somehow become background noise.
The violence of official enemies is individualized and dramatized. The violence of empire is bureaucratized and normalized. When Iran executes dissidents, headlines scream about barbarism. When Israel blows apart apartment buildings full of children with U.S.-supplied weapons, we hear about “security concerns,” “complexity,” and Israel’s “right to defend itself.” That double standard has become so normal we barely notice it anymore.
And yet the numbers tell the story. Yes, Iran’s executions are horrifying. But compare them to the scale of killing carried out by Israel in Gaza with full American support. Compare them to the deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Compare them to the million-plus dead from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One reason the Global South increasingly distrusts Western human rights rhetoric is precisely because of this inconsistency.
The Politics of Human Rights
Human rights matter intensely when the accused government opposes Washington.
They become strangely negotiable when the crimes are committed by allies.
That doesn’t mean Amnesty is part of some sinister conspiracy. I don’t believe that. But institutions absorb the assumptions of the societies in which they operate. And Western institutions — even liberal and progressive ones — often unconsciously treat U.S. power as the invisible center around which everything else revolves.
So Iran’s repression is highlighted. America’s role in creating the crisis is minimized.
Israel’s vastly larger violence is compartmentalized into a separate conversation.
And audiences are left with the impression that the chief danger to humanity comes from the designated enemies of the empire.
Meanwhile the empire itself disappears from view. That is why context matters so much.
A country under permanent siege behaves differently from a country at peace. Again, that does not justify repression. But it explains some of it.
The United States itself cracked down viciously during wartime. It jailed dissidents, spied on citizens, censored speech, and criminalized opposition during both world wars and after 9/11. Imagine how Washington would react if China or Russia were funding and arming internal American protest movements while openly calling for regime change.
We don’t have to imagine, actually. We already know.
Conclusion
The larger problem here is not simply hypocrisy. It’s the way selective outrage helps prepare public opinion for intervention. Partial truths become propaganda because they omit the forces producing the crisis in the first place.
And that’s why I found the Democracy Now segment so troubling.
Not because it criticized Iran.
But because it criticized Iran in a way that quietly erased empire.
About Things That Matter 