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#IranianCulturalSites Let’s tweet storm our favourite Iranian cultural sites:
Here’s my paternal hometown Kashan.. I loved the impromptu mini-concert taking advantage of the great acoustical elements courtesy of our incomparable architecture:
AtiehS retweeted
Well, this aged rather well. 👇
A new Haaretz investigation has uncovered a network of 1,653 X accounts posing as Iranians that mobilized to promote Netanyahu and his Likud party during Israel's recent election.
What's particularly revealing is that many of these same accounts had previously been identified in an influence operation promoting Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran's last shah, and regime change in Iran.
The researchers found clear signs of coordinated, inauthentic activity: accounts posting identical messages, amplifying Netanyahu within minutes of one another, and suddenly switching from Persian-language messaging about Iran to Hebrew appeals urging Israelis to vote for Netanyahu.
Some claimed to speak on behalf of the Iranian people, telling Israelis that Netanyahu's reelection was essential to freeing Iran from the Islamic Republic.
After the election, the accounts largely abandoned Israeli politics and returned to promoting the shah and discussing regime change in Iran.
This didn't emerge out of nowhere.
Earlier Haaretz and other investigations exposed Israeli government-funded social media influence operations targeting Iranian audiences, including efforts to promote Reza Pahlavi and manufacture the appearance of grassroots support.
Separately, a major @citizenlab investigation following the June 2025 Israel-Iran war uncovered another coordinated network of fake Iranian accounts spreading AI-generated content to encourage an uprising in Iran. (source: citizenlab.ca/research/2025-…)
Researchers assessed that the operation was most likely conducted by an Israeli government agency or a contractor working closely with it. Some of its messaging was synchronized with Israeli military strikes.
The latest Haaretz investigation does not establish who operates the 1,653 accounts, and Netanyahu's office and Likud deny involvement.
But the documented overlap is striking: accounts presenting themselves as ordinary Iranians promoting Pahlavi and regime change were also mobilized to influence an Israeli election on Netanyahu's behalf.
This is definitely not organic or spontaneous Iranian public opinion. It's coordinated, inauthentic political manipulation masquerading as grassroots support. And it's not new. For years, especially since 2022, as Israel intensified its regime-change efforts toward Iran, these operations have sought to manufacture the appearance of Iranian support for an agenda that serves Israeli political interests.
Link to the Haaretz investigation:
haaretz.co.il/news/elections…
AtiehS retweeted
Few have done more than Behnam & FDD to manufacture consent for war on Iran & enable impunity for Israel. These stenographers of slaughter never run out of excuses for more bombing & death. That they do so without shame is disgraceful. And so are those who indulge them.
Save this post and the critical open-source research by @FDD’s @JanatanSayeh for the next time people say why don’t the Iranian people rise up after they were last slaughtered in January.
Answer: Their butchers were barely targeted. 210 out of 24,000 US and Israeli strikes were dedicated against the “apparatus of repression.”
AtiehS retweeted
Iran’s reaction to U.S. elections:
Tehran sees Democrats’ win as a rejection of Trump’s war and its economic costs. Iran’s senior negotiators are signaling four key points:
1. Tehran wants to end the war.
2. It seeks a negotiated solution and is showing greater flexibility.
3. It does not intend to initiate the next round of escalation.
4. But it is prepared to retaliate forcefully if attacked again.
Tehran’s message combines an opening for diplomacy with a clear warning against further military escalation.
AtiehS retweeted
Holy shit!
Read Vance's entire tweet. Here's a teaser:
"The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night."
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
AtiehS retweeted
Leave it to Assal to dig up the perfect headline from what in internet time is time immemorial.
AtiehS retweeted
What a joke.
Iran didn't even retaliate with chemical weapons when Saddam Hussein used them on Iranians in the Iran/Iraq war, one that he started unprovoked. Why would it use them on its friends or neighbors now?
BREAKING: Reporting published by The New York Times earlier today claims that Israel is attempting to sell that Iran is about to use CHEMICAL WEAPONS across the Gulf.
It goes without saying that this is a borderline comically preposterous claim from Netanyahu and Mossad, and further spits in the face of Americans that have seen this war become a truly historic disaster.
But what this REALLY tells me, beyond anything else, is that Israel will do ANYTHING they have to do in order to force a continuation of this war. Netanyahu MUST have known that this would be treated with immense skepticism and dismissed entirely out of hand by most. He doesn't care, it's worth a shot regardless.
Israel is desperate. The writing is on the wall. And they will go to the ends of the earth in order to force a resumption of this war.
AtiehS retweeted
FACT CHECK: The United States slaughtered 168 schoolchildren and teachers in Minab on the first day of the war in a triple-tap strike… and then swept it under the rug.
🚫 CLAIM: Iran’s foreign minister recently claimed publicly that Iran has not attacked civilians in neighboring countries. This is FALSE.
✅ FACT: Iran has not only intentionally attacked civilian infrastructure, neighborhoods, and other facilities in neighboring Gulf countries, but it has also deliberately attacked civilian mariners at sea — killing more than 20 in recent months. Iran’s indiscriminate aggression is clearly evident and inexcusable.
AtiehS retweeted
So, Israel (a nuclear-armed state) is pushing the U.S. (a nuclear-armed state) to nuke Iran (not a nuclear-armed state) because Iran is a “nuclear threat.”
It’s the same logic that tells you genocide is “self-defense.”
Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. The target would be Pickax Mountain in central Iran, where Israeli intelligence claims the Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program. No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place. The only military option is a nuclear strike. Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one. “Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” says an informed observer.
Netanyahu is cornered and desperate. After last week’s election results, he can’t form a government unless Trump intervenes directly in Israeli politics and brokers a deal with other parties that gives Netanyahu 61 seats in the Knesset. Otherwise, he is out as prime minister and on his way to ignominy, investigations and possibly jail. Netanyahu must stay close to Trump. He needs this war.
To that end, he’s applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are also following Netanyahu’s lead, as are leaders of the Democratic Party. In a recent meeting on the subject, former president Barack Obama said he opposes the current Iran peace deal being drafted in Doha.
The rest of America’s longtime allies in the Middle East are terrified by the prospect of more war. On September 27th, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to enlist the UAE in his lobbying effort for a final attack on Iran. The Emiratis refused. After eight months of conflict, Gulf economies are teetering. So are global energy and fertilizer markets. They won’t recover soon. Globally, there are a total of about 850 supertankers used to transport oil from producers to the rest of the world. In October alone, 11 of them were badly damaged in Hormuz. At this pace, a global depression is imminent. A nuclear strike would radically accelerate the destruction. Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickax Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people.
And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed. No country other than the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. Some would like to. An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final.
We’ve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months. Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten America’s nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called “battlefield nukes” easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now we’re on the brink of it.
Close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons. That would be November 7, six days from now. To his credit, he’s hesitating. At the moment, Trump is listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.
They’re right, though it won’t be simple. The Iranians are famously frustrating to negotiate with under any circumstances, and elements of that government have become more radical since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family were killed in February. After decades of isolation, even relatively moderate Iranian leaders seem confused by how decisions are made in the West. (There is a widespread belief in Tehran, for example, that the United States government controls Israel.) But overall, people who have spoken to decision-makers in Iran say there is consensus there that more war is bad for everyone and a deal is worth making.
One group that hasn’t been consulted so far is the global population — the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed along with their children if Trump is pushed by Netanyahu into launching a nuclear strike next week. Now would be the time for them to speak up.
AtiehS retweeted
“How DARE Iran threaten to attack infrastructure while we threaten to attack their infrastructure!”
AtiehS retweeted
Yeah, normal behavior is kidnapping the head of state of country, and bombing another country twice while in the middle of negotiating with it. Totally normal.
AtiehS retweeted
They're actually copying Iran's Lego videos. Remarkable what Iran has managed to do against the global superpower: destroying US bases, downing scores of aircraft & now even seeing the US imitate its propaganda. Whatever else, the era of uncontested American dominance is over.
AtiehS retweeted
These vapid, thoroughly dishonest and corrupt foreign operatives have been arguing for years that sanctions only target the regime in Iran. Now when there’s talk about putting sanctions on their fave little ethno-state, they’re all flustered that the sanctions will hit ordinary people
AtiehS retweeted
Iran's hardline daily Vatan Emrooz responding to Rubio’s remarks: “Despite his partial and biased account of the clash between Iranian and Western civilizations, Rubio reminded those naïve Iranians who believe that America’s problem with Iran stems solely from the Islamic Republic being in power of a fundamental fact: today’s confrontation is not, at its core, an American war against an Islamic regime, but a confrontation with an ancient civilization.
The US secretary of state implicitly acknowledges that America’s current hostility toward Iranians extends beyond the ideology or structure of the Islamic Republic and is, in fact, rooted in civilizational identity.
Although delivered from a hostile standpoint, this reminder makes clear that, in American discourse, the Islamic Republic of Iran is seen not merely as a government that poses problems for the United States but as the representative of a historically rival civilization that must be contained, or at least weakened.
This outlook can also be seen in earlier statements by the criminal who heads the terrorist American administration. During the latest war, Trump threatened Iran with the destruction of its civilization on several occasions. In April 2026, he wrote in a post: ‘An entire civilization will die tonight, never to return.’ At the UN General Assembly, he also threatened to ‘send Iranians to hell, with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or greatness for generations to come.’”
.@SenMarcoRubio may have just handed Tehran one of the biggest propaganda gifts of this war and planted a deeply damaging narrative in the minds of Iranians who once viewed America favorably, potentially shaping their perception of the U.S. for generations to come.
Reaching back 2,500 years to invoke Xerxes and the burning of Athens to frame a contemporary war isn’t just lazy history. It’s dangerous politics. Ancient empires fought, destroyed, and conquered one another. Including Alexander's burning of Persepolis.
Dragging that into today’s conflict explains nothing. It just reframes this war as a civilizational clash. And that plays directly into Tehran’s hands. For years, the Iranian government has struggled to convince its own people that the U.S. is not against the regime, but against Iran itself. @marcorubio framing makes that argument for them.
Even many Iranians who despise the Islamic Republic are deeply proud of Iran’s history and identity. Foreign attacks and civilizational rhetoric don’t win them over. They push people away. So instead of isolating the government, this kind of rhetoric helps it rally around nationalist sentiment and resistance. Whatever the intent, the effect is clear. Washington is helping Tehran sell a story that it could never fully sell on its own: That the United States is at war with Iran itself.
At a time when Washington has yet to provide a full public accounting of the strike on a school in Minab that tragically killed more than 168 people on the first day of the war, including 120 children, when 1000s of Iranians have been killed, dozens of Americans have lost their lives, hundreds more have been wounded, and ordinary Americans are paying the economic price of this war, Rubio's attempt to reach back 2,500 years to invoke a clash of civilizations is a stunningly misguided diversion. Rather than answering the most urgent questions why the United States went to war, what it has achieved, and how it justifies the enormous human suffering and destruction it has inflicted- he seems to be searching ancient history for a moral framework to explain a war whose present-day consequences demand accountability.
The question is not what Xerxes did to Athens 2,500 years ago. It is what the United States is doing to Iran today, why it is doing it, and who will be held accountable for the lives destroyed in the process.
AtiehS retweeted
First, Reza Pahlavi pushed for sanctions that put Iranians in despair. Then he demanded an uprising in which he put thousands at risk while sitting safely in a Washington suburb.
When that failed, he promoted the narrative that only US-Israeli bombardment could bring down the theocracy.
And now that has failed miserably; he promotes civil war in Iran by calling for the arming of various groups.
There are two common themes in all of his advocacy:
First, everything he calls for serves the interest of Israel - sanctions, war, and civil war.
Second, all of his demands put all of the risk on Iranians in Iran and none of the risk on him.
Whatever happens, regardless of how many people in Iran get killed, die from medicine shortages, or get crushed by the sanctions, Reza Pahlavi will remain safe and well funded.
AtiehS retweeted
I’ve worked on this issue for most of my adult life and it’s a genocide, accompanied by ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
AtiehS retweeted
The Bully-in-Chief mistook UNGA for a Stone Age battleground, threatening to commit the mother of all war crimes in 'annihilating' a nation.
President @drpezeshkian ditched his prepared speech to tell the world that:
Iran is always open to diplomacy.
But NEVER threaten Iranians.
AtiehS retweeted
Imagine a politician saying that lying is a part of the Jewish religion. Mike Johnson declares that about Islam and the host just moves on to the next question.
Another obvious follow-up is: what's an example of Iran lying "every day"? The answer is none. When it comes to designated adversaries, politicians are given carte blanche to lie every day.
