Are we talking about the regime in Iran with its systematic arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings targeting political dissenters, journalists, ethnic minorities, women, and protesters? Are we talking about Iran, with it’s structural repression where peaceful protesters are met with live ammunition, mass detentions, forced confessions, and sham trials. Families are threatened into silence. Lawyers who defend political prisoners are imprisoned themselves. Journalists are harassed, jailed, disappeared. Iran where women who refuse compulsory veiling face beatings, imprisonment, public humiliation and death? Iran where The misogyny is literally codified into law? Iran where ethnic and religious minorities are disproportionately targeted, surveilled, and silenced and killed. Prisoners are tortureed, abused, denied medical care. Executions are common and a spectacle meant to instill fear. Are we talking about that Iran, a place where people jearn for a less terrifying country and then get slaughtered for that? And then Iranian regime (and this article) calls them foreign agents. That Iran?

Or are we talking about Western governments?