if the number of tens of thousands dead is true (and i'm highly skeptical, but let's go with that) then it correlates with the number of starlink terminals smuggled into sanctioned iran way before the protests. both us and israeli officials publicly boasted of mossad agents being on the ground (presumably coordinating these people exerting brutal violence; incidentally, these terminals were the reason for shutting down internet) and even bessant boasted about manipulating the currency into collapse to spark the unrests in the first place. that's all quite evil.

now, i'm against death penalty, but if a government under siege by foreign powers faces such an existential threat then that's one outcome to be expected ... those agitators had it coming. many innocent people died that day, but surely the majority weren't that innocent.

one can disagree with or dislike the irg, but i don't think they're evil, and if they are by the same criteria the us and israel are fucking monsters.

I would be entirely unsurprised if the US and Israel didn’t play a role in agitating, but the Iranian people genuinely don’t like their government. You can talk to pretty much any Iranian expat in any country. The protests may have been coordinated by Israel, but the people who died were ordinary citizens who want to live in a free country. The protestors absolutely were innocent by any reasonable definition. Protesting an oppressive government isn’t a moral offense.

> one can disagree with or dislike the irg, but i don't think they're evil, and if they are by the same criteria the us and israel are fucking monsters.

Yes, multiple governments can be bad, which is what this thread has been debating. Israel coordinating protests does not absolve IRGC butchering unarmed protestors. Iran sponsoring Hamas terrorism does not absolve Israel’s brutality against civilians. This isn’t complicated.

Those are not neutral protests, those are armed fraction to take down the government, any existing government would fight back.

He said it clearly:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/6/has-trump-confirmed-...

And anyone who knows a bit of history in the region they will understand that this is the case. They armed Saddam to fight Iran for 8 years. The main issue with Iran is that it is against Israel.

It feels like a lot of people on this thread believe that Iran can’t be bad because other countries have done bad things. This seems obviously absurd, but so many of the comments here take the form, “Iran isn’t bad, look at what the US has done”. Come on.

Gemini said The point isn't that one side is "good." The point is that your binary notion of bad and good is far too simplistic for this reality. We are talking about nuclear powers threatening to send a country of 90 million people to the dark ages just to seize their oil and resources. Radicalism is not born in a vacuum; it is an extreme yet necessary immune reaction to an invader. When you are facing a genocide level threat, the moral calculus is not actually that hard. If you can't see the difference between internal policy flaws and a superpower threatening total destruction, then you aren't being objective. You are just taking a side with the party holding the bigger hammer.

You're making an obvious straw man argument. Acknowledging that the Islamic Republic is evil does not imply a moral comparison between them and the United States or Israel. There's no contradiction between opposing the US and Israel for starting this war and acknowledging that the Islamic Republic is an evil regime. That's the point of this entire thread: more than one group can be evil, and the Islamic Republic does not cease to be evil regardless of one's opinion about the US and Israel. These are not dependent variables. You are endorsing an obviously false dichotomy.

But as Trump has assured us, that’s the old regime which is completely different from the current regime, which as Trump again has assured us, is not anywhere near as crazy as the old regime.

/s

The Iranian regime is incredibly evil. That makes the American actions even more evil given that they’re providing that evil regime so much cover and allowed it to transition from their 86 year old leader with almost no opportunity for opposition.

So the country waging wars from the sky, threatening to take their oil, annexing Greenland, suffocating Cuba, the only country who used nuclear bombs twice...is what?

I am vehemently opposed to Trump and this war as well. My position in this thread is that both sides are bad.

Neither the precise scale of the killings or the degree of militancy of the protesters has been well documented. It's reported that a lot of policemen and revolutionary guard soldiers were killed too.

Remember, Mossad publicly boasted that they were on the ground with the protesters, which was a pretty insane thing to do and basically gave Iran carte blanche to say these aren't protests, it's a foreign sponsored coup attempt. There's very little we can say to that when Mossad basically publicly said it was.

Maybe they were so sure the protests would succeed they figured it would earn them/justify goodwill with the new government?

FWIW, my information comes from Iranians who speak regularly with their families who still live in the cities where these killings happened. They talk about protestors pushed into a market place by IRGC with just one exit—the market was set on fire and anyone who fled out the exit was shot by IRGC.

Also, if you know anything at all about the history of the Iranian regime, it’s entirely unsurprising that this happened. They respond murderously to every large scale protest, and have been mass murderers since they turned on the leftists and other allies who helped install them in ‘79.

> it's a foreign sponsored coup attempt

This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally. I’m not defending Israel, but these were innocent unarmed people protesting even if Israel played a role in organizing the protests. I detest the Israeli regime as well, but justifying either side’s mass murder is insane.

Man, if you've followed Iran, you'll know that some exile Iranians are a bit like exile Cubans. Like the latter, they have plenty of legitimate things to be angry about, but that doesn't mean they aren't, a good deal of them, batshit crazy. Lots of them support the son of the CIA-supported dictator who was so bad he landed Iran with their theocrats in the first place. Some of them are supporters of MEK, a goddamn case study in political cults.

> This is what the regime says every time large protests erupt internally

Yes, but that doesn't mean they're not right. US and particularly Israel outright took credit for it, to a degree you'd be hard pressed to find any time in history. It wasn't just a spontaneous uprising, it was also very openly a foreign sponsored regime change operation.

Which doesn't mean they're aren't a lot of innocent people who have wanted to get rid of the theocrats all along getting murdered. I'm sure there are.

There are just enough in the opposition who have decided to ally with Israel (which would rather see Iran a Somalia-style failed state before a free and democratic Iran) and the dictator's sonthat any kind of moral legitimacy the movement could have had is out the window.

There's a lot of incorrect information here, but I prefer not to veer farther from our core disagreement by litigating details that seem tertiary (though I'm happy to discuss them in another thread or after we've resolved our core disagreement--it's an interesting topic).

You were originally arguing that the Islamic Republic isn't evil because the protestors deserved to be killed because Israel and the US claimed to have coordinated the protests. I don't see how you're getting from "Israel and the US claimed to have coordinated the protests" to "therefore Iran's mass murder was legitimate". Even if the tens of thousands figure is exaggerated by an order of magnitude, it would still make the Islamic Republic an evil regime. Even if Iranians who criticize the regime are "batshit crazy", even if the US and Israel organized the protests, even if the Shah was really worse than the Islamic Republic, none of that justifies murdering unarmed protestors by the thousands. My position is that mass murder is wrong even if the protestors held opinions I disagreed with.