Demonstrator silhouetted against a street fire waving the Lion and Sun flag, 9 January 2026 – CC0

Israel’s longstanding campaign to lure Washington into war with Iran seems to have fizzled once again—for now, anyway. But in their attempt to invent a casus belli, their spy agencies employ tactics—disinformation, infiltration, and incitement of rioting—that help sustain the patently false impression that Tehran, not Tel Aviv, is home to the Middle East’s cruelest regime.

“We Are with You in the Field”

In late December, people in several cities across Iran took to the streets in nonviolent protest over the crushing economic conditions spawned by US attacks on Iran’s currency and the further intensification of US sanctions. Police were deployed, but the protests were peaceful, so they stayed on the sidelines.

Then, suddenly on January 8, shocking violence broke out across Iran, and most of the peaceable protesters vanished from the streets. They’d been displaced by young toughs, many of them armed.

Video (released by both government and anti-government forces) showed arsonists setting fire to businesses, mosques, a fire station (killing the firefighters inside), and other buildings, as well as public buses. Roving gangs, reportedly armed by Israeli agents, gunned down hundreds of people.

Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone reported,

“In Kermanshah, where anti-government rioters shot and killed 3 year-old Melina Asadi, groups of militants were filmed firing automatic weapons at police. In cities from Hamedan to Lorestan, rioters have filmed themselves beating unarmed security guards to death for attempting to impede their rampages.”

Suspecting foreign incitement, officials in Tehran shut off all internet connections beyond Iran’s borders. Sure enough, the violence ended as suddenly as it had started two days earlier.

There soon emerged more evidence that the riots had been orchestrated from abroad. Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which has many agents and collaborators on the ground in Iran, had put out the following message through its Farsi-language X account: “Go out together into the streets. (See especially Justin Podur’s Jan. 27 analysis, “The Iran Insurgency: A review of the available evidence”) The time has come. We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” In an interview, Yoav Gallant, a former Israeli defense minister, was quite clear: “The regime in Iran must fall . . . At this moment, when what matters most is the mass action on the ground, we need to stay in the background and steer things with an invisible........

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