People living outside Iran participating in these protests have no idea what they are doing.
On the reddit NewIran sub, they were mocking a picture of somebody at one of those rally’s holding a giant IRGC flag… upside-down.
I wouldn’t use numbers of “useful idiots” showing up at rallies as a way of demonstrating internal support for the Iranian regime.
Surveys suggest around 70-80% are anti-regime, which makes sense considering the regime’s history of hangings and imprisonment for minor offenses. The people of Iran want the regime to end.
The moment is that the regime is severely weakened and is struggling to deal with an external war, with very few weapons left. Many heads of their military were eliminated and they are scrambling to put the pieces back together.
Couple that with a population of at least 80 million people who hate the regime and only didn’t fight back because the regime had physical power over them.
Case in point. Even the mainstream media does not tell what is actually happening in Gaza, despite the many journalists on the ground there, and you heard "genocide" and immediately think - or "know" - that is something that Israel is doing.
I do not use TikTok so maybe I do not understand, but how does TikTok influence its users? I thought content comes from other users. Does TikTok decide which content to promote? And if so, what exactly are they promoting that is threatening to the United States?
Israeli leadership in 2006 gave up Gaza and forcefully evicted thousands of Jewish people in what was supposed to be an exchange for peace. That was supposed to be the end of the rockets and the attacks.
In case you are not aware, the exact opposite happened.
To be clear, we very much do want Gaza. We had homes there. and we have Jewish roots there going back long before the time of today’s Palestinian colonists.
Above all of that though, is that we want peace. And so if we have to be patient for a time when we can peacefully live in Gaza again, we will be patient.
In the meantime, the most important thing is the safe return of loved ones who were taken hostage on October 7th (and before!) and safety for those living in rocket’s range of Gaza.
Gaza has been its own country / Palestinian State since 2006 and they have been recipients of foreign aid for many years, which is how they fund these attacks.
Not only that, but from reports, it sounds like they deliberately sent an alert several seconds before detonation to ensure that the user of the pager would be the direct target. Or perhaps that was just the time it took for the fuse to detonate the explosive? Either way, some of the videos out there show the incredible precision that the owner of the pager was taken down and people in the vicinity were unscathed.
Given that the pagers are for secret messages to be sent between militants, it would be highly unlikely for them to end up in the wrong hands unless the militant is being irresponsible.
Certainly you would not expect somebody in the military to leave a loaded gun around the house. But, also it should be obvious that they would not leave their radio device for transmitting top-secret information either due to the implications of having such information and how that would affect the safety of family members.
It is likely that nobody could have expected their pager to literally explode. But, military or merely involved in the "political" side, anybody who lets their family play with such a radio/pager is putting their family at risk.
I think the part you are missing is that this was not an ordinary cellphone. These were pagers handed out by Hezbollah to the militants in their organization so they could communicate, specifically because they did not want to use ordinary cellphones out of fear of being tracked.
The only person who would be likely to have such a pager is a Hezbollah militant who is deemed responsible for secret Hezbollah information (i.e. mid-to-high ranking members). While it is technically possible that such a pager would get into the wrong hands, that would be the fault of the person who left his pager on the table or let his family play with it.