There’s a passage near the center of Narges Bajoghli’s recent New York Magazine piece, “In the Room With Iran’s Social Media Savants,” that should have stopped every editor at that publication cold—and every Jewish reader should know why.

Bajoghli is describing how the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ new generation of content creators replaced the obscure theological language of the old regime with a new vocabulary—one drawn, as she puts it, from “human-rights literature and international law.” The specific words she lists: “Settler colonialism. Occupation. Genocide. Anti-imperialism.” Her approach is clinical, admiring, and quietly impressed. “A language,” she writes, “that anyone who had paid attention in the postcolonial world already knew and that required no prior knowledge of Shiʿa Islam to receive.”

She presents this as an observation. It’s also a demonstration. The same vocabulary she describes the IRGC deploying—stripped of theological origin, laundered through academic credibility, engineered to travel across ideological communities—runs through her own article like a watermark.

Her article is not merely about IRGC propaganda. It is, structurally, an instance of it.

This matters because of who Narges Bajoghli is. She’s an associate professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a dual US-Iranian citizen who spent a decade embedded with IRGC and Basij media producers. Her book, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (2019), won the Margaret Mead Book Award. She has appeared on CNN, NPR, BBC, and Democracy Now. She’s not a fringe voice. She’s a credentialed academic with extraordinary access to a designated foreign terrorist organization, whose work consistently portrays their actions as the understandable political behavior of sovereignty-seeking nationalists.

What makes her recent piece different—and more dangerous—is the youthful exuberance through which she redecorates state propaganda’s take on atrocities. Not to mention, the way October 7 is handled.

Najoghli begins by noting that “the formal U.S. and Israeli media infrastructure relies on institutional trust that has been catastrophically degraded over the past few years.” An honest remark, if it lacked a dog-whistle. If by “formal media infrastructure” she meant some U.S. outlets prefer sourcing the IDF over anything run by Hamas, or the countries being aligned politically resulting in shared goals, I would stop here. I’m sure she does not.

She says, the “AFP, the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN are perceived as having failed on Gaza — a perception that is widespread and not entirely wrong.” Basically, Western audiences are fertile grounds for revolutionary content after witnessing these........

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