Regime Chic: Prof. Bajoghli Redecorates Iran’s Propaganda for NY Magazine |
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 institutions fall short—which, in a twisted fate, most of us agree with. But where she sees imperial alliances, a preferential deficit for Palestinians, and the prospect of new followers, we see a commonplace coalition, an overabundance of antizionism, and future extremists.
If you think the BBC “failed on Gaza” for not condemning Israel enough, I have a mild suggestion: ask a Jewish person what they think of the BBC.
“When Hamas launched its attack on Israel,” Bajoghli quips, “cameras were as central to the operation as weapons.” The “GoPro footage of the breach, drone video of the assault — within hours, social-media-ready content was already circulating.” Her approach to this massacre—framed in terms like “attack” and “assault,” without moral clarification—stands out less for what it says than for what it avoids. Not for noting Hamas’ forward-thinking regarding information warfare, but for presenting it as a strategic innovation rather than an atrocity. It’s viewed positively, through staging and optics.
She continues: “During the temporary cease-fire in November 2023, Hamas released its Israeli captives in Gaza with cameras positioned to capture handshakes and high-fives — a deliberate counter to the “human animal” narrative Israeli officials had been amplifying.” She doesn’t say whether she thinks this is good, or just good marketing, but she doesn’t have to. It’s an example she uses of younger anti-Imperialists winning the narrative contest.
Of course the interviews, forensic analysis, and verified evidence that Hamas killed, took hostages, and committed sexual violence against civilians—war crimes and crimes against humanity—doesn’t appear in the piece. Women’s bodies used as victory trophies and publicly displayed, didn’t make the headlines. The rape, torture, and depravity Amit Sousanna and Romi Gonen faced, didn’t go viral enough to offset the propaganda high-fives. This is what Bajoghli describes as a media strategy.
And notably, the 1,200 dead are not mentioned.
This isn’t abstract for me. Unfortunately, I know and have utilized the language she mentions. I used to be an antizionist. I used a Marxist and post-colonial vocabulary. Fanon, Said, Bhabha, the whole toolkit. I believed most of it. I even had a chat with Chomsky. What changed wasn’t my politics broadly—I’m still skeptical of U.S. military projects and critical of many American foreign policy choices. It was my tools. They didn’t work. Post-colonial concepts applied to Zionism results in the same conclusion: Jews are colonizers, their return is a foreign invasion, and their state is illegitimate. It’s an ending built into the floor plan.
And it’s the conclusion the IRGC has now formally adopted as its communication strategy. Bajoghli just published a 12,000-word appreciation of how effectively it travels. This is not an accidental omission. It’s the structural logic of the piece.
It must be noted, however, that the Axis of Resistance she profiles looks different when you uncrop it, take the filters off, and turn on the house lights
The IRGC was founded to protect Iran’s clerical regime from its own population. That mandate never changed. They killed over 500 in the 2022 Mahsa Amini crackdown. Several thousand, possibly tens of thousands, were massacred just months ago—with Khamenei personally ordering forces to kill indiscriminately. Historically, there’s the bombing of the US Embassy and barracks in Beirut. This was the deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. There’s the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. They arm Hamas and Hezbollah, fund the Houthis, supply Russia with Shahed drones, plot assassinations, and Australian intelligence found strong evidence they were behind a recent synagogue firebombing in Melbourne. The U.S., the European Union, and Australia have all designated the IRGC a terrorist organization—one of the few state-run military forces labeled this by multiple Western democracies.
That is the record of the organization whose filmmakers Bajoghli spent seven years humanizing for Western audiences—and whose propaganda vocabulary she admires.
In a 2019 piece, Bajoghli described Hezbollah’s activities as having “helped keep Israel out of Lebanon” and left it there. It didn’t mention a rocket strike that killed 12 Druze children in Majdal Shams, which was attributed to Hezbollah. The Houthis’ official slogan—painted on buildings across Sana’a—is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.” Bajoghli argues their bond with Iran is “a political quest for sovereignty, rather than an otherworldly quest for religious rule.” To be fair, she is applying the post-colonial method consistently here. When extremists explicitly say they are motivated by their religious beliefs, you say it’s actually done for political and economic reasons. That way, you keep it connected to the cause, show you’re not Islamophobic, and so people are aware you know their intentions better than they do.
In 2015, Khamenei’s website referred to “the most important and memorable sentence” of the year: “Israel will not see the next 25 years”—and installed a countdown clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square. His website published a graphic using the phrase “final solution.” In June 2025 a statement on state television declared: “The armed forces will act with determination and destroy the despicable Zionist regime.” This isn’t opposition to US hegemony. It’s a 45-year record of destructive intent directed at a UN member state—the same member state whose existence the vocabulary of settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid is engineered to discredit.
Supporting the Iranian people’s right to be free of an oppressive regime isn’t a right-wing position. It’s a moral one. You don’t have to be a neoconservative, or a Trump supporter to believe that the protesters shot from rooftops deserved to live.
The IRGC appears in her writing when the regime is being sophisticated or resilient. Americans and Israelis appear everywhere else. Her TIME piece—opens with their economic catastrophe being “the product of eight years of U.S. policies.” It acknowledges IRGC elites “profited from sanctions evasion” and the government “severely mismanaged the economy,” but lets America take most of the blame. She reduces pro-Shah sentiment to foreign influence, while acknowledging that U.S. and Israeli pressure gives Tehran cover to dismiss dissent as foreign-backed.
This leads to the same logic by which the Ayatollah claimed an “international plot” orchestrated the recent protests–as he did in 2022. I believe “Zionist” was used for both.
As recently as this week, speaking to The Intercept, she described Iran winning “the narrative war”—not as a warning, delivered with evident satisfaction. While the IRGC was shooting protesters from rooftops, Hamidreza Mohammadi—brother of jailed Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi—sat beside Bajoghli on Democracy Now unable to reach his own family inside a blacked-out Iran. He said directly: “People in Iran simply want a different system, and they don’t want to be enslaved by this regime for its ideological purposes.” Bajoghli used the moment to argue that Western pressure and Israeli statements were the primary threat to Iranian lives.
Bajoghli takes how regime insiders explain themselves and applies it to the broader world—even though such views are partial and strategic, they still make her work feel convincing. They are all perspective and storytelling.
This intimacy mistakes itself for veracity and people conflate the two.
Bajoghli implies this new media lays bare the evils of Israel, America, and the West, creating solidarity amongst the righteous reactionary anger of the global left. The videos these vanguard creators make are “designed for people who carry a set of grievances and suspicions the video can walk into and inhabit, like a house that was already furnished.” She’s right. Hezbollah slowly furnished it, and Hamas shut the blinds. Russia and China turned the lights off. The regime cut the internet. She’s been adding to the décor. This piece is the latest addition, and the lights are going out.