Propaganda Tourists in Tehran: The Western Apologists Lending Legitimacy to a Terrorist Regime

In mid-July 2025, a curious collection of self-styled “activists,” “journalists,” and “peace advocates” gathered in Tehran for a regime-hosted event titled “Condemnation of Terrorism Against Media.” Organized by IRIB, the state-controlled broadcaster sanctioned by both the U.S. and the EU, the Sobh International Festival was anything but a neutral space for dialogue. Instead, it functioned as a staged propaganda showcase designed to launder the image of one of the most repressive regimes on earth—and the foreign participants were all too willing to play along.

Among those in attendance were Jennifer Koonings, Calla Walsh, and a rotating cast of Western agitators and ideologues with long histories of apologizing for authoritarian regimes—so long as they are anti-American. Their message was clear: the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the problem; the United States and its allies are. Their silence on the Islamic Republic’s egregious record of repression, hostage-taking, and terror sponsorship was deafening. Their complicity was not accidental—it was deliberate.

Useful Idiots, Career Apologists, and Paid Advocates

Jennifer Koonings, affiliated with Code Pink, delivered a fiery anti-American speech in front of a military exhibit showcasing drones and missiles emblazoned with IRGC insignia. Koonings' ideological alignment with the regime is hardly new. Code Pink has long served as a mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic, frequently meeting with Iranian officials while ignoring the regime’s human rights atrocities—particularly against women, journalists, and minorities. Koonings praised Iran for “resisting U.S. and Zionist aggression” but had no words for the women imprisoned for removing their headscarves, nor for the children killed during the 2022–2023 protests.

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Code Pink’s political blind spots—such as its refusal to condemn Iran’s systemic misogyny while claiming to support women’s rights—aren’t anomalies. They are features of a carefully curated ideological framework in which Western imperialism is the only evil worth mentioning.

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Another attendee, Calla Walsh, posed in front of IRGC missile displays and parroted talking points identical to those broadcast by PressTV, claiming Iran was “under genocidal siege by the United States and Zionists.” Like Koonings, Walsh made no mention of Iran’s political prisoners, no acknowledgment of its ongoing hostage diplomacy, and no criticism of its theocratic stranglehold on civil society.

The Broader Network of Regime Sympathizers

This is not a fringe event. The Tehran festival fits into a broader pattern of Western agitators aligning themselves with the Islamic Republic under the guise of anti-imperialism. Figures such as Jackson Hinkle, a social media personality with open affiliations to authoritarian regimes, have routinely praised the Iranian government, even as it murders dissidents and funds terrorist militias abroad.

David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, has also praised the Islamic Republic—not because he supports religious rule or respects the Iranian people, but because Tehran’s regime shares his hatred for Jews and Israel. The regime’s Holocaust denial and antisemitic propaganda have long attracted extremists on both the far right and far left, illustrating the strange ideological bedfellows produced by authoritarian opportunism.

Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone and a prominent far-left commentator, was also recently in Iran. His trip followed a long record of promoting regime narratives, including the downplaying of Iran’s human rights abuses and parroting Iranian state rhetoric on foreign policy. Blumenthal’s coverage rarely mentions the regime’s political executions, censorship, or suppression of dissent—opting instead to frame Iran as a misunderstood victim of Western aggression. Notably, The Grayzone is widely reported to receive substantial financial support from PressTV, the Iranian regime’s English-language propaganda network. His appearance in Tehran serves to reinforce the Islamic Republic’s foreign propaganda line while ignoring the voices of the Iranian people.

This was not the first iteration of the Sobh International Media Festival, and it likely won’t be the last. In fact, multiple Sobh festivals have been held in recent years as part of the regime’s sustained public diplomacy and influence operations. In May 2025, the Islamic Republic hosted a previous Sobh Media Festival where the regime awarded the “Martyr Ismail Haniyeh Award” to former European politicians Clare Daly and Mick Wallace—both former Members of the European Parliament from Ireland—and to George Galloway, the former British MP known for his pro-authoritarian and anti-Western positions. The award was given “for their political support of Palestine and the resistance,” a euphemism for endorsing Iran-backed militant proxies. Daly and Wallace have both attended more than one of these regime-organized events. Also in attendance at these festivals was David Miller, the disgraced British sociologist known for his conspiratorial rhetoric and extreme hostility toward Jewish institutions, who has openly defended the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah.

These individuals—whether motivated by ideology, access, or attention—form an informal alliance of regime legitimizers. They operate freely in Western democracies while acting as foreign agents of influence for a regime that jails, tortures, and executes its own citizens for demanding those same democratic rights. And the gatherings are not mere media workshops—they are highly coordinated propaganda spectacles designed to cloak the regime’s abuses behind a fog of contrived anti-Western solidarity.

The Khomeinist regime has brought together extremists from both ends of the ideological spectrum—far right and far left—in a bizarre but functional coalition. The marriage of these two extremes has come full circle, united by shared hostility toward Western liberal democracies and a mutual admiration for authoritarian control. Much of what the Islamic Republic exports ideologically—antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and conspiracy-laden authoritarianism—is consumed in the West by people who live safely in free societies while advocating for regimes that destroy them. These so-called activists resemble the Nazi sympathizers who operated in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1930s: willing to parrot fascist propaganda while enjoying the protections of open societies they quietly work to undermine.

What They Won’t Say—and What That Silence Means

There was no condemnation of the regime’s continued imprisonment of dual nationals, including Americans and Europeans. No mention of the Islamic Republic’s use of hostage diplomacy as a state tactic. No solidarity with the families of political prisoners. No reference to the more than 500 protesters killed during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. Not a single word about the fact that IRIB itself has broadcast forced confessions of political detainees—one of the very acts for which it is under international sanction.

This strategic silence reveals a basic truth: these Western attendees are not there for the Iranian people. They are there to perform ideological loyalty to a state that opposes the West, regardless of its crimes. In doing so, they betray the very values—free speech, women’s rights, press freedom—that they claim to defend in their own countries.

The Comfort of Dissent Without Consequence

None of these attendees would choose to live under the rule of the Islamic Republic. They return to the comforts of the West, where their “activism” entails no risk and no consequence. They enjoy freedom of speech, gender equality, and legal protections—luxuries not afforded to Iranian citizens. Yet they speak with reverence about a government that would throw them in prison the moment they criticized its Supreme Leader or challenged its religious laws.

Their hypocrisy is not theoretical—it is operational. They are tools of a regime that funds terrorist proxies across the region, that supplies drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, and that publicly calls for the annihilation of another sovereign state while executing its own people for dancing, singing, or posting on Instagram.

This Isn’t Anti-War—It’s Anti-Truth

The Tehran festival was not a peace summit. It was a stage-managed propaganda event populated by ideological functionaries willing to lend their Western credibility to an authoritarian regime. They claim to oppose war, but refuse to acknowledge the war the Islamic Republic wages daily—against its own people, against its neighbors, and against truth itself.

Far from being activists, these individuals are apparatchiks for hire, whose loyalties lie not with justice or freedom, but with whoever offers them a platform, a podium, or a seat at the table.

They are not just enemies of truth—they are enemies of the very societies that allow them to dissent without consequence. And they must be called what they are: propaganda tourists, regime mouthpieces, and betrayers of the oppressed.