Iran Focus
London, 09 Feb – The Iranian Regime has reportedly conducted an opinion poll among the Iranian people, which found that only 4.9% of Iranians are in favour of regime change.
However, logic dictates that this is just part of the Regime’s meaningless propaganda campaign.
Why? Because if you live under an oppressive Regime that has been rounding up protesters and threatening them with the death penalty, who routinely imprison political activists, and who once massacred 30,000 political prisoners in just one summer, why on earth would you tell a stranger on the telephone your true political beliefs?
It is also worth looking at those who claim to have conducted this research.
It seems fairly pointless to conduct a telephone poll about people’s political beliefs when tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in the past month with their political opinions written on placards denouncing the Iranian Regime.
So it seems obvious that the Iranian Regime would only want this poll to contradict what the actual Iranian people are calling for.
However, the Regime apologists in charge of this ‘research’, Ebrahim Mohseni, a Senior Analyst at the University of Tehran Center for Public Opinion Research, clearly didn’t even bother making sure that the numbers looked reasonable when he plucked them out of thin air.
According to the Regime’s research, only 8.8% believe that Iran should decrease its ballistic missile program budget, while only 11.3% believe the Regime is too involved in their personal lives and one-fifth disagree with the Regime’s Islamic laws, and only about one-fifth believe that Iran’s role in Syria and Iraq is not in the country’s interests and that Iran should decrease its Syria/Iraq budgets.
There is simply no way for this to be even close to the real figures. The majority of Iranians are living in poverty, with some people sleeping in graves, some searching for food in the trash, and some selling their organs on the black market.
Still the Iranian Regime gave the fabricated poll widespread coverage in its state-run media, while the international Iran lobby has attempted to get coverage in the West.
This is not the first time that the Regime has put out false polls; they did during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency to fake support for Iran’s nuclear programme and support for Ahmadinejad during the 2009 protests.
Human rights advocate Hesmat Alavi wrote on Forbes: “To conduct a ‘telephone poll’ in a totalitarian state such as Iran on a subject related to the ruling system, and not on which brand of laundry detergent they prefer, is tantamount to conducting a poll in Germany under the Third Reich! Which would have undoubtedly resulted in showing outright support for Hitler.”
Alavi continued: “Considering Iran’s intense crackdown and surveillance apparatus, especially when all secure means of communications are shut down, to believe one can obtain a measure of public opinion through calling Iranians on their landlines and asking them whether they support regime change borders on naiveté if not outright charlatanism.”
