As the bombs fall

I want to tell you a story, a tale of connection born of sharing stories – but before that, I have a favour to ask you all...

On Saturday I woke up to several messages from friends asking if I am ok, sending love, saying they are thinking of me and my family in Iran.

That’s how I knew that the bombing had started.

Since last June we have been waiting for Israel and the US to restart their war, and in earnest. For weeks since the unspeakable and unprecedented regime massacre of Iranian protestors, since the internet was somewhat restored, my cousins and friends in Iran have said at the end of every message, every conversation: ‘And we keep watching the sky’…

They were waiting. We were all waiting.

And in the midst of this, in the collective mourning that has gripped Iran in these weeks since the hell of the massacre, making the very air dense with grief, people in Iran have been trying to have a normal life.

I hope to have the possibility to sit down soon and write you some stories of the normality people have worked so hard to have in Iran and how that was instantly wiped out on Saturday. But until then – until my nervous system has settled down enough that a simple task like making a coffee doesn’t take me an hour of wandering about from room to room – my thoughts today are around how I can help with people’s desire to unpick the narratives we are being fed.

Writing As Medicine: now needed more than ever

Now that my country Iran is under heavy daily and constant attack and bombing by Israel and the USA – an illegal war according to international law – our stories and how we narrate them – and indeed WHO narrates them – seems to me more relevant than ever.

How this illegal war is being reported on legacy media, and how our social media feeds are being flooded by propaganda posing as regular posts, only confirm what I have been observing now for years, if not decades. Consensus-building propaganda posing as regular news, or normal-looking social media feeds that are presenting a skewed version of truth, have now taken over. And we in the West particularly seem vulnerable to being affected by this – because we are in the habit of thinking that we can trust our governments, institutions and media. By contrast, Iranians living in the homeland have long known not to trust a word their State media tells them, and in my travels back and forth over the past decades, I always felt that Iranians had a much more sophisticated approach to their consumption of news than we did in the West.

Of course that in itself has been undermined inside Iran by two particularly influential satellite TV channels which have been promoting certain characters and outcomes for so long now, and so insidiously, that many Iranians have not been able to spot the propaganda they have been fed. Israel-backed Farsi-speaking social media channels have flooded those platforms, promoting a certain vision of Iran’s future, building a false binary around the choices facing Iran, and now, social platforms are flooding the feeds of non-Iranians as well with a very particular vision of this war and Iranians’ reactions to it – all in order to keep on promoting this illegal war, distract from the humanitarian crimes still being committed in Palestine, and to confound people as to what they should think and who they should be supporting. Remember that this deliberately created confusion and bewilderment is in itself a manipulation – to keep us helpless and overwhelmed and therefore unable to resist.

Many people are asking me to explain. This and much else. I am not a Gen Z whiz with video editing tools at my fingertips. Nor am I able to always override the vagaries of my nervous system as it witnesses the soil that formed me being reduced to dust and rubble. Even as I worry and fret about the safety of the very many people of my heart that I love and adore in Iran. I have a voice and for that I am grateful. I would like to use it – if we don’t step up and tell our stories, write the narratives, then the loudest and most obnoxious do it for us, as we are seeing. So I need your help!

I am happy, willing and able to start a series of videos or even live classes online where I deep-dive into some of those topics for those who are finding the noise way too much to cut through. I would be happy to provide briefings for those who find this all so confusing and want to find a way to navigate this thousand-headed monster of a story – before it grows so many more heads it becomes impossible to confront. So this is my appeal to you: if you are a video/social media whiz, if you want to help and have some time you can donate for free (or if we find a revenue stream I can pay of course), then please get in touch here, and let’s work together towards flushing out some of the poison filling our news sources now.

Click to email me your thoughts

I’ll leave you with some pictures of my beloved precious homeland – before the horrors of plumes of smoke and fires and people digging through rubble for their loved ones…