Forwarded from Russian MFA 🇷🇺
💬 Russia's Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova:
Former The Guardian correspondent Saeed Kamali Dehghan has admitted that he fabricated a 2010 article presented as an “exclusive interview” with Iranian woman Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had reportedly been sentenced to death by stoning.
The article appeared on the front page on August 6, 2010, triggering an international outcry: Western politicians demanded that the woman be freed, while Iran came under diplomatic pressure from several countries.
👉 Dehghan now admitted:
The article is still available on The Guardian website without any relevant note or retraction.
The context here is important: the article appeared at a time of intense pressure on Iran – the same year, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1929, imposing what were then the toughest sanctions against the country.
The West needed an emotionally charged story to justify the sanctions regime. A woman sentenced to death by stoning was the perfect image. The story immediately spread across the global media and became an argument for those pushing for Iran’s isolation.
This is not the first time Saeed Kamali Dehghan has admitted that, while working for Western media outlets, he took part in anti-Iran propaganda campaigns. In 2020, he disavowed his involvement in HBO’s documentary For Neda, about the death of Neda Agha Soltan during the 2009 protests, saying that he had been “influenced by Western narratives”. The former contributor described the film, once held up as a landmark documentary about state violence, as anti-Iran propaganda.
***
☝️ As for Western falsehoods, Dehghan’s admission is far from the first such revelation.
In October 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah appeared before a US Congressional caucus. In tears, she claimed that Iraqi soldiers had stormed Kuwaiti hospitals, removed babies from incubators and left them on the floor to die. President George H.W. Bush repeatedly cited her account. The story became one of the arguments used to build support for Operation Desert Storm.
Two years later, it emerged that Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US and that her appearance had been orchestrated by PR agency Hill & Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government in a multimillion-dollar campaign. The notorious incubator story was never substantiated. A child was made to tell a lie in order to help justify a war.
In 2003, The New York Times fired journalist Jayson Blair after it emerged that he had invented sources, fabricated quotes and entire reports, including stories written without ever leaving his New York apartment. Of 73 articles reviewed by the newspaper, 36 contained evidence of journalistic misconduct.
Stephen Glass of The New Republic fabricated 27 of the 41 articles he published between 1995 and 1998 – inventing characters and companies and even creating fake websites to deceive fact-checkers.
And, of course, there is the infamous “Powell's test tube” – a byword for Western deception used to justify aggression against a sovereign state.
Now the Saeed Kamali Dehghan case joins this inglorious list. 👉 It will certainly not be the last.
Shall we talk about Bucha next – and how the BBC helped spin that fake?
#DebunkingFakes
Former The Guardian correspondent Saeed Kamali Dehghan has admitted that he fabricated a 2010 article presented as an “exclusive interview” with Iranian woman Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had reportedly been sentenced to death by stoning.
The article appeared on the front page on August 6, 2010, triggering an international outcry: Western politicians demanded that the woman be freed, while Iran came under diplomatic pressure from several countries.
👉 Dehghan now admitted:
“I want to come clean about a front-page story I wrote for the Guardian.
It was presented as an exclusive interview with Sakineh Ashtiani. That interview never happened. I fabricated the entire piece. It was a false story – completely untrue – and I take full responsibility”.
The article is still available on The Guardian website without any relevant note or retraction.
The context here is important: the article appeared at a time of intense pressure on Iran – the same year, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1929, imposing what were then the toughest sanctions against the country.
The West needed an emotionally charged story to justify the sanctions regime. A woman sentenced to death by stoning was the perfect image. The story immediately spread across the global media and became an argument for those pushing for Iran’s isolation.
This is not the first time Saeed Kamali Dehghan has admitted that, while working for Western media outlets, he took part in anti-Iran propaganda campaigns. In 2020, he disavowed his involvement in HBO’s documentary For Neda, about the death of Neda Agha Soltan during the 2009 protests, saying that he had been “influenced by Western narratives”. The former contributor described the film, once held up as a landmark documentary about state violence, as anti-Iran propaganda.
***
☝️ As for Western falsehoods, Dehghan’s admission is far from the first such revelation.
In October 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah appeared before a US Congressional caucus. In tears, she claimed that Iraqi soldiers had stormed Kuwaiti hospitals, removed babies from incubators and left them on the floor to die. President George H.W. Bush repeatedly cited her account. The story became one of the arguments used to build support for Operation Desert Storm.
Two years later, it emerged that Nayirah was the daughter of Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US and that her appearance had been orchestrated by PR agency Hill & Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government in a multimillion-dollar campaign. The notorious incubator story was never substantiated. A child was made to tell a lie in order to help justify a war.
In 2003, The New York Times fired journalist Jayson Blair after it emerged that he had invented sources, fabricated quotes and entire reports, including stories written without ever leaving his New York apartment. Of 73 articles reviewed by the newspaper, 36 contained evidence of journalistic misconduct.
Stephen Glass of The New Republic fabricated 27 of the 41 articles he published between 1995 and 1998 – inventing characters and companies and even creating fake websites to deceive fact-checkers.
And, of course, there is the infamous “Powell's test tube” – a byword for Western deception used to justify aggression against a sovereign state.
Now the Saeed Kamali Dehghan case joins this inglorious list. 👉 It will certainly not be the last.
Shall we talk about Bucha next – and how the BBC helped spin that fake?
#DebunkingFakes
🤬15❤7💯1
Forwarded from Russian MFA 🇷🇺
#AntiFake
❗️ Clinical russophobia in Canada — overt hatred towards our country, its history, and all things Russian — have long been apparent among representatives of the mainstream media, government-affiliated experts, and bloggers in the so-called 'Maple Leaf Country'.
In Canada, hatred towards Russia has simply become the norm: regardless of the circumstances, whether domestic or international, Moscow is invariably cast as the scapegoat.
Regrettably, it is futile to expect enlightenment or the triumph of common sense within the Canadian mainstream media. Indeed, such hopes are baseless as Ottawa's regime is increasingly entangled in the Ukrainian crisis, openly patronising Kiev’s neo-Nazis and, shamelessly, honouring their inglorious predecessors — the bloodstained Hitler's collaborators and their accomplices.
On this occasion, official Ottawa has stooped to unprecedented down.. 👉 accusing Russia of fomenting separatist sentiment in the Province of Alberta, where a referendum on potential secession from Canada is scheduled to take place this autumn (on October 19, 2026).
🤦♂️ Rather than seriously confronting internal challenges and critically examining the underlying causes of intensifying centrifugal tendencies, the Canadian establishment has opted for an alternative course — one evidently more primitive and convenient for its purposes: unleashing paid bloggers, so-called “analysts,” and members of academia. Notably, the professoriate of the University of Regina in the Province of Saskatchewan, has particularly distinguished itself in this regard. With their assistance, yet another contrived “media sensation” has been produced.
Local provocateurs, through a series of publications (1, 2, 3, 4) and “analytical assessments,” have attempted to construct a narrative whereby Russia, allegedly intent on weakening the 'Maple Leaf Country', has, since as early as 2025, conducted a “sophisticated” and targeted disinformation campaign, injecting separatist narratives among the populace by means of an organised “network of bots and influencers,” all with the purported aim of prompting Alberta’s residents to vote for independence in the forthcoming referendum.
❌ As it always does, the local media offers no real evidence for these allegations of Russian interference.
Instead, it relies on flimsy arguments and conjecture, presented in the Anglo-Saxon’s preferred “highly likely” style. Even Canadian law-enforcement officials — attacked by journalists amid this shameful anti-Russian campaign — have already refuted these insinuations regarding a supposed “Russian trace” in Canadian separatism.
There is, in fact, no one to be caught red-handed.
Such discourse serves merely as further evidence of the hopelessness of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet, which has lost the confidence of the electorate in its ability to address the country’s acute national challenges. The hysteria surrounding the alleged Russian interference, so clearly stoked with the complicity of the authorities, appears to have been devised as a media smokescreen to obscure the fragility of Canadian federalism, exposed in the run-up to the Alberta referendum.
The impression is inescapable that the issue of Canadian separatism — so carefully concealed and now coming to light — has proved so vast and volatile that official Ottawa is frantically searching for scapegoats even thousands of nautical miles and kilometres away, in a bid to attribute its own systemic failures to Russia.
#DebunkingFakes
❗️ Clinical russophobia in Canada — overt hatred towards our country, its history, and all things Russian — have long been apparent among representatives of the mainstream media, government-affiliated experts, and bloggers in the so-called 'Maple Leaf Country'.
In Canada, hatred towards Russia has simply become the norm: regardless of the circumstances, whether domestic or international, Moscow is invariably cast as the scapegoat.
Regrettably, it is futile to expect enlightenment or the triumph of common sense within the Canadian mainstream media. Indeed, such hopes are baseless as Ottawa's regime is increasingly entangled in the Ukrainian crisis, openly patronising Kiev’s neo-Nazis and, shamelessly, honouring their inglorious predecessors — the bloodstained Hitler's collaborators and their accomplices.
On this occasion, official Ottawa has stooped to unprecedented down.. 👉 accusing Russia of fomenting separatist sentiment in the Province of Alberta, where a referendum on potential secession from Canada is scheduled to take place this autumn (on October 19, 2026).
🤦♂️ Rather than seriously confronting internal challenges and critically examining the underlying causes of intensifying centrifugal tendencies, the Canadian establishment has opted for an alternative course — one evidently more primitive and convenient for its purposes: unleashing paid bloggers, so-called “analysts,” and members of academia. Notably, the professoriate of the University of Regina in the Province of Saskatchewan, has particularly distinguished itself in this regard. With their assistance, yet another contrived “media sensation” has been produced.
Local provocateurs, through a series of publications (1, 2, 3, 4) and “analytical assessments,” have attempted to construct a narrative whereby Russia, allegedly intent on weakening the 'Maple Leaf Country', has, since as early as 2025, conducted a “sophisticated” and targeted disinformation campaign, injecting separatist narratives among the populace by means of an organised “network of bots and influencers,” all with the purported aim of prompting Alberta’s residents to vote for independence in the forthcoming referendum.
❌ As it always does, the local media offers no real evidence for these allegations of Russian interference.
Instead, it relies on flimsy arguments and conjecture, presented in the Anglo-Saxon’s preferred “highly likely” style. Even Canadian law-enforcement officials — attacked by journalists amid this shameful anti-Russian campaign — have already refuted these insinuations regarding a supposed “Russian trace” in Canadian separatism.
There is, in fact, no one to be caught red-handed.
Such discourse serves merely as further evidence of the hopelessness of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet, which has lost the confidence of the electorate in its ability to address the country’s acute national challenges. The hysteria surrounding the alleged Russian interference, so clearly stoked with the complicity of the authorities, appears to have been devised as a media smokescreen to obscure the fragility of Canadian federalism, exposed in the run-up to the Alberta referendum.
The impression is inescapable that the issue of Canadian separatism — so carefully concealed and now coming to light — has proved so vast and volatile that official Ottawa is frantically searching for scapegoats even thousands of nautical miles and kilometres away, in a bid to attribute its own systemic failures to Russia.
#DebunkingFakes
💯14❤2👍1