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Notes -
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
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More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
Random- I happened to be reading the Wikipedia entry for Khamenei, when on a whim I thought to compare it to the Wikipedia page for Trump.
Even if you just read the summary introduction, the tone and facts emphasized for Khamenei are vastly kinder to him than they are for Trump.
But this is fundamentally insane. Khamenei has had thousands of people killed (including recently!). And he was crucial in Iran's long-term support of terrorist groups that have killed huge numbers of people in the Middle East.
Is there really no recourse for this? Are Americans absolutely forced to have one of our major sources of information (heavily used in schools) basically running propaganda operations on behalf of religious extremist dictators of governments that encourage "Death to the USA"?
1/ Build your own. Conservapedia, Infogalactic, Grokipedia etc. tried and failed, try harder.
2/ Take over. Bring few thousand friends willing to dedicate all waking hours to editing and edit warring, and persevere for years of uphill struggle.
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That depends. How much spare time do you have right now? One of the many structural problems Wikipedia has is their reliable sources policy. The way they've written it places all scholars and academics as the highest authorities for claims. Paper beats rock, decolonial cultural studies or not. The good news for you is that doesn't seem to be a serious issue on this article, as the 400 citations are mostly news sources which can be defeated with other news sources or, possibly, the same ones with a more neutral interpretation.
Your main problem is going to be that this is a protected article. Each change you want to propose is required to be a sentence for sentence replacement. After you submit it to the talk page, a person -- one who has decided this is what they want to do on Wikipedia -- will swoop in, read it for a few seconds, and say yes or no. That's another structural problem in Wikipedia: the people who choose to participate. Most likely you will need to claw, yell about policy, request other editors give a second opinion, re-submit a different version, and generally escalate it until you get your sentence replaced. You can then repeat this process to do the next sentence or small paragraph. So I ask again, how much spare time do you have?
Khamenei's article doesn't seem too bad by Wikipedia standards of bias, but it's there. Tracing Woodgrains wrote a good critique Mao's article last year to highlight its atrociously soft framing. I agree that when compared to Trump it's absurd, although that goes for a lot of articles on Wikipedia.
I haven't checked,* but I'm going to go out on a limb to say that there's more Trump-related articles than any other president or living world leader. I suspect the great 20th century dictators have him beat, though I'm not very confident.More options
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It's the Bin Laden vs Margaret Thatcher situation again. I'm one of those weirdos who is still on Tumblr, and I've got friends on Bluesky, and there were a lot of crab rave memes and "not celebrating, but totally celebrating" posts when Charlie Kirk died. There will be more when Trump dies. There has, however, been zero celebration for the death of a man who is worse in pretty much every metric they care about than those two (except Islamophobia, I suppose).
Tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall through an open manhole and die, situation?
He's their problem, Trump is ours kinda thing probably, combined with Iraq/Afghanistan forever war flashbacks, maybe.
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The Ayatollah certainly hates sunnis more than Trump or Kirk.
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From your description I was expecting far worse. Both entries are freely critical in terms of the facts selected for high level inclusion and neither are complimentary.
E.g. Khomeini's entry ends: "Khamenei's critics viewed him as a repressive despot responsible for repression, mass murders and other acts of injustice."
Trump's entry ends: "Trump's actions have been described by researchers as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding. After his first term, scholars and historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history."
This is a difficult thing to quantify, so forgive me, I turned to ChatGPT5.2-Thinking to attempt it in a vaguely neutral way. I asked the question "How many negative statements or claims or inferences or anything resembling criticisms from critics are made about ____, in total, in the pasted text below?" For both individuals and their introductory sections.
ChatGPT concluded that there were 41 negative statements about Trump, and only 20 about Khamenei. There's a real density of negative inferences about Trump, which Khamenei doesn't get.
I would personally consider some of the "negatives" about either of the men to be neutral or even positive. But especially regarding Trump, to me the phrasing and emphasis seems meant to create a negative impression in the reader (especially the typical reader on Wikipedia).
Part of what was galling to me was how many of the negative claims about Trump could have been made about Khamenei, or some variation on them, and yet Khamenei's much worse "offenses" were ignored.
Here were the statements selected by ChatGPT for each of the men. I've pointed out some areas where Khamenei could have potentially been described in a similar manner to Trump, but wasn't:
Khamenei:
he was “only a middle ranking cleric” at appointment (such a trivial negative to count)
he was “not even an Ayatollah” before appointment (again, trivial, at least to most audiences)
he achieved the position through “state media, patronage networks, and the security apparatus”
he transformed the IRGC into a tool for “domestic control”
his rhetoric included “calls for Israel’s destruction”
his rhetoric included “antisemitic tropes”
Iran (under him) was involved in “proxy wars” with Israel and Saudi Arabia
he is labeled a “hardliner”
he “sidelined … political dissidents” and other factions (oh, he merely sidelined them)
he “eas[ed] restrictions” only when regime stability/legitimacy was threatened implying tactical repression
his leadership was associated with “expansion of state militarization”
his leadership was associated with “consolidation of power” in the Supreme Leader’s office (associated with... some vague thing)
people were put on trial for “insulting” him, often with blasphemy charges
those sentences included “lashing”
those sentences included “jail time”
“some of them died in custody”
critics viewed him as a “repressive despot”
critics said he was responsible for “repression”
critics said he was responsible for “mass murders” (they merely said it? or did it actually happen?)
critics said he was responsible for “other acts of injustice”
Trump:
imposed a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries (Khamenei never supported any travel restrictions?)
expanded the Mexico–United States border wall (does Iran never enhance its border security?)
enforced a family separation policy on the border
rolled back environmental regulations (never happens in Iran?)
rolled back business regulations (never happens in Iran?)
withdrew the U.S. from climate agreements
withdrew the U.S. from trade agreements (never happens in Iran?)
withdrew the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear program agreement (Khamenei having any role in nuclear program issues which precipitated his death is not mentioned in Khamenei's intro)
started a trade war with China (Iran never has tariffs or adjusts its trade policy?)
downplayed COVID-19’s severity
contradicted health officials
attempted to overturn the 2020 election result
actions culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack (to me, most of these descriptions are either overstated, or missing crucial context)
impeached in 2019 for abuse of power
impeached in 2019 for obstruction of Congress
impeached in 2021 for incitement of insurrection
found liable (civil) for sexual abuse
found liable (civil) for defamation
found liable (civil) for business fraud (I guess Khamenei can't be said to have ever done anything illegal or morally wrong, since his cohort controlled the judiciary and the religion)
found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records
first U.S. president convicted of a felony
federal felony indictment alleged retention of classified documents, later dismissed without prejudice
federal felony indictment alleged obstruction of the 2020 election, later dismissed without prejudice (you can sort of see how every single plausible negative thing is being crammed into the introduction)
initiated mass layoffs of federal workers (did the Iranian government never fire anyone? And you see there is no mention of the positive intentions of this kind of action. In fact, the positive intentions are perhaps never mentioned for any of Trump's actions, as though he just went around trying to do bad things, for absolutely no plausible reason whatsoever.)
imposed tariffs on nearly all countries at the highest level since the Great Depression (no mention of the international context that these nations typically had higher tariffs than we had...)
administration actions included targeting political opponents and civil society (ah, but it's not possible that Trump was himself ever targeted...)
administration actions included persecution of transgender people (Khamenei never persecuted any sexual minorities, eh?)
administration actions included deportation of immigrants (Iran never ever deported anyone?)
administration actions included extensive use of executive orders (I guess this is acknowledged for Khamenei, lol)
these actions drew over 550 lawsuits challenging their legality (I guess Khamenei couldn't be challenged in this way...)
pursued a legally controversial campaign to attack alleged drug traffickers (I'm sure drug traffickers are treated kindly in Iran!)
ordered a military intervention in Venezuela that captured Nicolás Maduro (I don't believe there's anything in Khamenei's introduction which acknowledges Iran's roles in supporting other nations and organizations which engaged in violence)
authorized American involvement (alongside Israel) in a major attack on Iran
that attack resulted in the assassination of Ali Khamenei
comments/actions characterized as racist (Khamenei was surely a beacon of tolerance)
comments/actions characterized as misogynistic (we all know how much the Iranian government encourages women to live freely and at a bare minimum with head uncovered, right?)
made many false or misleading statements to an unprecedented degree (Khamenei was a real George Washington?)
promotes conspiracy theories
actions described by researchers as authoritarian
actions described as contributing to democratic backsliding
ranked by scholars/historians as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history
Not sure these are even intended as negatives, however mild; they could as easily give the impression of a humble-man-of-the-people success story as anything else.
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"Critics" are generally assumed to he biased, though, and counterweighted by "supporters". "Scholars and researchers and historians" are understood to be bastions of truth and fact. It's subtle, but it's there.
I don't disagree but 'vastly kinder' led me to expect a much starker contrast.
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