alt Hacker NewsI don't believe these numbers.
This is not a comment of support of the Iranian regime, or against the people of Iran to have which ever government they see fit.
But these numbers are simply not credible. It's 40 beheaded babies all over again.
Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat. Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact. There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.
A part of me suspects the incredibly conspicuous endorsement of the protestors by the US/Israel regime is an attempt to discredit them. A zombie regime under the Mullahs will likely to continue to implode economically, which means they are less able to defend themselves from US/Israeli attacks in the future. A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
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Iran is the 17th most populous nation in the world, with 93 million people. These protests seem to be occurring across the entire nation. Another comment mentioned over 4,000 separate clashes. Other sources have already corroborated a lower bound in the mid-thousands. I think the burden is on you to refute these numbers by showing that the sources are deliberately misleading or finding a flaw in the methodology. Simply saying that you find them "not credible" and that some people might have a political motive behind sharing them is not an argument.
Note, I'm not saying that they have been confirmed, but I do not think that you have given sufficient cause for rejecting them out of hand.
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> But these numbers are simply not credible.
Why do you think that?
> Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat.
Obviously Israel would see the Iranian regime as an existential threat when they quite openly advocate for the destruction of Israel[0] and have a nuclear weapons program.
> Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact.
Israel would almost certainly prefer a stable intact Iran with normalized relations.
> There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.
Israel and the US don't want to destroy Iran, they want Iran to stop funding terrorists and stop threatening regional stability.
> A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
Why should the US lift sanctions while Iran continues to fund terrorists and attempts to develop nuclear weapons?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Israel_in_Irani...