Iran’s State Media Distorts New York Times’ Reporting to Claim January Protests Were Instigated by Mossad
Mehdi Khanalizadeh, Professor of International Relations and media personality, appeared in a television program on Iran’s State Media on March 23rd, falsely claiming that “The American media outlet, the New York Times, has confessed that the events of January 8th and 9th [Nation-wide protests] were a Mossad project to encourage the United States to go to war with Iran.”
Here is the an excerpt of what he said on air:
“January 8th and 9th, the New York Times is an American media outlet, it is an anti-Iranian media outlet, and it has no desire to support Iran. In this report, it explicitly stated that January 8th and 9th was a Mossad project inside Iran to encourage the US to take military action against Iran. Meaning, first, if January 8th and 9th hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t have a war right now. Second, they fundamentally started it to set the stage for America... America, for reasons it is currently entangled in, the same reasons former US presidents did not enter war with Iran, was afraid of entering war with Iran. The Mossad started January 8th and 9th, Israel started it, to push the American side towards war with Iran... Look, I’m not saying it. It says it was Mossad’s strategy. I intentionally went and took a picture from the New York Times’s main page and brought it, which says the Mossad set the stage for identifying and assassinating Iranian officials, set the stage for identifying locations... They published a list, said where...”
Mr. Khanalizadeh is referring to an article published in the New York Times on March 22, 2026, with the title “Israel Thought It Could Spark an Internal Revolt in Iran. It Hasn’t Happened.”
This article examines the failed Israeli and American strategy to create a widespread internal revolt in Iran during the recent war.
The writers claim that the head of the Mossad presented a plan to Netanyahu and the Trump administration that the airstrikes and the assassination of Iranian leaders at the start of the war could quickly lead to a popular uprising and the collapse of the regime. However, three weeks into the conflict, no uprising has formed. The article mentions that intelligence assessments indicate the Iranian regime remains intact, and people’s fear of repression by military forces has prevented the formation of protests.
In this article, there are two specific places where the protests of the Iranian people before the war are mentioned. One is a caption for a picture of student protests at Alzahra University in late February, which reads:
“An image taken from social media last month shows students gathering for an anti-government rally at Alzahra University, a women’s college in Tehran”
The second is a mention of protests appears later in the article:
“Other US officials familiar with intelligence assessments said that even when the government comes under pressure, as seen during the widespread protests in the country in January in which thousands of protesters were killed, it has managed to suppress the uprisings relatively quickly.”
It is completely clear that neither of these two mention or the entire New York Times article makes any reference to the January 8th and 9th protests being a Mossad plan to encourage Trump to attack Iran, or that if this had not happened, there would be no war.
Since the start of the war, Iran’s state media has repeatedly misrepresented international news coverage and reports. This is part of Iran’s larger campaign of manipulating information to shape a particular domestic narrative while people in Iran are facing a near-total and nation-wide internet and communication blackout since the start of the war, on February 28th.
We have previously covered Iran’s patterns of information manipulation during the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022. While the report focuses on the Islamic Republic’s patterns and tactics of information manipulation during that period, the same tactics continue to be used by the Iranian government during crises, including the 12 days war in June and earlier this year, during the early January protests fatally suppressed by the state.