Is the 'hardliner' talking point about Irans Raisi a whitewash?
Major media that use the term hardliner also explain to the readers what it means, sometimes. The BBC notes Iran's hardliners will seek to reinforce a puritanical system of Islamic government, possibly meaning more controls on social activities, fewer freedoms and jobs for women, and tighter control of social media and the press. The hardliners are suspicious of the West, but both Mr Raisi and Supreme Leader Khamenei favor a return to an international deal on Iran's nuclear activity. BBCs headline on June 19 was that hardliner Raisi will become president.  CNN also says that Raisi is the hardliner who will be the next president. However, CNNs headline also calls him ultraconservative. The article notes that From 2018 onwards, Trump unleashed a torrent of sanctions that crippled Iran's economy and emboldened hardliners. The tiny window of opportunity granted by the clerical class to the moderate government of President Rouhani to engage with the US and Europe began to quickly close. Trump had proven the hardliners' skepticism about the West correct, Iran's conservatives repeatedly said.  According to France24, Raisi is an ultra-conservative who is replacing a reformist in the current president Hassan Rouhani. Under Rouhani people were persecuted for not covering their hair, for protesting, and for other minor offenses. A well-known wrestler was murdered under Rouhanis supposed reform leadership. Foreign tourists were kidnapped and kept in prison. Journalists and dissidents were hunted down abroad. CBS also calls Raisi a hardliner, as does Turkeys TRT. With the term hardliner cemented as the only normative term that can be used to describe Raisi, it is worth wondering what else is going on. Women are persecuted and forced to cover their hair. Dissidents are murdered. Journalists crushed. Minorities crushed. Yet Iran allows some diversity of thought, its media has more interesting stories than the totally totalitarian media in Turkey where only pro-AKP views are aired on state media and where criticism of the president can land people in prison. Turkeys media is so extreme that a far-right extremist recently murdered a peaceful 20-year old female volunteer of an opposition party. Irans regime is more open than the regimes Iran supports in Damascus and the thugs it supports among Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as militias in Iraq. cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });  if(window.location.pathname.indexOf("656089") != -1){console.log("hedva connatix");document.getElementsByClassName("divConnatix")[0].style.display ="none";}  However, Raisi may be even worse than what Iran has seen in the past. On June 19 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said Ebrahim Raisi's election as Iran's new president was a blow for human rights and called for him to be investigated over his role in what Washington and rights groups have called the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, according to Reuters. It looks like Raisi is not just a hardliner or conservative but was responsible for mass murder. That would put him on par with other murderous regime leaders. Accusations of crimes against humanity are not usual for a ruler of a country. Amnesty noted in 2018, our organization documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the death commission which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. This sounds a lot more than just hardliner.  The reason the term hardliner was invented was largely as a foil for narratives in the West. The western countries needed the far-right extremist Iranian regime that hangs innocent people to have a good side and so reformers were conjured up. Then hardliners were said to oppose them. But the reality was that Irans regime, run by Ayatollah Khamanei and the IRGC, was already one of the most extremist regimes in the world. But western governments wanted to make a deal with it in the run-up to the 2015 JCPOA. To do this a narrative was created, through focus groups and various lobbying groups that were close to governments and media, to push narratives about the so-called Iran Deal and the need to empower moderates. This created a narrative whereby anyone opposing the Iran deal was empowering hardliners by not giving Irans regime everything it wanted. It didnt matter if Irans regime was imprisoning people and giving them lashes for music videos, or kidnapping western tourists and accusing them of spying for no reason than to use them as hostages, the regime had moderates and hardliners. During the Trump era the narrative worked to portray Trump as empowering hardliners. When the Biden administration came into office there were attempts to argue that the administration should rush back to the Iran deal or the hardliners might win the June elections. Now we have seen the elections in which basically only hardliners were allowed to run. It stands to reason that Iran has hardliners the way other countries do. Iran doesnt exist on the moon. Its politics are linked to those in Iraq, Lebanon, and the rest of the region. It may be the only Shiite theocracy, but its version of political Islam not that different than the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who run Turkeys AKP. It is a revolutionary power, but largely in a reactionary revolutionary way. This leaves many questions why it has hardliners while other countries often do not, at least consistently the way Irans politics is said to be divided. This brings to mind how western countries are often said to have a far right, much as Israel has a far right while in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan or Malaysia references to the far right tend to be less. This is because western media often lacks a lexicon to discuss non-western political systems. In such cases arbitrary terms like hardliner are used. This is in place of local terms. When it comes to Raisi its not clear if the term hardliner is enough to describe a man now potentially wanted for crimes against humanity. A global narrative among major media uses the term hardliner to describe Ebrahim Raisi , the winner of Irans recent elections. The term hardliner was invented by major media to describe the far-right in Iran. It is generally not used to describe any other form of politics in the world. For instance, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Japan, Spain or the Congo dont have hardliners. Only Iran.