The instrumental use by Europe and the United States of the keyword “terrorism” and its derivatives in the field of international relations to legitimize their aggressive actions is not new. However, the importance of this issue becomes clearer when we consider the unconditional support of Western intelligence services for the promotion of terrorism in Iran.
As time passes since the occurrence of the December 2025 unrest, its consequences are felt more by the people and officials, and this makes the need to examine and analyze the terrorist crimes that occurred in this period even more necessary.
In this regard, Ahmad Majidi, an expert in the field of media and terrorism, wrote a note exploring the dimensions of the recent unrest and its relation to political propaganda. His note follows:
Today’s world is the world of word-making and concept-making. Words and concepts that shape human perception — and on the basis of which humans make decisions and act — have media as their most important tool. In today’s world, which is the world of media and advertising, and where humans are surrounded by advertising machines, the most important perception-shaping element is undoubtedly the media. It is this tool that can, by using words and concepts according to the taste of media owners, shape perception for its audience.
That is why we see that in today’s world, words no longer have a single meaning; hundreds of meanings exist for each word, because every power holder who owns a media outlet creates concepts according to its own interests.
This explanation was to make it clear that in today’s world, where arrogant powers have mobilized all their capabilities to achieve maximum domination, nothing should be outside their sphere of control — not even words and concepts. Therefore, they create words and concepts according to their interests. For example, although “terrorism” is a condemnable word, there is no consensus on its identification and explanation. Powers express examples for it according to what their goals require.
After the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the centuries-old interests of the arrogant system were endangered, the system of domination made every effort to confront the Islamic Republic. It was precisely during this period that all tools were put to use to achieve the goal of overthrowing the Islamic Republic, and one of the first actions was to employ a collection of terrorist groups.
The first terrorist incident in Iran occurred on February 12, 1979, and since then, hundreds of terrorist incidents have taken place, resulting in the martyrdom of more than 23,000 victims of terrorism. Despite this number of terrorism victims, the Islamic Republic of Iran has simultaneously become a great power in confronting terrorist incidents, the latest example of which was confronting the terrorist unrest of December 2025 — an unrest that, had it occurred anywhere else in the world, would undoubtedly have led to the overthrow of the political system, civil war, and long-term chaos. But in Islamic Iran, it was managed in a short period.
This management was the result of the valuable experiences of the military, law enforcement, and security agencies, and it was these very agencies that thwarted the complex and long-term plan of the Western arrogant system.
It is therefore not without reason that, in this confrontation, European countries hastily placed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on their terrorist list, because the IRGC was one of the most important effective bodies in thwarting their plans.
In truth, this is a domino-like process: In the confrontation between Islamic Iran and the Western arrogant system, first word-making is done through the media; then, through massive propaganda, this word-making turns into perception; and when perception becomes widespread, field action takes place.
That is why the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which in the case of the ISIS fitna was not only the guarantor of security in West Asia but also in Europe — has, due to the interests of Western governments, been placed among what they call terrorist organizations by countries such as Germany and France, which for decades have been safe havens and shelters for well-known terrorist groups such as the MEK and separatist groups.
By Ahmad Majidi