From a street in Minneapolis to the streets of Teheran, what does media focus reveal about global morality and hypocrisy?
By David E. Kaplan
Yes, the fatal shooting of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis was a tragedy. It was the second killing in less than three weeks of a US citizen in Minnesota by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and it should not have happened. However, there was something skewered and revealing about what followed.
For days on end, US TV new networks, notably CNN, were covering this solitary killing as their Number 1 news item as if nothing else was newsworthy. Well not quite; there was stiff competition from a mega-snowstorm gripping much of the country but as the big freeze began to thaw, the ‘hot’ news returned exclusively to the street scene in Minneapolis. Different angles of film footages of the scuffle and the shooting were constantly and repeatedly screened as were the endless opinions from law enforcement experts and politicians. The divergent visuals were competing with divergent verbiage and still, five days later, it was still monopolizing the news.
In no way am I belittling the tragic event in Minneapolis either of the victim and his family nor the traumatic impact on the psyche of the American people and its political ramifications. However, contrast this for news relevance with the wholesale state sponsored slaughter unfolding simultaneously in the Islamic Republic of Iran:
A solitary death on a street in Minneapolis by a Federal law enforcement agent against a mass murder by the thousands on the streets of Teheran and across much of Iran.
Teheran makes Minneapolis look like a day at Disneyland but what is making the news?
By some accounts, 36,500 Iranians were slaughtered over a period of 48 hours and yet, one did not need a political Richter Scale to discern that there was little to zilch interest in the US of Iran’s mega-massacre – not in the written press, not on the TV news networks, certainly not among students at colleges who one should have expected since they did not hesitate to protest against Israel during the last two years and not on major city streets nor outside embassies. The killing in a US street of a single protestor in confusing circumstances solicited far more interest than the transparent slaughter of thousands of protesters on multitude streets across Iran!
The silence was staggering. Why? What was the missing ingredient that failed to ‘trigger’ moral outrage and newsworthiness?
Conjuring up images of the Holocaust, Stephen F. Lynch, a Democrat who represents Massachusetts 8th congressional district describes the death in Minneapolis as a “brutal execution…..by ICE agents”, more specifically, “…Gestapo-like conduct,” looking like “a firing squad – taking a human life for no reason. Every American should be ashamed to watch this happening.”
Maybe they should, once the dust settles and the facts are clear. But in Lynch’s words, should not every Americanalso “be ashamed,” to be ignoring the news out of Iran from eyewitnesses and cell phone footage that millions of protestors in the streets are being targets for state rooftop snipers and trucks mounted with heavy machine guns? On Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, an official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned on state television to anyone venturing into the streets:
“If … a bullet hits you, don’t complain.”
Can you imagine an American Federal Agent saying that?
Despite the disinterest of the major TV news networks, TIME magazine thought it about time and reported that “As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone.” Apparently two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME that:
“So many people were slaughtered by Iranian security services on that Thursday and Friday, it overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead. Stocks of body bags were exhausted, the officials said, and eighteen-wheel semi-trailers replaced ambulances.”
The extraordinary high death rate over 48 hours led to speculation among experts groping for comparisons with other mass killings.
Les Roberts, a professor at Columbia University who specializes in the epidemiology of violent death, contrasted what was happening in Iran with Aleppo(Syria) and in Fallujah (Iraq),explaining that “when spasms of death this high have occurred over a few days, it involved mostly explosives with some shooting.” The only parallel offered by online databases occurred in the Holocaust when on the outskirts of Kyiv on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi death squads executed 33,000 Ukrainian Jews by gunshot in a ravine known as Babyn Yar.
So, while the US news obsessed over Minneapolis, it mostly bypassed the news out of Iran that was exposing bloodshed on a scale so horrifying it was beyond comprehension.
In a brief message sent via Starlink from Tehran to Iran International, one resident said the situation in the capital and other cities was so dire that “every person is reporting the death of a family member, relative, neighbor, or friend,” stressing that “this is not an exaggeration.”
“The air was filled with the smell of blood in Tajrish and Narmak,” an Iranian user outside the country quoted a contact as saying in a post on X, referring to neighborhoods in north and east Tehran.
“They were washing the blood from the streets with the municipal irrigation tankers they use to water roadside plants.”
Thousands more have reportedly been detained nationwide. Iranian authorities have labeled anyone present on the streets after January 8 a mohareb—“one who wages war against God”—a charge that carries the death penalty.
The whereabouts of most detainees remain unknown.
There have been reports suggesting that families being asked to pay the equivalent of €5,000 to recover the bodies of their loved ones and others asked to pay for the bullets used to kill their relatives.
Why aren’t US students, notably those at the Ivy League campuses screaming “genocide”?
What is the missing ingredient failing to ignite their passion to protest?
On Sunday, two short videos surfaced showing families inside a hangar belonging to Tehran’s forensic medicine organization in the Kahrizak area. Dozens of bodies wrapped in black bags were visible, some on gurneys and others laid directly on the floor. There is footage brought out of Iran by someone who had recently escaped the country of “… bringing in the bodies in pick-up trucks and telling people to search them themselves,” and later footage showing bodies being unloaded from trailers. “Outside the building, hundreds of people moved among rows of corpses laid directly on the ground, wailing and screaming.”
In one clip, a woman’s voice can be heard crying out to her child: “Get up my love, get up for God’s sake,” as families wander among the bodies searching in shock.
The footage appeared to capture only a fraction of what was taking place.
Sadly – and tellingly – all this frightening footage and revolting revelations have also only captured “a fraction” of global news attention.
The geographic gap between Gaza and Iran is not too far apart but there is one difference. If you can’t blame Jews it is not news.
There lies the missing ingredient.
As the world this week on the 27 January observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day one would have hoped for a news media and those plethora of ‘people’s power’ movements more receptive to mass murder taking place and more responsive to the appeals for support.
It was not to be.
Holocaust comparisons as misappropriately expounded by Congressman Lynch found more resonance to what was happening in Minnesota than what was happening in Iran.
“Never Again” is typically “Once Again”.
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