On Tuesday, The New York Times ran a piece titled, “Why Iran Is In Mourning,” in which the Times attempted to put the best face on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, opining of his funeral that there was a “unified national outpouring that is reserved for a small handful of figures in any country, I mean a beloved president, a civil rights leader like Martin Luther King in the United States…” The Times reporter theorized that the Trump administration had “miscalculated the level of admiration” that Iranians had for Soleimani, claiming that opposition figures who had been jailed by the Iranian government had said, “He was a national hero.”
Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi told host Michael Barbaro stated that Supreme Leader Ali Khameini recited the Muslim prayer for the dead during the funeral for Soleimani, adding that “in the middle of the prayer, several times he paused and openly cried. And the crowd also wept very loudly with him.” Fassihi continued, As a reporter who has covered Iran for over 25 years, what struck me was that the people who had attended were not just supporters of the regime, but a lot of people who were generally very critical of the regime … there were activist, there were opposition figures who had been jailed by the regime who attended, and when I asked them, ‘Why are you there? Why are you going?’ the response was, “General Soleimani protected our national security. He transcended politics. He was a national hero.”
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