The Independent journalist Eva Bartlett, writing in RT on March 4, blasted the silence–and thus complicity–of the Western media about the bombing of the school. “Western media is either silent or implicitly blaming Tehran for the strike that killed 168 girls,” she writes at the outset.
On March 2, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted a photo of the graves being dug on X, noting, “These are graves being dug for more than 160 innocent young girls who were killed in the U.S.-Israeli bombing of a primary school. Their bodies were torn to shreds. This is how ‘rescue’ promised by Mr. Trump looks in reality. From Gaza to Minab, innocents murdered in cold blood.”
“Footage shared on Telegram and on X clearly shows horrific scenes of some of the young girls torn apart in the U.S.-Israeli bombing of their school,” Bartlett writes further. “But just like the untold thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel, as well as the half a million Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions, these Iranian children’s lives don’t merit Western media outrage. Instead, they produce cynical reports that not only lack any semblance of empathy, but suggest that Iran is either lying about or is to blame for the murders.”
She then provides a number of examples of media whitewashing of the bombing. “Even if you set aside the actual culprit of the school bombing, legacy media reports are devoid of any concern for the slaughtered children: no details, no empathy, no mention that they were murdered in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan,” Bartlett continues. “The tone would be radically different were the children Israeli, Ukrainian or American. We would see names, ages, stories about them. They would be humanized—if only they were not Iranian (or Palestinian, or Lebanese, or Syrian).”
Later, Bartlett notes: “The U.S. and its bought media have so little regard for Iranian lives that they don’t even bother to try to explain, much less apologize for, the murders of the 168 schoolgirls. Outrageously, it is as if they simply never existed to Western media.”
