February 21, 2025
The Iranian media are giving wide coverage to the wildfires in southern California, with the most attention given to what they assert is widespread looting going on all over the region.
The media portray this massive breakdown in law and order as the natural result in a society where government doesn’t try to help the public and where the public does not trust government. There has indeed been looting in the fire zones and also cases of arson.
Police in the Los Angeles area reported arresting 97 people as of January 15 on charges of looting, vandalism, arson and curfew violations. Los Angeles County has a population of 9.7 million. The daily Hamshahri gave some of the greatest coverage to the looting allegations. It said mass looting is the norm in the United States after natural disasters and did not start with the California wildfires this winter. Hamshahri said, “The public’s apocalyptic views of their living conditions in the vast American continent and their lack of trust in the government and official media have led to the formation of a new wave of looting and damage to public property and large-scale thefts in different states after each natural disaster.”
It is true that some looting is the norm when floods, hurricanes or earthquakes disrupt normal life and interrupt routine policing. But the extent of looting hasn’t been widespread since the racial rioting of the 1960s. Hamshahri said the main reason Americans resort to mass looting “is the culture of individualism and distrust of government institutions. An individualcentered culture and, of course, previous experience of being ‘left to their own devices in times of crisis’ pushes people to seek their own solutions….
People who do not have access to sufficient resources or feel hopeless about government assistance may resort to looting stores or other resources.” Hamshahri said, “The situation is even worse if it occurs in an area that has been historically and systematically neglected by the government (such as states with larger Black or Latino populations) because people in those situations have come to believe that there will be no savior and that the government will not bother to save those it considers second- and third-class citizens.”
The fact that the emphasis on looting is a feature common to all the media suggests that state censors have ordered them to focus on looting. The regime has a long-standing policy of seeking to portray the United States as a society dominated by crime, poverty, and any and all other negative characteristics.
