An astonishing sight was seen in Tehran this week, with pictures and videos of the scene quickly spreading on social media. An Iranian, apparently pleased by the elimination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, bravely [or recklessly?] decided to show his support for Israel’s Mossad, hanging a sign bearing the words “Thank you Mossad” and an Israeli flag.

The sign was hung sometime overnight on a traffic overpass over a major intersection in the Pars neighborhood, in the heart of Iran’s capital Tehran.

Intelli Times, a Hebrew social media account on intelligence and security and Middle East news, stated that it has verified the authenticity of the video according to the type of vehicles seen in the video as well as by the advertisement of a local Iranian liquor company next to the sign. It added that in Iran, this act is punishable by death. The use of Israeli flags, signs, or symbols is banned by Iranian law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35B3sDZ6s0&feature=emb_logo

تصاویر دریافتی با شرح: تهرانپارس، #تهران #Iran
زیر پرچم اسرائیل نوشته شده "Thank you Mossad"

ویدیویی هم فرستادند:https://t.co/aT5n2vkYNr pic.twitter.com/GDKzn3aYXs

— Vahid Online (@Vahid) December 7, 2020

This isn’t the first that the Israeli flag, along with the American flag, has served as a tool for Iranian citizens to express their discontent with the Islamic Republic’s regime.

In January, Iranians took to the streets in anger against the regime following the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane by an Iranian missile, killing 176 people on board, mostly Iranians. Hundreds of demonstrators outside Beheshti University defiantly refrained from walking on huge Israeli and US flags that are painted on the street, expressing their anger and contempt toward their own government. The few people who walked on the flags were booed by the other demonstrators.

Students in Tehran University take pains to avoid walking on the flags of U.S. & Israel—as the regime forces people to do—and when two Basiji regime agents then make a point of trampling the flags, the crowds shout "Besharaf!" #بی‌شرف — the regime is shameless, dishonorable. pic.twitter.com/BLr5QKztr8

— UN Watch (@UNWatch) January 12, 2020

Students shout down Iran regime enforcers who walk across flags of US and Israel at entrance of Tehran’s Beheshti University. Via @ManotoNews pic.twitter.com/05X5hAvBFy

— Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒 (@borzou) January 12, 2020

A recent Algemeiner report compared the response of Iranian citizens to the killing of Fakhrizadeh, which was limited to a small number of demonstrators, to the response a similar killing would have elicited 30 years ago – bringing “tens if not hundreds of thousands of citizens into the streets to chant “Marg bar Israeel” (Death to Israel) or “Death to the Little Satan and the Great Satan [the United States].”

The report added that data from Google Trends confirm that Iranian citizens have gradually been losing interest in ideological hatred of Israel, a trend it compares to the lack of interest in communism during the last years of the Soviet Union.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)