Tehran's Martyr Cult Goes Editorial: Khamenei Channels Publish a French-Language 'Good Side of History' Issue

At 18:27 UTC on 19 July 2026, a Telegram channel identifying itself with the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pushed a single message to its French-speaking subscribers: the latest issue of a glossy PDF magazine titled The Good Side of History. Four minutes later, at 18:31 UTC, a second French-language channel, this one explicitly tagged #NousDevonsNousSoulever and #MartyrKhamenei, reposted the same publication with an editorial preface. Both channels distributed the magazine as Issue 22, dated July 2026, and framed it as a retrospective on "the historic week that has just passed," anchored to the funerary rites of Khamenei, who died in June 2025. The synchronisation, and the explicit French-language targeting, are themselves the story.

The Islamic Republic has long invested in diaspora-facing media, but the form here is unusual: a magazine file rather than a news bulletin, distributed through channels that solicit engagement rather than passively broadcast. The packaging borrows the visual grammar of an op-ed quarterly, the kind a reader might find in a Parisian bookshop, and aims that aesthetic at a francophone audience that the regime has spent decades trying to cultivate.

A magazine, not a wire

The two channels are not raw propaganda outlets. They are slow-publishing, magazine-formatted channels whose entire product is a designed PDF, branded with Khamenei's image and distributed in both French and other languages. Issue 22, dated July 2026, advertises itself as a return to "The Right Side of History," a previous issue referenced as a framing device for what the editors call an unprecedented funeral week. The hashtagging in the second post, #NousDevonsNousSoulever ("We Must Rise Up") and #MartyrKhamenei, signals an intent to mobilise as much as to commemorate. The distribution links point outward to the channels' own website, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and a further Telegram channel, suggesting that the PDF is the centre of a multi-platform apparatus rather than a one-off release.

That apparatus has a measurable footprint inside Telegram, but the actual readership lies somewhere harder to count: a francophone diaspora audience in France, Belgium, Quebec, and francophone Africa that has historically been a recruitment priority for Iranian cultural diplomacy. The choice of French rather than Farsi or Arabic is a deliberate editorial decision, and it shapes the audience the magazine can reach.

What the framing claims

The material the channels link to inside the magazine cannot be verified from the Telegram posts alone, which function as tables of contents. The 18:27 UTC message points readers to "the unprecedented funeral" of Khamenei, a ceremony that drew senior Iranian political and military figures to Tehran in late June 2025. The 18:31 UTC message reframes the same week through a historical lens, presenting the Islamic Republic's position as the moral winner of a series of regional contests the editors do not name in the Telegram excerpt. The reader is invited to download the PDF and continue the argument inside.

The structural message is older than this issue. Iran's state-aligned media has, for years, narrated the Islamic Republic as standing on the righteous side of a civilisational contest with the United States and Israel, framing regional alignments, sanctions, and the suppression of the 2022 protest movement as proof of historical vindication rather than political vulnerability. A martyr-themed magazine, distributed in French to diaspora readers, is a continuation of that project with a more explicit theological frame.

What this kind of publication actually does

Magazine-format propaganda is built to be saved, shared, and cited, not merely read. Unlike a Telegram post that scrolls past, a PDF sits in a chat, in an inbox, or in a downloaded folder. It can be forwarded to a contact who is not on Telegram. It carries the visual authority of a designed publication, which raises its credibility with audiences primed to treat magazine layout as a signal of seriousness. For diaspora outreach, particularly in France, where the Islamic Republic has cultivated mosque networks, cultural associations, and student associations for decades, that credibility matters.

The cost is low. A bilingual editorial team, a designer, a Telegram channel administrator, and a hosting plan for a small website are within the budget of any state-aligned media operation, and the channels advertise exactly that stack of platforms. The audience does not need to be enormous. The point is presence inside a specific information ecosystem: francophone Muslim readers in Europe and West Africa who are already predisposed to consume alternative framings of Middle Eastern politics and who encounter the PDF in a chat, a mosque announcement, or a social-media share.

Counterpoint and contest

The dominant Western and Iranian-diaspora-critical framing treats this kind of publication as a recruitment tool rather than a journalistic product. Iran International, the London-based Persian-language outlet that has become the de facto opposition wire for Iranians abroad, has consistently framed Khamenei-aligned diaspora media as the operational arm of a state intelligence apparatus rather than a benign cultural project. On that read, a French-language martyr magazine is not nostalgia; it is infrastructure, and the hashtags are the operational layer.

The Iranian regime's own position is that publications of this kind are a legitimate exercise in ideological outreach to Muslims worldwide, comparable to Christian missionary publishing or Western public-diplomacy magazines. Within that frame, the language of "martyrdom" is theological vocabulary, not a recruitment cue. Both readings can be true simultaneously: a publication can be sincerely ideological and also function as recruitment infrastructure, and the editors can believe in both at once.

What the available Telegram excerpts do not show is the magazine's content itself, the editorial staff who produced it, the actual subscriber numbers, or any concrete evidence that a particular named individual was recruited or mobilised by Issue 22. The sources published today are tables-of-contents, not full texts, and the gap between a designed PDF and its downstream effect is the most contested terrain in any serious study of state media.

The stakes, plainly

If the magazine is read at the scale its distribution suggests, a few thousand francophone readers will encounter a curated framing of Khamenei's legacy, the 12-day war with Israel, and the regional order that has hardened around Iran's eastern axis. If it is read at a wider scale, through forwarding chains, mosque distribution, and social-media reposts, the framing will reach an order of magnitude more people and enter conversations the Iranian state does not currently dominate. The editorial decision to publish in French, rather than Farsi, is the clearest signal of which audience the editors believe matters most, and that audience sits inside the European information space, where Iran's soft-power footprint is thinnest and most contested.

The publication date is fixed. Issue 23 will follow.

This article focused on the editorial form and distribution strategy of two French-language Telegram channels tied to Ayatollah Khamenei's media apparatus, rather than on the internal politics of the Islamic Republic. Monexus does not have access to the full text of Issue 22 and has reported only on the Telegram excerpts dated 19 July 2026.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/fr_Khamenei
• https://t.me/fr_Khamenei
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_International