The article, written in the ideological register characteristic of Mehr's state-directed editorial line, claims that Iran recently emerged victorious from a "forty-day war" against what it describes as an "illegal and oppressive" military assault by the United States and Israel — an assertion that cannot be independently verified and reflects the Iranian government's own contested narrative. Against this backdrop, the agency argues that boycotting either event would amount to self-imposed isolation, handing adversaries a propaganda victory.
"Boycotting the World Cup means surrendering the platform to foreign media to present a distorted and isolated image of Iran," the piece states. It goes further, describing Iran's national football team playing on American soil as "walking on the cheek of a superpower in sports shoes" — a metaphor invoking Ayatollah Khomeini's rhetoric about humiliating great powers. The author invokes Khomeini's 1987 declaration that "Islam will conquer the world's key strongholds," reinterpreting the stadiums of Los Angeles and Seattle as modern-day ideological battlegrounds.
On Hajj, Mehr frames Iranian pilgrims' presence in Saudi Arabia as "devotional diplomacy" — a show of national strength that, in its telling, demonstrates Iran's refusal to be intimidated. Quoting Khomeini's 1988 message that Hajj must serve as "a great pulpit from which the voices of the oppressed reach all the world," the article positions the pilgrimage as a vehicle for projecting the Islamic Republic's political messaging to a global Muslim audience.
The piece explicitly ties both events to what it calls Iran's "ascending power" status following recent military confrontations and calls on Islamic intellectuals to pursue "soft war" alongside conventional resistance. It concludes that active participation — rather than boycott — will "fire the final shot against the Iranophobia project" and confirm Iran as "a powerful, peace-seeking and undefeatable nation."
The article's publication by Mehr is significant. The agency operates under direct state supervision and its editorials routinely reflect positions endorsed at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic. The framing of sporting and religious participation as instruments of ideological warfare underscores how Tehran views even civilian soft-power arenas through the lens of geopolitical confrontation.
Mehr News Agency (state-affiliated Iranian outlet operated under the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting umbrella, widely regarded as a mouthpiece of the Iranian government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' ideological apparatus).