An AI-generated response to Boy George’s “We Will Dance Again” puts Gaza back into the frame—but it also reveals how quickly human suffering is becoming algorithm-ready entertainment.
Boy George begins his new pro-Israel song with a declaration disguised as a debate:
“You say genocide, I say war.”
The line reduces one of the defining legal and moral questions of our time to a difference of opinion—as though genocide were simply another way of interpreting a military conflict.
Now the song has received an answer.
In an AI-generated, plastic-brick-style video attributed to PersiaBoi, a brightly dressed figure resembling Boy George performs beneath colorful nightclub lights. There is a vintage microphone, an immediate beat and the polished artificiality of digital spectacle.
But the performance is repeatedly interrupted.
The video cuts to destroyed neighborhoods, damaged ambulances, rescuers, displaced families and children beneath concrete. It turns Boy George’s refrain back against him:
“You keep singing ‘we will dance’ while a whole people die.”
Its response is unequivocal: “It’s not a war—it’s genocide.”
The video does not reject Boy George’s pop language. It hijacks it. That is precisely what makes it effective.
A Counter-Narrative Built for the Feed
PersiaBoi is among a growing collection of creators using generative AI, plastic-brick animation and English-language rap to circulate pro-Iranian political narratives. The videos ridicule American and Israeli leaders, challenge Western accounts of military conflicts and compress complicated geopolitical events into short, emotionally direct stories.
The form is intentionally familiar. Plastic characters recall childhood and commercial entertainment. Rap provides rhythm and repetition. AI makes it possible to respond to political events quickly and inexpensively.
This is propaganda redesigned for the social-media feed: immediate, musical and highly shareable.
PersiaBoi has sometimes been associated with Explosive Media, a Tehran-based collective producing similar political animations. They are more accurately understood as participants in a wider creative movement rather than automatically treated as the same organization. Explosive Media denies being controlled by the Iranian government and presents its work as an effort to counter Western distortions about Iran. Critics remain skeptical because of its access and consistent alignment with Iranian state narratives. WIRED
Without verifiable evidence of direct government funding or control, PersiaBoi should be described as pro-Iranian or regime-aligned—not definitively state-sponsored.
But propaganda does not require an official government seal. It requires a story designed to organize public feeling toward a political objective.
The Truth Inside Propaganda
Calling the PersiaBoi video propaganda does not automatically make its argument false.
Propaganda can contain facts. It can expose hypocrisy and restore people who have been deliberately excluded from a dominant narrative. Its power comes from selection: what it asks us to see, what it permits us to feel and what it quietly leaves outside the frame.
Boy George’s song remembers the people murdered and abducted during the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival. Those lives deserve remembrance. That violence cannot be dismissed or explained away.
But the song turns remembrance into exemption. It uses one atrocity to place everything that followed beyond meaningful moral examination.
Palestinian deaths become the unfortunate ugliness of war. Destroyed hospitals, mass displacement, hunger and children beneath rubble disappear behind the reassurance that an army is simply doing what an army is for.
PersiaBoi’s response identifies that erasure with brutal efficiency. It forces Palestinian suffering back into the performance. Every return to the brightly colored singer becomes more uncomfortable because Gaza can no longer be held outside the song.
Its message is clear: if we are going to keep dancing, the rubble must remain inside the frame.
But the Frame Must Keep Widening
The counter-video nevertheless demands scrutiny of its own.
Iran’s government presents itself as a defender of Palestinians and an opponent of American and Israeli power. That position does not erase its repression of Iranian dissidents, women, LGBTQ+ people and anti-government protesters.
A creator can expose Western hypocrisy while remaining silent about authoritarianism closer to home. A video can tell the truth about Gaza while arranging that truth to support another government’s political interests.
Recognizing this does not mean retreating into false balance.
Boy George’s song and PersiaBoi’s response are not morally identical simply because both use propaganda techniques. One minimizes Palestinian suffering; the other restores it to visibility. Evidence, political power and material consequences still matter.
The answer is not to conclude that everyone is propagandizing and therefore nothing can be known. The responsibility is to ask more precise questions:
Who created this?
What evidence supports it?
Whose suffering has been made visible?
Whose suffering remains absent?
What political power benefits from the arrangement?
The most dangerous propaganda is not always an obvious lie. Sometimes it is a carefully framed truth—emotionally persuasive, culturally fluent and incomplete in precisely the way power requires.
Boy George offers compassion with borders.
PersiaBoi breaks through one of those borders by placing Gaza back into the picture. But our responsibility is to keep widening the frame—even when what comes into view complicates the story we wanted to believe.
The song may end.
The information war will keep dancing.
This dispatch introduces a larger ipropaganda examination of AI-generated culture, political storytelling and the new aesthetics of information warfare. The expanded essay will appear in a forthcoming print edition of propagate.
https://www.tiktok.com/@mahdihemmat/video/7667565701787389197