A celebrity chef with millions of followers on social media is the latest victim of Tehran’s increasingly harsh crackdown on the protests that have swept the nation since a young woman died in police custody following her arrest under the Islamic Republic’s stringent “hijab” laws last September. 

According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, police arrested Navab Ebrahimi on Wednesday and carted him off to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Mr. Ebrahimi’s Instagram account, with a reported 2.7 million followers, was rendered inaccessible in the wake of his detainment. 

Iranian authorities offered no justification for Mr. Ebrahimi’s arrest — at least not publicly — but it is widely believed that they put the charismatic cook in the dock for having subtly ribbed a slain Iranian general on the third anniversary of his death. The general in the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qasem Soleimani, a known regional troublemaker, was assassinated in January 2020 at Baghdad. 

According to the Guardian newspaper, Mr. Ebrahimi’s arrest coincided with his posting a recipe for Persian cutlets on the day the regime authorities marked the anniversary of Soleimani’s death. Persian cutlets are a hearty dish that can be made from either seasoned ground beef or turkey. When cooked properly, they are crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. 

While posting a picture of said cutlets on Instagram may seem like an innocuous undertaking, in the world of Iran’s persistently repressive mullahs it is not necessarily so. For opponents of the regime, social media postings of the meat patties are a thinly veiled reference to Mr. Soleimani’s death by drone strike. According to the New York-based Center for Human Rights, “social media users speculate that his arrest had something to do with his Instagram story.”

Earlier this week Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, vowed to avenge Soleimani’s demise. In a ceremony to mark his death, Mr. Raisi said that those who had a hand in the general’s death “should know that retaliation is obvious” and that “there will be no relief for murderers and accomplices.”

In the meantime, the noose is tightening around Iran’s reviled Revolutionary Guards, at least internationally. As the Sun reported, Britain is joining America and other nations in designating the IRGC as a terrorist group. 

Iran has for months now been wracked by sometimes violent protests against the Islamist regime. In November, protesters who have had their fill of the mullahs’ decades-long catalog of cruelty and endless failures even torched a one-time home of the country’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. 

The reviled regime has responded to the protests by means both violent and panicked. An activist group, Iranian Human Rights, says at least 488 people have been killed in the protest turmoil since November. At least two protestors have been put to death by public execution. According to the UN, the regime has made more than 14,000 arrests since the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died in custody in September. Iranian Human Rights says that nearly 20,000 have been detained. 

On Thursday, the AP reported from Dubai that Iranian authorities shuttered a decades-old French research institute at Tehran in response to cartoons published by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that mocked the country’s ruling clerics. They also summoned the French ambassador to complain about the drawings. 

Signs are increasingly pointing to a badly outmoded regime that is scrambling to put out fires of dissent that it is unable to contain. For advocates of democracy and regime change, this is progress, but daily life remains dangerous for many Iranians struggling to make their voices heard. Mr. Ebrahimi is just the latest example of that. 

The fate of the chef, who rode to fame at least partially on the wheels of an American social media giant, remains unclear. There was no immediate reaction to his arrest from Instagram’s parent company, Meta, or whether the company would do anything to restore the chef’s account. For the moment at least, Mr. Ebrahimi’s YouTube channel remains active.