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Now that Canada's National Post
has apologized for the disinformational article about Iran it
published on its front page last Friday, one should inquire as
to how this happened in the first place. The Post had
reported that on May 15, the Iranian Parliament had passed a
law establishing "separate dress codes for religious minorities,
Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct
colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes
would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that
they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming
najis (unclean)." This was absurd. The one Jewish member
of the 190-member Iranian Majlis, Moris Motamed, among others
refuted it noting that Iranians would never put up with such
a law. He added, "Our enemies seek to create tension among
the religious minorities with such news and to exploit the situation
to their benefit."
The legislator must surely
count Iranian-American journalist Amir Taheri, author of the
nonsense, among these enemies. But what led Taheri to produce
a sensationalistic piece, drawing immediate damning comment from
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, U.S. State Department
spokesman Sean McCormick, and Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles? Taheri is after all a
man of apparently impeccable journalistic credentials. He's been
Middle East editor for the London Sunday Times, has written
for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily
Mail, Arab Times, International Herald Tribune,
Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday,
The Washington Post, Die Welt, Der Spiegel,
Der Zeit, La Repubblica, L'Express, Le Nouvel
Observateur, El Mundo,and others. He regularly
comments on CNN. Quite a range of editors apparently consider
him competent. So I think it unlikely his piece resulted from
mere journalistic sloppiness.
Taheri was also between 1972
and 1979 executive editor-in-chief of Kayhan, Iran's main
daily newspaper under the Shah's regime. He contributes to the
neocon National Review and his speaking engagements are
handled by the warmongering neocon Benador Associates PR firm.
He and these colleagues have repeatedly urged a U.S. attack to
produce regime change in Iran. The neocons, of course, have shown
themselves more than willing to employ deceit in building the
case for military action; it is part of their Straussian modus
operandi. However much their "intelligence" about
Iraq, disseminated through Douglas Feith's Office of Special
Plans and media sycophants like Judith Miller, has been discredited,
they're plodding on with their strategy of vilifying yet another
regime to build popular support for its overthrow.
Looking at the big picture,
what they've done so far is to persuade much of the American
public that Iran is doing something illegal in enriching uranium
and insisting on its right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty
to do so; that Iran is definitely trying to build nuclear weapons;
and that Iran has declared its intention of "wiping Israel
off the map." The first of these is untrue. The NPT expressly
allows all signatory nations to master the nuclear cycle under
IAEA monitoring. The second is unproven. The IAEA has stated
repeatedly that there is no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons
program. The third is a distortion. Iran's President Ahmadinejad
has quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini as having stated that
the "regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from from the
page of time." But this same Ahmadinejad was of course immediately
identified in the U.S. press after his election last June as
one of those who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, taking
U.S. diplomats and CIA agents hostage. The deception was soon
exposed, but the strategy here is to vilify and have faith that
the vilification will linger after the specific charge has been
dropped.
In 1990, after Iraq invaded
Kuwait, the "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," a front group
established by the Hill & Knowlton PR firm to promote war
on Iraq, used its ties to California Democrat Tom Lantos and
Illinois Republican John Porter to stage the appearance of a
teenage Kuwaiti girl at a Congressional hearing on the invasion.
She testified that as a volunteer at al-Addan Hospital in Kuwait
City she "saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital
with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators.
They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators,
and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Some of us
wondered at the time whether it was likely that Iraqi boys would
wantonly slaughter Arab babies in this Kuwaiti hospital. It was
later revealed that the girl testifying was a daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., and that she was lying through
her teeth. But the lie worked very, very well, validated by Colin
Powell and others in the first Bush administration, and by reputable
press organs. Many months later it was shown to be a farce, but
of course then the damage had been done.
A routine, unremarkable, invasion
of one Arab nation by another justified by reasons much more
persuasive than the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (an invasion
that had actually met with much sympathy among the Emirate's
population, most of whom did not hold Kuwaiti citizenship) had
been persuasively depicted as act of utter evil. Saddam was the
"new Hitler," a wanton premature baby-killer, to be
followed by the Serbian Milosovic (architect of Nazi-style Bosnian
concentration camps), and now this horrid Iranian Ahmadinejad
who wants to use his nukes to annihilate the Jews.
But the Jewish rep in the Iranian
parliament (who has been outspoken before) is surely on-target
when he suggests that some seek to "exploit the situation
to their benefit." They do so by exploiting ignorance, prejudice,
fear, and gullibility. They churn out so much disinformation
one has the sinking sense that however one tries to expose it,
their plans in the short term will prevail. But those paying
attention have to try, and keep raising the slogan: Stop the
Attack on Iran!
CounterPunch
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