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Articles : "War on Terror"The Anatomy of Neoconservative Propaganda
Watching American (and Iranian-Americans who haven’t been to Iran since the revolution of 1979) “experts” talk about Iran can be a painful experience. Most of the analyses are not only superficial and stereotypical, they also lack the depth that is required in order to make sound policy.
Of course the ultimate phony expert is none other than the anti-intellectual George W. Bush. Last week in front of the Israeli Knesset, he likened the willingness to talk to Ahmadinejad to the appeasement to Hitler. But the administration and their Israeli friends have navigated through a number of phases and systematic distortions throughout the past three years in order to prepare us for what they will try to do: Use something Ahmadinejad said in 2005 against the Democratic candidate for president in 2008.
Here are the stages of Neoconservatives’ and Bush’s propaganda campaign on Iran:
1) The time line starts in 2005 when one of Ahmadinejad’s statements was grossly mistranslated with the unanimous consent of the American media. Then, Ahmadinejad had said “Imam [Khomeini] said this occupying regime in Jerusalem must vanish from the page of times.” The statement was mistranslated as “Israel should be wiped off the map.”
What started as Ahmadinejad quoting Imam (Khomeini), the leader of the 1979 revolution, criticizing Israel’s government was deliberately mistranslated not only to attach the quote to Ahmadinejad, but to use to further the propaganda campaign against Iran. The quote is about the “regime in Jerusalem” with “occupying” mentioned as justification for making the statement. Wanting a government gone for its policies is nothing new or radical. Last time I checked, about 71% of this country wanted the Bush regime gone for its policies. And despite placing one in the minority, wanting Israel gone is not an unacceptable position. Understand that when people talk about the existence of Israel, they are not talking about the people in Israel, but whether Israel, the West Bank and Gaza should be one country for both Arabs and Jews or Israel should be a separate and Jewish state. Why can we have frank discussions about whether Kosovo should be an independent country or part of Serbia but cannot have the same conversation about Israel?
Not only did Al Jazeera, (which some believe is doing Arab world’s bidding to isolate Iran and create friction between her and the West), mistranslate Ahmadinejad’s quote by replacing the words “occupying regime” with “Israel,” but the occupation that Ahmadinejad had hinted at in the original quote was eliminated to make the statement an irrational and irreconcilable desire to annihilate the people in Israel — and by extension, Jews, because in the eyes of neoconservatives, no Arabs lives in Israel. And how about the 8 million Palestinian refugees who were uprooted? “What are you talking about?”
2) The second stage is what neoconservatives have sixty years of experience at, which is equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Following the statement, the Bush administration did not waste any time to completely take Ahmadinejad’s statement out of context and make it appear as if it were against Jews. Of course anyone with a thorough knowledge of the region knows that Iran is home to the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. People in Iran do live under oppressive theocratic laws. But Jews don’t have it any worse and don’t get it any worse than they did before Ahmadinejad came to power. But when Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations calls a former US president, Jimmy Carter — whose extraordinary efforts to bring peace to Israel earned him the Nobel Peace Prize — a “bigot” for talking to HAMAS, one does not expect Ahmadinejad to be treated any better than he had been for quoting a criticism of Israel.
3) In order to effectively portray Ahmadinejad as dangerous, the administration realizes that the next step was to pretend that Ahmadinejad’s statement was a policy declaration. This is when neoconservatives like William Kristol and the members of the Bush administration began making statements like Ahmadinejad “wants to wipe Israel off the map.” Of course one’s saying something must be done is by no means the same as one saying he wants to or is going to do it. When Nancy Pelosi says Bush must go, does anyone interpret it as a death threat against Bush?
4) The fourth stage is an extension of the previous distortion. It involves pretending that not only Ahmadinejad has expressed the desire to destroy Israel, but he has in the power to do so. This is to deny one major fact, which is that Ahmadinejad is not the government official who is in charge of foreign policy. Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader in Iran, is the one who calls the shots. Nonetheless, at this stage, people are led to believe that Ahmadinejad is going to do what he is wrongly alleged to have said he wants to do and can’t even do if he wants anyway, which is wipe Israel off the map. John McCain denied this fact about the leadership structure in Iran again today.
Of course this notion is ridiculous and requires one to take what the second phony expert on Iran — John McCain — calls a “holiday from history.” The fact is that Iranian leaders have been making anti-Israel statements since the 1979 revolution, but Iran has not attacked another country in more than a hundred years. Ahmadinejad’s words (such as calling Israel a “stinking corpse”) are nothing more than empty rhetoric for domestic consumption. If anything, the “stinking corpse” remark should be reassuring for Israel; one is highly unlikely to want to destroy what one considers to be dead already! Looking into these remarks as indicators of actual policies betrays one’s complete ignorance of Iran.
5) The fifth aspect involves addressing criticisms. One can make the argument that Iran is not going to commit suicide by attacking Israel knowing that Israel alone possesses at least 300 nuclear weapons and can destroy every major city in Iran overnight without the help of the United States. In order to counter these arguments, neocons invoke an absurd notion that the leaders in Iran aren’t pragmatic and function according to an apocalyptic world vision and, hence, cannot be deterred as the Soviets were during the Cold War. This is of course a temping but inaccurate response. One needs to look back no further than the 1980s when Iran was secretly buying weapons from Ronald Reagan while publicly leading crowds to chant “Death to America.” Does anyone really believe that if Iran’s leaders had an apocalyptic vision, they would have bought weapons from the Christian “Great Satan” to kill fellow Muslims in Iraq?
These stages have brought us to where we are today: A few quotes by Ahmadinejad have been misquoted, mistranslated and misinterpreted to the point of distorting reality, drawing him as a powerful anti-Semitic dictator with an apocalyptic vision and nuclear intentions who will sooner or later try to destroy Israel.
As someone who was born in Iran lived there for seventeen years, this blogger is under no illusion that the regime in Iran is one of the most repressive in Iran. Many of my fellow liberals who think oppression in Iran is due to “cultural differences” need to let go of the fairytale. Oppression is real, and Iranians do face oppression unmatched in nature by any other country. Nonetheless, the notion that Ahmadinejad is a modern-day Hitler and needs photo-ops with the “Great Satan” to prosper when chanting “death to America” has worked out much better for him, or that talking to him amounts to appeasement is one of the most fundamental distortions that neoconservatives have purported in this campaign.
Sam Sedaei was born in 1982 in Iran. He lived in Tehran until 1999 before immigrating to the United States at age sixteen on his own. He went to high school in Chicago and received his bachelors in Economics and Political Science with concentration in Public Policy from Kalamazoo College in June of 2006. He recently moved to Washington DC to begin working for an international NGO. Sam revisited Iran during a five-week trip that expanded from two weeks before the 2005 Persian presidential elections until three weeks after the event to do research on social issues that related to the growth of the Persian Democracy Movement.
Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV and Fuse. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...
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Posted by anthony on Wednesday, September 26th 2007
what a painful article.
by replacing the words “occupying regime” with “Israel,” but the occupation that Ahmadinejad had hinted at in the original quote was eliminated to make the statement an irrational and irreconcilable desire to annihilate the people in Israel — and by extension, Jews… which is the occupation that A ‘hinted at’ in the original?
Ahm rose to power in Iran based on his ‘Legend’ of being a boss of the ‘embassy takeover’
with consideration of the “october surprise”, Prez Carter’s confirmation (though what is the word of a Prez worth?) of Republican manipulation of the Iran crisis, the fact that the U.S. withdrew all support for the Shah six months prior to the ‘revolution’, the fact that the U.S. was simultaneously setting up ‘Islamic warriors’ next door to do in the soviets (whose goal was a takeover of Iran and Iraq-thus control of global oil…duh), the fact that, besides the Shah (who they let go to a hospital), america was hostile to all his old cronies after the revolution, yes, with consideration of some of these facts, and adding a dask of Johnny Civil logic, i presume Ahm is a CIA asset. How about that ‘holocaust deniers conference’ right on cue? After we torch Iran, Ahm will be playing table tennis with Saddam and OBL in the swiss resort Baarrffinstrudel. (Or they will just be iced)
Smoke much crack?
veil of lies
I remember Information Clearinghouse ran the translated speech of Ahmadinejad as an article when he supposedly said “Israel should be wiped off the map.” And, funny enough, in the context of the speech, it wasn’t such a radical statement. That people focus on it reminds me of how sound bite obsessed the news media are.
I was in the military at the time when the Embassy was taken in Iran. I was being prepared to deploy in 24 hours. I had to sign my last “will and testament” and I had 2 Insurance Policies to choose from as I sat in a conference room at my command being briefed on the situation in Iran and receiving orders. My wife was grabbing my sea-bag for me and bringing it to the base. I was a Navy Corpsman. Outside of that scenario, The best that I understood was that the Shah was eventually admitted into a Medical Center in the U.S. for treatment of lymphatic cancer. He died in Egypt. He was hated by his countrymen for past atrocities against citizens and he was also held low regard for policies that were offensive to the Islam. He appointed Ayatollah Khomeini to office, as best as I understand, and it seemed that it was the Ayatollah that kicked the Shah out of the country (I don’t know the real reason why). Also, I had the impression that other prevailing forces in Iran wanted the Shah brought back to Iran to be tried for crimes and the main contention was that our government refused give him to the Iranians, thus, the Embassy take-over. I was in my early 20’s and I knew nothing about the Iranians and the Farsi Language. So now you have a general idea of what was being portrayed to our citizens at the time. I’ve read a lot of articles on the subject in response to this article and there are irreconcilable and contradictory statements in most of the other published articles on the internet. If I were in my twenties right now, I would walk away from this subject not knowing “heads from tails”. At the age of 50, I must admit that now I’m not sure what to believe even now. I have noticed a lot of revisions being made, not only in various Historical Accounts such as American history books but also I have noted changes in documents in the U.S. Library of Congress itself. This is not a new or surprising to me. When the Communists took over after the 2nd and successful Boxer Rebellion in China, most of Buddhists Shrines were plundered of jewels and precious metals, desecrated and often torn-down just like the Statue of Saddam Hussein and the grave-monument of Ahmed Michael Aflak in Iraq. Also many specific words were forcibly changed in the Chinese Language. The point is that every time there is a change in regime, expect a lot of things to be destroyed. We really have not had a change here in the U.S. in regime since Reagan took office. So, a large number of things have been altered.
As for Israel, as long as I can remember being alive, the same group of people have been controlling their government. The reason I believe this is not from their words or the change of names in their government, from period to period in history, but from seeing the same actions being done over and over again from generation to generation. They continuously piss-off the surrounding nations and at every turn of negotiations they turn around and commit another atrocity followed by an immediate excuse of retaliation before the ink on the signed Treaties and Agreements have even dried. They are arrogant and smug about it top of that. Until they change their internal policy of how to deal with their neighbors, don’t expect to see any change in your life time. Though I have Judean blood coursing through my veins, I renounce the criminal monsters that control both Israel and the United States at this time in history. Whether we are talking about Palestinians, Basques, Romany, Kurds, or poor people in the Southern U.S., this can be guaranteed: If you treat people like wild and feral animals, they will bite you! As for me I choose to actively participate in immediate civilization where I live by trying to help unemployed American citizens get job, housed and fed in the local economy. It helps me stay employed at the same time.help unemployed American citizens get job, housed and fed in the local economy. It helps me stay employed at the same time.
-organize them into militias and print your own euros
i got my info from two members of the shah’s cabinet independent of each other
plus other research
Euros! lol! Nice one Johhny.
“i got my info from two members of the shah’s cabinet independent of each other
plus other research”
Thanks for reading my comment. At least a few people are paying attention. :)