Has the New York Times declared war on Iran?

Middle East Eye

Once upon a time, the United States launched a war on Iraq with the help of false allegations of WMD. 
 
The corporate media - and most memorably the US newspaper of record, the New York Times -thrust itself onto the PR frontlines by presenting as reality the unhinged claims of the George W Bush administration.

Now, more than 16 years and an obscene quantity of Iraqi deaths later, it seems we may be witnessing a repeat performance of the same old media tricks, this time targeting Iran - although at least Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has not yet decreed that the Iranians be made to “suck on this”.
 
First off, of course, there’s the ongoing nuclear hysteria, which apparently can’t be put to rest no matter how many times we review the facts.

As Mehdi Hasan points out over at The Intercept, theTimes report of 13 May on US visions of “sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons” fails to answer a simple question: “How can the Iranians 'accelerate work' on weapons that do not exist?” 

Then there’s that Times editorial cartoon, published the same day with the title “Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program?" and featuring a caricature of the Ayatollah Khamenei retrieving a "nuclear programme" from his kitchen freezer. 

A helpful correction published three days later notes that “[a]n earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has not produced highly enriched uranium”.

But selective retroactive fact-checking can hardly reverse a tsunami of radioactive propaganda.

Nor does the US media, in its quest to paint Iran as a violent aggressor, generally care to provide relevant history re: US violence vis-à-vis Iran- like the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, which enabled the long-term rule by terror of the torture-happy shah, dedicated customer of the US arms industry.

And guess what: the shah’s reign also saw intense US efforts in support of a nuclear Iran.

The recent reported sabotage of four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates - the timing of which seems rather suspiciously convenient - has meanwhile offered anonymous US officials exciting new opportunities to point the finger at Iran in the press.

See, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s announcement that "U.S. Says Iran Likely Behind Ship Attacks”, in which “a U.S. official” is credited with relaying this most explosive “finding”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Euro-Washing the Nakba

Jacobin

Earlier this month, Israel treated the Gaza Strip to a quick military assault that killed nearly thirty Palestinians, among them two infants and two pregnant women. Four Israelis were also killed by rocket fire from Gaza — an unusually high casualty count, proportionally speaking, for Israel, whose recent track record also includes wiping out 2,251 people in Gaza in fifty days.

As usual, Western media outlets were quick to blame the Palestinians, while valiantly upholding the Israeli monopoly over the right to retaliation and self-defense — which, it bears mentioning, is kind of like saying the car wheel was defending itself against the crushed armadillo.

According to the Daily Beast, the upshot of the bloody showdown was as follows: “Hamas Started a War Over Eurovision, the Song Contest That Gave Us ABBA.” We are left to understand that the occasional Palestinian decision to fire generally ineffective rockets has nothing to do with being under continuous Israeli attack but rather with strategic objectives like wrecking Eurovision, the annual gaudy affair that launched the Swedish pop group in 1974 and that is currently underway in this year’s host city: Tel Aviv.

Conveniently for Israel, Eurovision 2019 overlaps with Nakba Day on May 15, which commemorates the Nakba — or “catastrophe” — of 1948, when Israel set up shop on Palestinian land, destroying more than four hundred villages, murdering some ten thousand Palestinians, and expelling three-quarters of a million more. Needless to say, the ethnic cleansing, killing, and dispossession that have for the past seventy-one years characterized the Israeli enterprise show no signs of abating. On top of straightforward methods like bombing and sniping, there’s also plenty of contemporary Israeli news of a can’t-make-this-shit-up variety, such as the orders to demolish homes belonging to hundreds of Palestinians because they are located in what Israel considers its national “peace forest” — and because Jewish settlers need to build homes there. Hence, perhaps, some additional PR perks of hosting the Eurovision spectacle and thereby Euro-washing Israel’s criminal orientation.

On May 10, Israel’s official Eurovision Twitter page unleashed a promotional video that qualifies as a catastrophe in its own right: four-and-a-half excruciating minutes of cheery song and dance about how Israel is “so much more” than a “land of war and occupation” — it’s a “startup nation,” a “land of honey, honey” where Israelis are “smooth as silk,” “gays are hugging in the streets,” and there are “some” Arabs, lots of shawarma, and “lovely bitches.” (Haaretz notes: “The issue of whether the mistranslation [of ‘beaches’] was an error or a deliberate attempt to poke fun at bad pronunciation has been discussed extensively on Twitter.”) READ MORE AT JACOBIN.