Yellow Jew Badges in Iran = Journalism as Yellow as it Gets

Iran Jew Badges=Black Propaganda

The drumbeat of anti-Iranian propaganda rolls on with of course more inflammatory Jew bashing attributed to the regime of president Machmood Ahmadinejad. This time a false and extremely scurrilous story has been making the rounds in the blogosphere and right-wing websites and even receiving editorial placement in some papers by staffers with dubious intent and an obvious ideological agenda. The story states that the Iranian parliament, at the command of Ahmadinejad has recently passed a law requiring Jews and “other religious minorities” aka fundamentalist Christians to begin to wear colored strips of cloth on their clothing as a form of indentifying themselves. Shades of the Third Reich, the story practically screams Holocaust and all that is missing are the concentrations camps. The covert operation to transform the Iranian hardliner into the newest version of the ‘New Hitler’ is as the think tank phrase goes “picking up steam” and now that Saddam Hussein has been dispatched somebody has to take the place of the modern incarnation of Der Fuehrer and expecting the MSM to pin the label on George W. Bush is as realistic of expecting Joseph Goebbels to call Onka Dolph ‘The New Satan’.

My local newspaper which long had been independent, a rare and vanishing breed in the days of media consolidation, corporate greed, yellow journalism, government propaganda disguised as news and sensationalism that belongs in checkout stand tabloids has slowly been taken over by the disease of newsless news and unsubstantiated conjecture through a losing battle of attrition given retirements and reassignments of key members of the editorial and news staffs. Yesterday morning it has officially joined the club of state run corporate press propaganda organs when a prominently placed editorial ran comparing the recent allegations on Iranian anti-Semitism to what else, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust while referring to the story on the mandatory wearing of badges as an identifier. This is entirely consistent with the anti-Israel message that is being attached to Iran and it’s democratically elected president, the U.S. media takes quotes out of context and hypes any insinuation that Iran has declared that the state of Israel is an enemy as if that comes as any big surprise when it comes to any other country in the Middle East…they ALL hate Israel ! The cynical choice to callously and shamefully exploit the Holocaust to further foreign policy initiatives shows an amazing lack of regard to the true victims of anti-Semitism which thanks to Bush’s war is enjoying a resurgence everywhere and dishoners the memory of the millions of Jews who were murdered by Hitler’s Nazi regime.

The fact of the matter is that the story is such an obvious piece of black propaganda (along the same lines as the ‘babies in incubators’ yarn back in the leadup to the first Gulf War) that most mainstream news outlets (other than the usual sensationalism driven cable channels like FOX) found it to be so problematic and riddled with red flags that they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Rupert Murdoch’s Newsmax and The Drudge Report were on it like flies lighting on dogshit though and the reactionary right wing hate bloggers were pounding their keyboards with a frenzy usually reserved for pounding their puds over pictures of Ann Coulter to disseminate this story that was nearly immediately debunked. The original source, The National Post of Canada was rapidly backing away from the story as though it were an unexpectedly encountered rattlesnake on a nature trail.

There has been an onslaught of attempts to paint Ahmadinejad as a dangerous anti-Semite who is on a divine mission to ensure the destruction of the state of Israel for months now which of course could be expected given the neocon alliance with hard core elements within the Israeli government who want to see Iran eradicated and are all too willing to trade in the currency of the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes by exploiting American sympathy and guilt in order to bolster public support for another bloody, ruinous foreign misadventure that Bush in his messianic mindset and the influential support of a Christian Zionist base of fundamentalist loonies bent on inciting a nuclear conflagration and therefore kicking off the events leading to the absurdity that is the Rapture will buy into it and nuke Tehran.

I was so pissed off that I did a rare thing, I wrote a scathing letter to the editor of my local paper, not that it will likely see the light of day, the bastards don’t like to be called on their bullshit especially when it was their lead editorial despite the story not appearing elsewhere in the paper. It reeks of the activity of an inside operative on their editorial board and conjures up comparisons with the infamous Operation Mockingbird where the CIA utilized paid plants throughout the domestic press to disseminate agency propaganda. There was an excellent story done back in 1977 by Carl Bernstein the Washington Post Watergate reporter who didn’t sell out. This is hard to find anywhere so hopefully the following link works, it did yesterday but you know how it goes with the creeping censorship of the internet:

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

I am even more pissed right now due to the double dipping, first my tax dollars are used to finance covert propaganda and then I have to pay to read it through subscribing to my newspaper. Nice Racket!

Incidentally, the incessant lying, the court packing, the NSA being used to spy on journalists and just all of the creeping fucking fascism that we are having rammed down our throats by Bush’s jackbooted thugs also pisses me off.

But of course I am in the minority in a nation of sheeplike drones.

And besides, even if the story had contained more truthfulness than disinformation regarding the Iranian parliament passing such a bigoted and hateful measure wouldn’t the act be at least somewhat morally equivalent to those of our own domestic demagogues in congress who are seeking to defile our constitution with discriminatory amendments targeting taxpaying American citizens based on a deep seated loathing of their lifestyle?