Enough With Anti-Iran Propaganda!
In the UK, and in Italy, and I am sure in the USA as well for what I can read on the International Herald Tribune, we are being bombarded by anti-Iran propaganda. There is no attempt at explaining, let alone understanding the complexities of the present situation, and one side is depicted as “good”, the other as “bad”.
Italian daily “Corriere della Sera”‘s home page a couple of days ago was literally drooling at the rumors of a “lake of blood” in front of the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament. Why? Because that would finally seal the concept of a violent, evil regime. Trouble is, there is an unfortunate number of dead but it has nothing to do with what you would expect from a violent crackdown by armed thugs and police firing live round on the crowd.
President Ahmadinejad’s fight against corruption is never mentioned, just as only few will have noticed that the opposition’s eminence grise is Ayatollah Rafsanjani, former President himself and whose sons appears to have “magically” become the richest people in Iran during that tenure.
What is requested by the opposition is never explained either. What has apparatchik Mousavi got to do with people asking to be freed from the long hands of the Moral Police, is left to the reader’s imagination. Supreme Leader Khamenei is belittled for having himself allied with Ahmadinejad and the Veterans of the Revolution.
What do we read instead in Western newspapers, but absurdist analyses showing very little respect for Muslimhood, let alone the Islamic Republic of Iran? (I’ll put a link about that soon…)
In this atmosphere it is clear that too many powerful, and truly evil forces, in Iran, in the USA, in the UK, in the Arab world and in Israel have a heavy interest in keeping Iran as a trouble spot and impeding a geostrategically completely natural alliance with the United States itself.
There isn’t much a person, or even a group of people can do. But denouncing the propaganda is one possibility.
Maurizio - Omnologos 
Wow, I read your post twice. are you joking? is this a joke? You can not realy mean this! with all that this evil regim has done to Iran and her people, how can you realy defend them? this was the most trobling:
You write:
” there is an unfortunate number of dead but it has nothing to do with what you would expect from a violent crackdown by armed thugs and police firing live round on the crowd.”
are we watching and reading the same news?
thanks
wdednh
2009/Jun/26 at 08:23:32
that’s exactly the problem, wdednh. The news we are watching are not balanced and independent. The idea that perfectly evil people are doing bad things to perfectly good people is being shoved down our throats. Being no Iranian, having little access to news from Iran apart from those propagandist sources we call Western news channels and newspapers, I myself can only judge causes based on their effects.
For example, oppressive, evil regimes bent on terrorizing the populace don’t use tear gas, and don’t find themselves with 20 dead in two weeks. Their leaders don’t waste time asking everybody to follow the Rule of Law.
Evil regimes kill hundreds in one go, like in Romania years ago, or in Uzbekistan a couple of years back.
In the meanwhile the death of 350 people in the space of a few weeks, many of them civilians, caused by Western drones between Pakistan and Afghanistan, something we could and should have a serious discussion about with some possibility of changing the current murderous status quo of ours, receives 0.000001% of the media coverage than an Iranian problem upon which our capacity of influencing the outcome is zero.
omnologos
2009/Jun/26 at 08:54:14
I see two possibilties
1. you do not have enough time to read/listen to the journalists left Iran in last days, read them
2. you are paid to write this! I don’t mean this
I go for the first one.
Stop it please.
Thanks.
MK
2009/Jun/26 at 09:50:02
MK
Your statement is absurd. Please expand your views of the world. There are other possibilities. Propaganda is not something the receiver of which is usually aware of, otherwise it does not work as propaganda.
omnologos
2009/Jun/26 at 10:20:46
I found your post perfectly reasonable and well-reasoned. I was intending to thank you for trying to inject a bit of objectivity into the conversation. Then I read the knee-jerk comments. Too bad most Americans can only see things in black/white, good guy vs bad guy. We’re not comfortable with complex situations, and prefer to have our news explained to us by “experts” so we know what to think.
I noticed that when the Supreme Leader spoke about how people were burned to death in Waco when Clinton was President, that comparison sank like a stone, ignored by Americans who prefer to think ourselves above such primitive behavior.
Weeping Sore
2009/Jun/26 at 17:48:28
I agree. I just got back from watching a commentary on cnn about “Is the USA interfering with the Iranian govoernment?” It was absurdly presented. All of the respondants were westerners or british. There was no iranian from iran that responded. And it was the typical “Iran is big bad totalitarian state and has brought all this on themselves.” I think it’s lame. Just a real quick google shows me that we’ve interferred in iran for a half century or more. That commentary was NOT fair to the iranians – it was pure westerner propoganda. Besides, if you were iran and knew that the westerners were distributing propoganda against you in your own country, wouldn’t you get a bit nervous and want to clamp down on journalists too? The problem is that when you clamp down to try to get rid of the western meddling in your own country, they’ll take what you do and say you’re “Clamping down on the freedoms of your people.” We’ve funded anti-iran sentiment in iran for al ong time. Bush recently pushed more funding, about 10-fold, to support anti-iran journalists/magazines/etc in iran. Then when iran tries to combat this with their own opinions on hte matter, western nations present it as “Iranian government only presents one side of the story.” I think we should just stop meddling, including funding anti-government sentiment. Independent americans can fund this. The american government should NOT fund something like this.
John
2009/Aug/02 at 22:22:51