Please read the part in red closely.
“Separate Dress Codes for Religious Minorities”
The Latest Neocon Lie About Iran
GARY LEUPP
May 26, 2006
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 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 ope*****. 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.
But those paying attention have to try, and keep raising the slogan: Stop the Attack on Iran!
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: [email protected]