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"A Canadian newspaper
apologized on
Wednesday for a story that said Iran planned to force Jews and
other religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing to
distinguish themselves from Muslims. The conservative National
Post ran the story on its front
page last Friday along with a large photo from 1944 which
showed a Hungarian couple wearing the yellow stars that the
Nazis forced Jews to sew to their clothing.
The story, which included tough anti-Iran comments from prominent Jewish groups, was picked up widely by Web sites and by other media [including the St. Petersburg Times, who ran this editorial, and this correction]. "Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online," the paper asked readers last Friday. But
the National Post, a
long-time supporter of Israel and
critic of Tehran, admitted on Wednesday it had not checked the
piece thoroughly enough before running it.
"It is now clear the story is not true," National Post editor-in-chief Douglas Kelly wrote in a long editorial on page 2. "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story."" (read entire story) University of Michigan professor Juan Cole says that the false cloth badges claim "is similar to the attribution to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the statement that "Israel must be wiped off the map." No such idiom exists in Persian, and Ahmadinejad actually just quoted an old speech of Khomeini in which he said "The occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.""The latest demonization of Iran is similar to previous U.S. propaganda campaigns that helped fuel support for two attacks on Iraq ("Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die", and the claim that Iraq was threatening the U.S. with Saddam's WMD and the Iraqis would welcome the U.S. as liberators). As the U.S. government continues to try to convince Americans to support a future attack on Iran, it is our hope that the U.S. media will be diligent and refuse to fall into the traps set by those who are pushing for more war. If the public can not rely on a neutral press for unbiased information, the public is doomed to be excluded from the democratic process and therefore doomed to be oppressed, not free. |