war within a breath

The Media and Iran: A Case Study

07.21.07 - 03:50pm

Those who wish to attune themselves to the ways the mainstream media prepare the way for the most horrific state aggression should take note of this article by the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland.

Freedland is supposed to be a classic liberal columnist in Britain’s leading progressive newspaper, yet the article is an instructive example of the way the media accommodates to the establishment line, trying to manufacture consent by means of framing the discussion in a certain way.

So, Freedland says, the progress (sic) in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is a “happy byproduct” of the Iranian “threat”:

These unexpected, happy byproducts of the Iranian threat should not obscure our view of the threat itself. As the Guardian reported this week, the notion of military action to prevent a nuclear Iran is under serious consideration in the White House - with Bush apparently leaning towards Dick Cheney’s view that it may be necessary to use force before they leave office in January 2009.

That there is a “threat” from Iran is simply taken for granted, but what kind of threat? A “nuclear Iran” of course! Never mind that the phrase itself is provocatively ambiguous between an Iran with nuclear power (permitted under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory while Israel, Pakistan and India are not) and an Iran with nuclear weapons. For people like Freedland the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its repeated conclusions that Iran is complying with its treaty obligations, simply do not exist, or are perhaps drowned out by white noise from the establishment. Note also, Freedland’s breathless reporting of the White House line that force (translation: criminal aggression) against Iran may be “necessary”. Why we should take the warped opinions of a gang of maniacs who have done nothing but lead their nation (and Britain slavishly in tow) to disaster after disaster remotely seriously is not explained.

But of course the biggest “threat” from Iran is to Israel. Yes, that nuclear-armed, high-tech military-wielding, US-funded regional superpower:

Nowhere is the Iranian peril assessed more closely than in Israel, which would, after all, be target number one for any Iranian bomb. In several conversations with Israeli policymakers, they all described Tehran as the biggest single threat to their national security, ranking ahead even of the Palestinian conflict. The latter can be contained and managed, they believe; but the Iranian threat is - and they all used this word - “existential”. The way Israel sees it, the combination of a nuclear bomb and an ideology that yearns for a world without the Jewish state adds up to the threat of annihilation.

Freedland’s casual description of the ongoing, brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories as a problem being “contained and managed” is bad enough, as is the bizarre contention that the Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle for an end to that occupation is a threat to Israeli national security; surely it is the Palestinians who overwhelmingly face a threat to their security from Israel, it being Palestinians who are daily harassed, arrested and killed by the Israeli military. Of course it is only Iran which has an aggressive “ideology” and threatens other states. It goes without saying that Israel, the United States and the United Kingdom never attack and invade other nations… except Iraq. Oh and Lebanon over and over again. And Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and all those others. Nor do they support coups and insurgencies… except in Venezuala. And in Nicaragua. And in Chile. Oh… and in Iran.

For Freedland it doesn’t matter how many other countries we and our allies attack, nor how many democracies we overthrow, nor how many dictatorships we support. It is always someone else who is the “threat”, who has an aggressive “ideology”. That other nations may legitimately fear a real threat from the US, the UK and Israel, and the effect this may have on their peoples and the strategic decisions taken by their governments, is something that does not even enter Freedland’s head.

In the final paragraph Freedland gives the clearest possible indication of how the US and UK, and their servants in the mainstream media, will be framing the debate over Iran:

It need not end in war. If China and Russia are persuaded to tighten sanctions still further, force can probably be avoided. But this decision - whether it’s resolved through war or peace - may not be more than a year away.

Having internalised the propaganda framework of the US and UK elites, the only choice for Freedland is sanctions or war. As “the west” continues along the path to a confrontation with Iran it will no doubt hold up its hands, shed crocodile tears that sanctions and other “peaceful” options are no longer viable and prepare to unleash its bloated military might against yet another relentlessly demonised enemy. If we allow the mainstream media to set these two aggressive and illegal courses of action as the basic framework within which the debate occurs then we have already lost, and it is against this that we need to guard.

It is encouraging that so many of those who responded to Freedland’s article recognised the way in which the issue was being unjustifiably framed. That people are becoming so much more aware of the methods the media use to spin us into war can be a source of hope for the antiwar movement.

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