on
June 14th 2006 at 12:43 pm in Conspiracies, Freedom & Repression, Interesting Links, Media, Religion & Politics When this was still fresh, I knew this was all bullshit. Few message boards I frequent were discussing it and debunked it quite rapidly. Somebody at kuro5hin recently wrote an interesting piece about it, and here’s a link to the article:
The world reacted with shock and dismay last month to the news that Iranian Jews were being forced to wear yellow badges, a policy made infamous by the Nazis. Canada’s National Post featured the story on its front page with a headline reading “Iran Eyes Badges For Jews” above a photograph of Hungarian Jews wearing yellow Stars of David from 1944. The world media quickly followed the National Post’s lead, with the reports repeated in major newspapers across the globe. The Simon Weisenthal Center confirmed the story, noting “Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis”. The Australian and Canadian Prime Ministers expressed outrage, with Stephen Harper observing that the Iranian regime was “very capable of this kind of action”.
The only problem with this story? It was a complete fabrication.
Most noteworthy is this little paragraph here, as nobody in the Western world seems to know that Iran is getting demonised by the media all over:
Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rhetoric has been interpreted by some as a desire to attack or even commit genocide against Israel. However, the widely-reported statement that Ahmadinejad supposedly made, “Israel must be wiped off the map” was, in fact, a mistranslation. As Juan Cole has noted, Persian contains no such idom as “wiped off the map”. A more accurate translation is “The occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time”, a more passive statement. It’s also worth noting that the Iranian president does not control the Iranian military, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini does, and the Iranian government has itself denied wanting to attack Israel. Documents have emerged that show in 2003, Iran secretly offered peace with Israel to the US, but was rebuffed.
I noticed the kuro5hin article has been pulled?!
It’s still in Google’s cache though….
Incidentally I just read that the guy that ‘invented’ this story was none other than the US-fled Iranian Amir Taheri, that incidentally works for the American Enterprise Institure.
Of course that’s a mere coincidence, right?
Silly that the above mentioned article on Kuro was pulled for being ’speculative’ whereas the original badge-story is just as speculative….