Invoke the Holocaust to Encourage War?

[c9]

Perhaps some of you saw the story in the National Post the other day, "Iran Eyes Badges For Jews," and frowned deeply as you considered it. The short version of this post is: it's made up. I bet you didn't see the retraction, nor any explanation of what it's all about. Because the first story made the rounds so fast, we ended up with Canadian PM Stephen Harper denouncing the (non-existent) idea, the Simon Weisenthal Centre in LA getting upset about it, and numerous media outlets repeating the story. All legitimate, except that it's not really making headlines explaining the falsehoods now.

Antonia Zerbisias, a media columnist at the Toronto Star, gathered all sorts of info on this, and outlines: Amir Taheri wrote it. How'd it get to the SWC, and thus around the world? Taheri sent it. Who's he? An employee of Benador Associates. Who're they? A "typical right-wing war-mongering" American PR agency, according to Zerbisias. She has links and details if you're curious.

So basically an American PR guy pushed a false story, fed it to Jewish groups to create a story out of the reaction, and now everyone from right-wing blogs to Rush Limbaugh are running at full tilt on it despite it not being true. *Nice*.

Comments

[sisyphus238.livejournal.com]

There was a story on the CBS Evening News about American tourists checking out Venezuela and all the thing Chavez is trying to do to spend the nation's wealth on helping the poor. They spent a good deal of the story on ow people claim they have freedom of speech and can broadcast what they like. How 4 out of 5 papers are against Chavez but that he has taken no steps to muzzle them. The one dissenting voice they had was a woman who, with American funding, is trying to "promote Democracy" and who claims that people are indeed being suppressed. She was too pretty as far as I was concerned and struck me as one of those who is being paid to disrupt Venezuela. I was reminded of John Perkins (http://www.johnperkins.org/) whose job it was to go into countries like Venezuela and offer the leaders offers 'they couldn't refuse'. If they DID refuse, they often didn't live too long.