No, as Canadians we are not done with it.
Not by a long shot.
National Post is certainly done with it of course. They pulled the online version of the story after it was roundly debunked, and issued the most tepid of retractions, without any apology for having been used as a psy ops dupe. Except they still have their NaPo Sound Off! page up, featuring the question : "Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany?"
No word on how their bullshit editorial from neo-con Amir Taheri featuring the now discredited line : "Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes" became a front page news photo of Hungarian Jews in WWII above copy referring to the Holocaust.
Harper is also done with it, having used the occasion to strike an entirely inappropriate tough guy pose :
"The prime minister couldn't vouch for the accuracy of the newspaper report, but he added that Iran was capable of such actions and compared them to Nazi practices.
"Unfortunately, we've seen enough already from the Iranian regime to suggest that it is very capable of this kind of action," Harper said."
Ah yes - 'Holocaust capable' even if they're not yet currently manufacturing holocausts.
Now where have we heard that phrasing before?
Harper continues :
"We've seen a number of things from the Iranian regime that are along these lines . . .
"It boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the Earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany."
You mean like arbitrarily running a front page picture of Jews wearing yellow stars? That sort of thing?
But here's why we aren't done with it. Despite NaPo's tepid apology-free retraction, the following papers are choosing to run the story anyway : The New York Post with an edited and even more inflammatory version, the Washington Times, the Sydney Herald, the St Petersburg Times, and numerous smaller papers. The Jerusalem Post has posted a retraction to theirs, but as of this writing, the Canadian Jewish Congress still has the original NaPo story up, sans picture and NaPo retraction.
So out it goes into the world, where weeks from now when Bush is ramping up support to invade Iran, he can make some oblique reference to Iran and the Holocaust in the same sentence, and readers of these and other papers will nod their heads and say, "Yes, Iran is Holocaust-capable, I read about that somewhere".
No, unfortunately we aren't done with it.
4 comments:
No we're not.
And if we don't get to the bottom (or top) of the five W's wrt to where this came from and how it turned into that front page fabrication, we are dupes.
My money is on Antonia Z.
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And why, I wonder, did they pick the front end of a 3 day newscycle deadzone to push this thing anyway?
Is it because they know that most mainstream press editors in the center of the Canuckistanian Universe took off for cottage country Friday morning to open the season?
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Ross : Did you also see this at Firedoglake?
Re timing. Maybe they didn't expect it to get debunked this fast either.
Alison, do you have a copy of the original story by Chris Wattie that got pulled? (Or do you have a suggestion on where one can be found?)
I'm interested in how that first story phrases the "confirmation" from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, particularly if it mentions a name.
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