Anatomy of a Smear
Or, How a Bill Becomes Propaganda.
The last maneuver in producing “fake but accurate” journalismlike activities is the smoothest of all: claim that the story was true at one point, but your reportage forced the foe to retreat. If it’s not strictly factual now, that’s only because the enemy reversed course and covered their tracks.
Which brings us to Eli Lake’s story today in the New York Sun: “A Vote of Thanks Is Expressed By Iranian Jews.” The headline works best if you don’t read the article. It’s supposed to catch the momentary attention of the casual newsreader. A few days ago she read something about Iran dressing the Jews (and the Zoroastrians and the Christians, but they don’t make sexy propaganda objects) in funny clothes. Then, she saw something about how maybe that wasn’t really true. Now the Sun headline flashes by in an RSS feed list or from a newsvendor in the subway station, and she thinks, “I get it. It was true, but Iran backed off under pressure.”
Unfortunately for the Sun, it has column inches to fill, so it has to stick something under that artful header. Lake and his editors are up to the task, at first:
CAIRO, Egypt – A leading spokesman for Iranian Jews is thanking the world for its outcry over a report that the mullahs were readying legislation that would require Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities to wear distinguishing markers.
Cairo, Egypt! A dateline with which to conjure. It’s not, you know, Iran, but it’s in that direction, and the name bespeaks the exotica of foreign correspondents, tearooms and souks and hookahs in alleyways. It would be churlish to ask a correspondent in Cairo, Egypt! how a whole bunch of Iranian Jews in the headline have become just one guy in the lede. And again, alas, Lake and the Sun must keep going, for if all the articles were only a paragraph long, those spring winds down the avenues of Manhattan would blow the flimsy paper hither and yon. Besides, maybe people will stop reading before:
While the legislation considered in the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, so far does not create a dress code for Iran’s Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians – an echo of Nazi laws that required Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and communists to wear distinctive armbands and badges – the spokesman, Sam Kermanian, said yesterday that he suspected early reports of this kind may have been a trial balloon.
And indeed they were! Amir Taheri’s trial balloon. The National Post’s trial balloon. Perhaps the trial balloon of the successor of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. If we artfully do not specify whose trial balloon we can get around the awkward fact that the law itself and, per correspondents who actually followed the debate on the law, the legislators did not provide for “distinctive armbands and badges” for Iran’s religious minorities.
But Sam Kermanian is there, right? As a spokesman for Iranian Jews he’s there every day in Tehran, observing the Majlis and soaking up the word on the street. Um, not so much:
Mr. Kermanian, who is the secretary-general of the Iranian American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, spent hours over the weekend on the phone with Tehran trying to determine the accuracy of a report in the New York Post by Mr. Taheri and a stronger piece in Canada’s National Post that said the proposed regulations would require Jews to wear special badges, evoking memories of the yellow Stars of David that Jews were obliged to wear in Nazi Germany.
Crap! Sam Kermanian is – gasp – an American! 25,000 actual Iranian Jews and Eli Lake has to make do with some guy from LA? Kermanian has been living in the United States since 1979, just after he finished grad school. He appears to have done some good work and to have lived a full life. He’s the kind of immigrant that does the country proud. But he’s an American.
And there goes the Post’s headline.
In the next paragraph we encounter an actual Iranian Jew and, for the first time, the awkward truth about those “reports” discussed earlier in the article:
The National Post story turned out to be incorrect. Over the weekend, the representative of Iran’s Jewish community in the Iranian legislature, Maurice Motamed, denied that the proposed dress code changes would require minorities to wear distinctive clothing or badges.
And after that it’s all “Look! A bear!” 1) Iran has done other bad things. 2) An exile in New York says the zonnar are being “discussed and considered.” 3) Iran has required religious minorities to wear funny clothes in the past. 4) Iran “requires all non-Muslim butchers, grocers, and purveyors of food to post a form in the window of their place of business warning Muslims that they do not share their faith. At the time it was put in place, the code was defended on the grounds that it enforced Islamic dietary law.” Of course, there actually are Islamic dietary laws, but never mind.
Final score: One actual Jewish Iranian, Mr Motamed, who does not thank the world for its outcry; one Jewish-American who lived in Iran a long time ago who does. 24,999 (roughly) Jewish-Iranians who couldn’t get through to Mr Lake in Cairo, Egypt. But the article exists to mutate the zonnar story into a form that can survive the new, harsher environment.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
May 23, 2006 @ 1:58 am
Jim, keep up the good work. Someone needs to do it.
Comment by Reb Yudel —
May 23, 2006 @ 2:16 am
The Sun is the pet neo-Con baby of Seth Lipsky, during whose tenure the weekly Forward tirelessly trumpeted Ahmed Chalabi.
Comment by Jiminy Cricket —
May 23, 2006 @ 3:48 am
This is a great article!
This is something we will be hearing in the media until it becomes conventional wisdom. This article counters it nicely!
Please, oh please cross-post this at Daily Kos.
Comment by ahem —
May 23, 2006 @ 4:47 am
Kermanian has been living in the United States since 1979, just after he finished grad school.
And just after, um, other things in Iran that happened in 1979, too. I’m particularly disappointed with the Wiesenthal Center’s ’well, the reports have been questioned, but it certainly sounds like the sort of thing those mullahs would do!’ Oh, yes, and while I don’t know about the truth of reports regarding the blood of Christian children…
Sheesh.
Comment by Fairfax —
May 23, 2006 @ 8:35 am
The way that this story was so uncritically accepted by people other than wingnuts frightens me, because the next time around the lie will surely be more plausible, and will have a much greater effect than this pathetic little belch.
Comment by John Smith —
May 23, 2006 @ 9:43 am
Public television just had an American Experience program on the reading of Joseph Gobbels diary. Very good. Who said it can’t happen here. It started in 1945 right after the allies defeated the axis. Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!
Comment by KingElvis —
May 23, 2006 @ 10:49 am
Got the link from Talking Points Memo.com
Wonderful takedown. Newspapers suck ass. They are about 99% ”You should feel this way” and about 1% ”This is actually what happened.”
Comment by neil —
May 23, 2006 @ 11:02 am
I’m not sure about the Motamed guy, though. He’s a member of the Iranian legislature, but not elected — he was appointed to one of the seats reserved for religious minorities. Thus he may not have the same incentives and concerns as the rest of the Iranian Jewish community.
Comment by Jay C —
May 23, 2006 @ 2:33 pm
Thanks for the expose, Jim: I have a feeling that the ”Iranian clothing scandal” isn’t quite dead yet: but at least you have done your bit to pound a few nails in the coffin.
And you’re right about the New York Sun: for some unknown reason I have been getting a unsolicited copy of it dumped on my doorstep each morning: even for free, it;s overpriced!
Pingback by Taheri-ng It Up Over and Over § Unqualified Offerings —
May 23, 2006 @ 7:49 pm
[...] rants as the Iranian dress code bill in translation, done by a Persian friend. Meanwhile, neil makes a good point in comments from yesterday: I’m not sure abou [...]
Comment by Gary Farber —
May 24, 2006 @ 4:43 pm
No argument whatever with your main point, but one small point here: ”4) Iran “requires all non-Muslim butchers, grocers, and purveyors of food to post a form in the window of their place of business warning Muslims that they do not share their faith. At the time it was put in place, the code was defended on the grounds that it enforced Islamic dietary law.†Of course, there actually are Islamic dietary laws, but never mind.”
Indeed, but do halal laws say anything about the food preparer being non-Muslim?
I know only a tiny bit about halal laws, but I know they’re very similar to kosher laws, a subject I’m not expert in, either, but do know something more about, and the kosher laws say nothing whatever about the food having to be prepared by a Jew. It’s irrelevant. The kosher laws speak to how the food is prepared, not who the food is prepared by, and plenty of kosher food is made by and sold by non-Jews.
It’s my understanding that halal law is the same, though I could be all wrong. But if so, I’m unclear on the aptness of your final sentence there.
But otherwise, as I said, no argument.
”Please, oh please cross-post this at Daily Kos.”
Alternatively, one could read this blog, which has been around a lot longer than Daily Kos.
Comment by Thomas M. —
May 25, 2006 @ 12:59 am
If muslims have a dress code, doesn’t that by default identify non-muslims. Or are non-muslims allowed to dress in the state approved costumes? And as for the politcized media… if ”the seriousness of the charge” doesn’t sell, next use ”fake but accurate”.
Comment by Gary Farber —
May 25, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
Following up on myself (yes, hairy palms time again), interesting background here. Yes, it’s at Frontpage, an extremely disreputable propaganda site as a rule, and thus I wouldn’t trust this article, save that an extremely good old friend whom I’ve known for thirty years, who is a distinguished professor of Jewish Studies, and who is thoroughly left-wing and anti-Iran war vouches for the writer and piece (also expressing her own reluctance to link to that site, otherwise).
Comment by waterdancer —
May 26, 2006 @ 9:21 am
Check out what I’ve been able to dig up so far on Eli Lake at Daily Kos. Pretty interesting, I think personally. Daily Kos tag: Eli Lake