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- Douglas Murray: Favorite "Key Issue" Fizzles Out
- Samuel Westrop: Iran's Disinformation War
Favorite "Key Issue" Fizzles Out
by Douglas Murray
September 23, 2013 at 5:00 am
September 23, 2013 at 5:00 am
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The idea
that solving the Israel/Palestinian question is the key to unlocking the
problems of the region was what everyone who wanted to sound as if they knew
what they were saying was most delighted to say: "What was that about
Yemen? Well of course the real problem we need to solve is the
Israel/Palestinian issue." Rarely in diplomatic history has so much been
got so wrong by so many people for so long.
With the civil war in Syria grinding through its third year, Egypt descended
into ethnic and inter-religious barbarism, and the American Secretary of State
reduced to promising "unbelievably small" action by the world's only
super-power, it is hard to find any chinks of light. But one, perhaps, exists.
It is that we may finally have seen the explosion of one of the most embedded
and central myths of our time: the idea that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is
the "key" to sorting out the problems of the Middle East.After seeing what has happened since the "Arab Spring" began, this might be an appropriate moment to ask whether or not every Western foreign minister deserves simply to be sacked and sent back to school. Rarely in diplomatic history has so much been got so wrong by so many people for so long.
For at least the twenty years since the Oslo Accords, the idea that the Israel-Palestinian conflict was the "key" to unlocking the problems of the Middle East was the leitmotif of any discussion about the Middle East and North Africa areas. So pervasive was it that people could refer to the "Middle East" problem as though everyone agreed that there was only one problem across that whole set of benighted lands.
While of course it would be nice if all disputes could be solved — Cyprus, Kashmir, Turkey, Morocco, Tibet -- what is worse is that the allegation came from every side of the political spectrum. Politicians of the left said it. Politicians of the right said it. The idea that solving the Israel/Palestinian question was the key to unlocking the problems of the region was what everyone who wanted to sound as if they knew what they were saying was most delighted to say: "What was that about Yemen? Well of course the real problem we need to solve is the Israel/Palestinian issue." "A bomb was planted in which Western city? Well what we really need to do is solve that border dispute issue of the Israelis."
Further, one of the oddest things about all this is that for some reason, when the alleged centrality of the issue should have been swept aside most completely, it became instead even more central.
After 9/11, when Western cities began to be places on the frontline of a global effort to express innumerable Islamist grievances and extort endless Islamist demands, the free world's leaders instead decided to play this long-defunct tune one more time.
For instance there was the whole Bush era push to address the "key" issue. Tony Blair boasted in his memoirs of his determination to persuade George W. Bush that the quid pro quo for support for the war in Iraq must be a boost to the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Blair's belief in the centrality of the issue was endless -- as it remains. Then, as now, it was confirmed by a particular type of politician on the ground. Blair recalls a meeting with the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora in September 2006 in which Siniora stressed that there could never be peace in the region until "Israel/Palestine" was resolved. "With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing is," he said. Blair clearly nodded this through, "I pledged again to do what I could to get the U.S. president to refocus our efforts on it."
Elsewhere Blair recalls another period of mulling on the Israel/Palestinian issue. "With that [the peace talks] stalled, all manner of bad things were going to happen." This idea was not just the pet theory of the Prime Minister. It permeated the Foreign Office establishment as well as Blair's disciples and heirs in Parliament. David Miliband, his former Foreign Secretary was still talking about the centrality of the dispute just last year when, by then in opposition, he used a television interview on something else entirely to talk about that this dispute being the one that was "key" and most in need of addressing.
This is not, however, just a Labour party problem. The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has repeated the same theme ad nauseum. And so has the Foreign Secretary William Hague and every one of the current political establishment with barely one exception.
If a list of exponents of this fallacy were ever compiled in full it would outrun the patience of the most diligent reader. The message, needless to say, ran across Europe. Catherine Ashton -- the lamentable EU Foreign Minister -- has spent her time in office even since 2009 parroting the "key to the region" motif. She has shown a remarkable ability to hold this thought in her head even as her period of office has seen the Middle East fall apart almost everywhere other than in the Israel/Palestinian areas. Even the former head of the British domestic intelligence service, MI5, has said that the "grievance" over the Israel/Palestinian issue is a factor we must address for domestic security reasons.
I have dwelt on Britain, but the same story can be told anywhere in the West. It can be told by the bucket-load in each and every European country. And of course the same story can be told in the U.S. -- where the current administration as well as their predecessors seem to have swallowed the motif hook, line and sinker.
In three years of uprisings, overthrows, revolutions and counter-revolutions, barely a protestor in any country has come out onto the streets to express their irritation at current housing arrangements in East Jerusalem. In every instance they have come out to demand a say in their future or to demand work, fair pay, opportunities or simple amenities such as food. The demands of the Palestinian people and their propagandists in the West have not even been at the bottom of the list of demands in a single one of the Arab uprisings. And just as Israel has played no part in their revolutions, so it has played less-than-no part in their ensuing civil conflicts.
It is time to face up to the fact that in almost all Western countries, entire foreign ministries and political establishments have been caught repeating a motif so wrong-headed, so completely mistaken that if they had any shame, they should now be silent. In the meantime we should tell them that although it is possible we will listen to them at some point in the future, we will not do so until they have gone away for a time and successfully retuned.
Related Topics: Douglas Murray
Iran's Disinformation War
by Samuel Westrop
September 23, 2013 at 4:00 am
September 23, 2013 at 4:00 am
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There are
number of problems with the Iranian version. Not only has the British newspaper
never printed any such story, but the journalist named as its author, Brian
Craig, does not even exist. In an effort to discredit Iranian opposition
figures abroad, agitators in the regime doctored a screenshot and invented a
crime.
Since 1979, agents of the Iranian regime have been linked
to the killing of 162 political dissidents in Geneva, Rome, Istanbul, Paris,
Berlin and Oslo, to name but a few places. Today, although Tehran's leaders are
apparently still not averse to dispatching their assassins, analysts claim that an
increasingly significant proportion of Iran's battle against dissidents in the
West is now being fought with a campaign of slander, propaganda and
disinformation. What once was murder, now takes the form of media manipulation
and character assassination.Most recently, a screenshot of an article, "Police followed serious sexual assault," was published on the website of the Young Journalists Club, an Iranian news aggregation site, which according to the New York Times, is a mouthpiece of the Iranian regime. The original article appears to have come from the South Wales Argus, a tiny local British paper with a circulation of just 23,000.
The article claims a young boy was subjected to a brutal sexual assault. The accused is a prominent figure within the Iranian diaspora, who regularly appears on a London-based -- therefore uncensored -- Persian-language television channel, which, apparently to the great irritation of Iranian authorities, has a huge following in Iran.
There are a number of problems with the Iranian version of the news article. First, much of the story is written in what seems a noble attempt at a second language: for example, "Nevertheless police released him by earnest."
Second, and more importantly, not only has the South Wales Argus never printed any such story, but the Argus journalist named as its author, Ian Craig, does not even exist. In an effort to discredit Iranian opposition figures abroad, agitators in the regime doctored a screenshot and invented a crime.
The fake South
Wales Argus screenshot.
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Iranian agitators take
advantage of CNN's unverified "citizen journalism" initiative; the
fabricated story was soon taken down.
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These Iranian agents work closely with Iranian state news agencies to manipulate international news. In September 2013, for example, Iran's official FARS news agency reprinted a Foreign Policy article on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, albeit with a considerable number of alterations. Foreign Policy journalists Uri Friedman and Katelyn Fossett noted: "they [Iranian regime-employed journalists] lopped off entire paragraphs, changed key words, and added others to turn the argument into a case for why the U.S. should not take military action in Syria -- and why the rebels, not Syrian President and Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad, have committed unspeakable atrocities."
Recently, regime agitators have expanded their endeavors beyond traditional media. In 2008, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps announced that it was planning to launch ten thousand blogs that would "promote revolutionary ideas" for the Basij forces -- a mass-paramilitary organization with a variety of roles, including the brutal suppression of protestors.
In addition, in 2013, pro-regime activists established hundreds of fake social media accounts and blogs, purporting to belong to BBC journalists and their Iranian colleagues. Iranian agents even created an imitation BBC website, persianbbc.ir. The fake site mirrors the BBC's actual site in design and fonts, but includes stories such as, "Death of Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein: fabricated stories by Washington" and "BBC colluding with Israel to attack Iran." Further articles accuse the BBC and other Western press of censorship and media manipulation; blog posts within the sham website include articles by BBC journalists in which they supposedly confess to acts of sexual deviancy.
The fabricated BBC
website.
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On occasion, European politicians have detected Tehran's disinformation efforts. A Swedish MEP, Cecilia Malmström has revealed the extent to which Iranian agents attempted to influence parliamentarians. These efforts included mailing thousands of letters to European policy makers, which accused various opposition groups either of terrorism or of having extremist agendas. Although most of the letters contained different signatures, the text and the handwriting were all identical.
Media manipulation can occasionally go awry. Mohammad Mohaddessin notes that some propagandists have become so accustomed to the rhetoric of the official Iranian press that supposedly objective articles disseminated in the West referred to Iran's late Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, as "Imam Khomeini," and to one opposition group as the "National Army of Hypocrites."
In 2012, Iran's official FARS news agency printed an article which claimed "the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. President Barack Obama." FARS had picked up the story, however, from the satirical news website The Onion and presented it as news.
Iranian agitators apparently do not just want an Iranian audience. One YouTube channel, "The Heritage and Destiny Channel," established by regime activists, features a video in which two British actors explain the sinister signs of "Jewish supremacy" supposedly concealed within the 2012 Olympics logo.
The main target of Iranian propaganda efforts seems to be the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran [PMOI], one of the largest opposition groups, and a leading member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Regime activists have created hundreds of websites dedicated to demonizing the PMOI. Anne Singleton, a British woman whom a U.S. government report has accused of spying for Iran, runs one such website, iran-interlink.org. In 2005, through Singleton and her husband, the Iranian regime even attempted to host a meeting in the British Parliament, to spread disinformation about the PMOI. According to a British parliamentary group, the meeting was, in the end, not permitted "because of disquiet amongst Parliamentarians."
The Iranian regime's litany of claims against the PMOI is so pervasive that one accusation -- that the PMOI assisted with the suppression of the Iraqi Kurds -- was included in a 1994 U.S. Department of State report on the PMOI. A report by Friends for a Free Iran, a European Parliamentary committee, noted that a UN investigation revealed the supporting witness to the State Department's claim to be "an agent of the Khomeini regime's Ministry of Intelligence."
In another instance, a French jurist and lawyer in the Counsel of Saddam Hussein, Emmanuel Ludot, revealed, in 2005 that the Iranian ambassador to France, Sadeq Kharrazi, had asked him to use the fallen dictator's court case to blame Saddam's mass-murder of Iraqi Kurds on the PMOI.
In May 2005, Human Rights Watch published a report into PMOI refugee camps in Iraq; it claimed the PMOI was a terror group which subjected "...dissident members to torture and prolonged solitary confinement," and that within PMOI camps there were "...two cases of death under interrogation." Friends of Free Iran have noted, however, that Human Rights Watch did not even visit the camps despite an open invitation; that the human rights organization ignored testament from a number of PMOI experts, and that it failed to speak with U.S. coalition forces who had governed the camp since 2003. Instead, Human Rights Watch's evidence relied on 12 hours of telephone interviews with 12 different witnesses, most of whom Friends of a Free Iran revealed to be closely connected with Iranian agents and government institutions.
Writing for the Gatestone Institute about the recent Iranian elections, Lawrence Franklin observed:
The Office of the Leader apparently instructed the Guardian Council to select several hard-line candidates and one with a less obnoxious public persona. This playbook guaranteed the election of the perceived more moderate candidate, Hassan Rouhani. That maneuver reduced the chances of another voters' revolt, which followed the discredited 2009 presidential results. Rouhani's victory also acted as a safety valve, releasing some of pent-up anti-regime sentiment. Some Rouhani voters believing they had scored a victory over the regime, foolishly celebrated after the results were announced. Moreover, this sordid process burnished a bit Iran's international image.
Tehran's soft power seems to subsist on the politics of duplicity. Too often, journalists and policy makers in the West forget that totalitarian regimes do not always act honestly. While the fabrication of an article from an obscure Welsh newspaper does not seem too great a threat, considering the anticipated resumption of talks over Iran's nuclear program, such deceptions are an important illustration of the tactics that fuel the Iranian machine.
Related Topics: Iran
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Westrop
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