A reader attacks the NY Times for taking at face value Iran's assertion that it has "backed away from direct threats to Israel."
Re: "Iran Backs Off From Direct Threat to Israel" (Oct. 30, page A4):
Without context or challenge, the lead paragraph of this story asserts that "Iran's Foreign Ministry released a statement on Saturday backing away from direct threats to Israel."
The Times bases this lead -- and its headline -- on a Foreign Ministry announcement that "Iran is committed to its obligations stated in the United Nations charter and it has never tried to use force or threat against a second country."
What the Times fails to tell its readers is that this Iranian statement is a demonstrable lie. For many years, Iran has used force against Israel in contravention of its obligations under the U.N. Charter by waging a still ongoing terror war against the Jewish state via proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which Tehran arms, finances and relies on to "wipe Israel off the map," as its own president made clear the other day. The Karine-A weapons ship, intercepted by Israeli naval forces, originated in Iran. Tehran planted many of its Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon to train and direct Hezbollah to attack Israel.
To let the Iranian Foreign Ministry statement stay unchallenged in the face of obvious contradictory reality is nothing short of an abdication of responsible journalism by the Times. A responsible newspaper, when handed such false propaganda, would at a minimum ask Iranian officials in Tehran or Washington how they reconcile their terror war against Israel with an assertion that Iran "never tried to use force" against Israel. A response or even non-response to such a question would have been quite instructive.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the Times has let demonstrably false Iranian propaganda grace its news pages without any challenge. Two days earlier, on Oct. 28, it ran a story in which it pictured a former Iranian president, Ali Rafsanjani, as a moderate counter-force to the country's current president. The same Rafsanjani who said four years ago that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Irael will destroy everything. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." The same Rafsanjani, who said during this year's "Jerusalem Day" anti-Israel demonstrations in Tehran that Iran will settle only for a Palestinian-ruled pre-1948 Palestine -- a formulation, repeated by Iran's Foreign Ministry, that would wipe Israel off the map.
By failing to paint a complete picture of Iran as the world's No. 1 sponsor of terrorism and a country whose entire ruling elite is committed to the destruction of Israel, the Times allows its credibility to take a real beating. I hope you can help editors and reporters find their way back to a more objective, cold-eyed view of the Iranian ruling establishment and its real, not imaginary, agenda.
Sincerely,
Leo Rennert
Comments