“You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war”
– William Randolph Hearst
The call to war with Iran is alive and well today, as hawkish self-styled media outlet Newsmax.com is pushing a story entitled “Iran Admits It Could Pull Nuke Trigger on US, Israel“. The article is festooned with scare quotes designed to prove that Iran’s Defense Ministry is “dropping the pretense that it is developing nuclear technology purely for peaceful purposes.”
And in the great history of Yellow Journalism the story appears to be virtually entirely invented out of whole cloth. The article quotes heavily from a fictional “strategic analysis” by an apparently fictional “top adviser to (Iran’s) Defense Minister.”
Yet there is no indication, beyond that article, that the so-called author of the analysis Alireza Sedidabadi even exists, and the “intelligence ministry website alef.ir,” from which Newsmax author Ken Timmerman claims to have obtained the shocking revelations, isn’t real either.
No kidding, visit alef.ir. Now ask yourself “how many Iranian government websites feature prominent pro-Green Movement articles and Samsung advertisements.” You could also go to the “links” section on the site and ask “how many Iranian government websites link to the Jerusalem Post” as a news source?
Indeed, the only Iranian quoted in the whole Newsmax article who seems to be real is self-described CIA spy Reza Khalili, who of course plays up the call to war that the piece so clearly is designed to be, even claiming Iran is “very close to being able to arm their ballistic missiles with nuclear war heads,” a claim so demonstrably absurd it seems incredible that it was even included.
Taking a page out of Hearst’s book, Newsmax is quite literally trying to “supply the war” here. Fortunately for us they don’t seem to be particularly good at it, and such nonsense will likely only “convince” the people who were sold on the idea of the war already.
