Iran the Target of misinformation Campaign

A story authored by Amir Taheri regarding new legislation in Iran allegedly requiring Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive color badges circulated around the world this weekend before it was exposed as false. It was initially published in Friday's edition of Canada's National Post, which ran beside the story a 1935 photograph of a Jewish businessman in Berlin with a yellow, six-pointed star sewn on his overcoat, as required by Nazi legislation at the time. The Post accordingly issued a retraction. Taheri's story, however, was reprinted by the New York Post, which is owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, and picked up by the Jerusalem Post, which also featured a photo of a yellow star from the Nazi era over a photo of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Juan Cole, president of the U.S. Middle East Studies Association (MESA), described the Taheri article and its appearance first in Canada's Post as "typical of black psychological operations campaigns," particularly in its origin in an "out of the way newspaper that is then picked up by the mainstream press" – in this case, the Jerusalem Post and the New York Post. A former U.S. intelligence official described the article's relatively obscure provenance as a "real sign of [a] disinformation operation."
In particular, Taheri explained, religious minorities will "have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews will be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes, while Christians will be assigned the color red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the color of their zonnar," he wrote.
While Taheri did not evoke the Nazi precedent in his column, the National Post asked its readers at the end of the piece, "Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online at nationalpost.com."
In fact, however, the legislation contained "absolutely no mention of religious minorities," according to Hadi Ghaemi, the chief Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW), who said it included "only generalities with regard to promoting a national dress code and fashion industry that should be subsidized and supported by the government."
The article – and especially its attribution to "human rights groups" – was particularly unfortunate, he told IPS, because "it plays into the hands of the Iranian government that wants to discredit human rights issues that are raised at the international level." The actual legislation was indeed "a troubling development," but not for the reasons cited by the Post, he added, because "its main target is most probably Iranian women."
Other denunciations were quick to follow. One Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, Maurice Motamed, insisted that color requirements for ethnic minorities had "never been proposed or discussed in parliament," let alone approved. "Such news," he told the Associated Press, "is an insult to religious minorities here." "This report is a complete fabrication and is totally false," he told The Australian newspaper. "It is a lie…."
Two Israel-based Iran experts, Menashe Amir and Meir Javedanfar, also denounced the original reports about the legislation, suggesting in a follow-up article in the Jerusalem Post Monday that they were based on outdated speculation about the impact on non-Muslims of the adoption of Islamic dress standards.
"I think the way these stories played – particularly the references to the Holocaust – was designed to arouse and play upon concerns and accusations that Ahmadinejad is another Hitler who needs to be dealt with accordingly," noted Cohen, who added that the Iranian president's questioning of the Holocaust and aggressive statements about Israel have made such stories more credible.
Resource: Inter Press Service