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2 COMMENT Cartoons
aid US lynch mob mentality By
Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Here is a clue why,
despite billions spent by Washington on its global
public relations campaign, the image of "ugly
Americans" still persists in many part of the
world, particularly the Muslim world. Just look at
the vicious demonization of Iran and everything
Iranian in Hollywood, the US media and, of course,
the political rhetoric of American politicians.
A distasteful odor of hate ideology,
repelling rational thought, is
discernible everywhere, with
Iran-bashing in vogue and evincing the darker side
of US political culture, ie, the imperialist,
xenophobic, intolerant and repressive sentiment of
politicians and media pundits toward Iran.
Thus, whereas the enlightened Democratic
presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton takes her
opponent, Barack Obama, to task for ruling out a
tactical nuclear strike on Iran, insisting that
all options must be "on the table", her Republican
rival, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, has
penned an article in the "influential" Foreign
Affairs suggesting that as president he would
consider a tactical nuclear strike on Iran. He
writes: "The theocrats ruling Iran need to
understand that we can wield the stick as well as
the carrot, by undermining popular support for
their regime, damaging the Iranian economy,
weakening Iran's military, and, should all else
fail, destroying its nuclear infrastructure."
And that is exactly what the US military
planners are cooking up, per a recent report in
the London Sunday Times, namely the decimation of
the "entire Iranian military" and the "select"
targeting of some 1,200 sites.
Such
incendiary rhetoric, infecting the discourse of
right-wing European politicians as well, has been
a good sell to the gullible US public, but not to
the more sophisticated Europeans, who have
expressed their opposition to any war on Iran in a
recent opinion poll.
Unfortunately, in the
United States, the tight interplay between
government policy and what the German philosopher
Jurgen Habermas refers to as "public opinion
formation" simply means that a systematic media
campaign to demonize and even to dehumanize the
Iranians, as part and parcel of a brewing
"politics of exterminism" vis-a-vis Iran, has been
raging unabated, often led by pro-Israel Jewish
pundits such as Michael Ledeen and Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz, both enthusiastic
advocates of "bomb Iran".
But other than
several Iran-bashing motion pictures by the
Hollywood "culture industry", [1] perhaps the most
flagrant, and ugliest, manifestation of this
phenomenon in US politics and media has appeared
in that vital compartment of opinion-making we
call political cartoons. Notwithstanding the
recent controversies swirling about European
cartoons denigrating Islam's Prophet, or a German
cartoon showing the Iranian soccer team dressed as
suicide bombers, the right-wing American
cartoonists have been making their own
contribution - by depicting Iranians variously as
dogs, beasts and, in the case of one published
last week, by Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Michael
Ramirez as cockroaches. [2] (Ramirez' syndicated
work has a subscription/distribution base of about
400 publications through Copley News Service.)
The latter recalls a similarly insensitive
cartoon that appeared in a Tehran daily last year
depicting an Azeri-speaking cockroach, which led
to huge protests by Iran's Azeri minority. That
cartoon was denounced by the government's cabinet
ministers as "an offense to the Iranian people as
a whole".
Sure, cartoons take a satirical
look at news and gossip, and political cartoons
add humor to an otherwise sterile topic, but they
also serve as propaganda instruments, particularly
in times of (and leading up to) war and
(international) crisis. The editors of the
Columbus Dispatch, which published the Ramirez
cartoon, defended it as "freedom of expression"
and dismissed a letter sent by the Council on
American-Islamic Relations comparing it to Nazi
cartoons.
In his reply, the newspaper's
editor wondered aloud why the council was silent
about Iran's cartoon contest on the Holocaust
(which, as it turned out, was shunned by all of
Iran's dailies). However, the council's record,
available on the Internet, shows that it did
denounce that cartoon contest and sent a letter to
Iran stating: "Now it is the time for responsible
people of all faiths to avoid inflammatory actions
that are clearly designed to incite hatred." The
letter also stated: "One cannot demand responsible
behavior from others while at the same time acting
irresponsibly."
Comparison to Nazi
propaganda Sadly, there are strong
resemblances between the current anti-Iran
propaganda in the US media and that of the Third
Reich. As a case in point, the cartoon by Ramirez
mentioned above is
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