Out Of Whole Cloth

Did you catch the surreal hysteria on Friday about how Iran supposedly passed a law requiring Jews to "wear a yellow strip of cloth" in public? A brief recap: early on Friday, Canada's National Post ran a story reporting that "Iran's roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes" according to a new law passed by Iran's parliament. Predictably, the story caused an uproar, with the usual suspects from politicians to bloggers to Drudge trumpeting it as an "Ah Ha!" moment. One problem: it was complete bullshit. The link to the story was here. By mid-afternoon the link was dead, the story was gone, and the National Post had published this retraction. The headline disappeared quietly from Drudge as well, replaced not by the retraction, but by a story about a woman who ripped off her husband's testicles with her bare hands.

Some background: the National Post was founded by Conrad Black. In 2001, CanWest Global Communications bought the paper. CanWest's founder was Israel "Izzy" Asper. From the Wikipedia entry on Asper:

He was a prominent member of Canada's Jewish community, and was well-known for his strong faith and support for Israel. While a Liberal in domestic Canadian politics his views in regard to Zionism coincided with the right wing Likud - he was an admirer of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Asper would occasionally pen editorials defending the nation in his various papers and was accused by a number of media observers of censoring opinions critical of Zionism or which he deemed sympathetic to the Palestinians.

According to Bill Marsden, a veteran reporter with the CanWest-owned Montreal Gazette, "[The Aspers] do not want any criticism of Israel. We do not run in our newspaper op-ed pieces that express criticism of Israel and what it is doing."

Last week's controversy was hardly the first for the National Post. From a CBC report in 2004:

The world's oldest news agency, Reuters, says it will complain to CanWest Global's newspaper chain about its use of the word "terrorist" when editing stories dealing with the Middle East.

Papers owned by CanWest Publications, Canada's largest newspaper chain, have been altering words and phrases in some newswire copy stories dealing with the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thereby changing their meaning.

In one Reuters story, the original copy reads: "...the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which has been involved in a four-year-old revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank."

In the National Post version, printed Tuesday, it became: "...the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that has been involved in a four-year-old campaign of violence against Israel."

The global managing editor for Reuters, David Schlesinger, called the changes unacceptable. He said that CanWest crossed a line from editing for style, to editing the substance and slant of news from the Middle East.

Some bloggers who trumpeted Friday's "yellow badges" story are also media professionals who should know that many consider CanWest to be the Fox News of Canada, and that this type of story in the National Post merits immediate skepticism just as it would if it ran in the New York Post. But that's not what happened; even some clear-thinking opiners who have expressed dismay at the deception and incompetence behind Iraq still get in line to push this sort of agenda-driven slop. At what point will an appropriate sense of skepticism displace the reflexive, unthinking hysteria that got us into Iraq? Never?

We face two dangers in dealing with Iran: self-doubt and paralysis through analysis because of the disaster in Iraq, or a repeat of that disaster because we refuse to recognize and reject the same mendacity from the same cast of characters.

Right now, the greater threat is the latter.