Propaganda war latest: Tehran 3 Israel 0

Iran’s tactic of portraying its enemy as facing inevitable destruction is proving successful


Amir Taheri
Times U.K. Online
07 June '10

As Iran’s leadership prepares to dispatch a Red Crescent flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, its propaganda organs are spreading one message throughout the Muslim world: the Jewish state, branded by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “the Zionist stain of shame”, is heading for its inevitable destruction.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said of these aid ships that “if this symbolic campaign continues, it will result in the surrender of the Zionist regime, which will certainly be one of its biggest defeats”.

Over the past three years, Iran’s Khomeinist regime has succeeded in changing the traditional perception of Israel. Instead of Israel being the almost invincible enemy that crushed the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War, it is now portrayed as a waning power, a small and vulnerable enclave that, having lost the support of its powerful protector, the United States, is facing the might of a resurgent Muslim world under Tehran’s leadership.

This message is pumped out through Iranian satellite television stations, such as the Arab language al-Alam News Network. Tehran also publishes scores of magazines and books that are freely distributed throughout the Muslim world. Muslim opinion-formers are regularly invited to Iran for seminars on the pan- Islamic campaign to accelerate “the inevitable end of Israel”, a phrase repeatedly used by Iran’s official media. Mr Ahmadinejad has visited more than two dozen Muslim countries to propagate this new anti-Israel strategy.

To underline this new image of Israel, the Tehran propaganda machine has replaced footage of poor Palestinians crushed by “Zionists” with that of the growing arsenal of rockets that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have built up for what President Ahmadinejad calls “the final assault on the Zionist state”. The Jew, previously depicted as aggressive and domineering, is presented as cowardly. The mullahs in Friday sermons in Iran now claim such things as “the Jew runs away at the first sight of blood”.

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