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Jewish World Review August 8, 2002 / 30 Menachem-Av, 5762
Michael Ledeen
Can You Keep a Secret?: The media silence on Iran
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
When I first came to Washington I met what I took for a hopelessly cynical man who asked me to define
a secret. I stumbled, and he said that a secret was when you called a press conference and nobody
reported what you said.
Apparently the media of the entire Western world have applied this standard to the dramatic events in Iran,
because on Monday massive demonstrations were held in the country's major cities, from Tehran to Isfahan,
Tabriz, Mashad, and others. The regime responded with unprecedented violence. There was widespread
street fighting. More than 1,000 people were arrested. Several were apparently killed. Even late on Tuesday
conflicts were ongoing in Khorassan, and not a single word appeared in a major Western publication, or on
the news wires, or on any television broadcast of which I am aware.
So we have a new historical phenomenon: an invisible, unknown, and therefore secret revolution is under
way in Iran.
And the question for the media is the following: Why do you refuse to report these events? For it is really
hard to imagine that this information - which was not hard to obtain and to verify - is unknown to the
Washington Post and Times, the New York Post and Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the major
networks and the cable-news channels.
It rather reminds one of the days of the Cultural Revolution in China, or the immediate postwar period in
Cambodia, when millions of people were killed and the West ignored the story. It was not that there were no
journalists or others who knew what was going on; they simply refused to tell the story, for a variety of
reasons. Some refused because they knew they'd be expelled - or worse - if they wrote the truth. Others
refused because they sympathized with the regime and didn't want to give intellectual weapons to the
regime's critics. Still others yielded to peer pressure, like the television "reporters" who apologized to Arafat
when one lone Italian network broadcast the film of the Palestinian slaughter of two Israelis whose only crime
was to have taken a wrong turn.
Iran is the mother of all terrorism, and the fall of the mullahs would be a major turning point in the modern
history of the Middle East. If the details of the regime's desperate and savage struggle for survival were
reported accurately and quickly, the West might yet rediscover its conscience and join with President Bush in
declaring the regime an international pariah, thereby accelerating its demise.
If ever there were a story that warranted intense coverage, it is this one. If ever "the people's right to know"
were at stake, it is here and now. Instead we have silence.
Why?
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JWR contributor Michael Ledeen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of, most recently, The
War Against the Terror Masters. Comment by clicking here.
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03/26/02: The Revolution Continues: What's brewing in Iran
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03/05/02: We can't lose any more ground in Iran
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02/12/02: Unnoticed Bombshell: Key information in a new book
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01/21/02: It's Munich, all over again
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10/11/01: Somehow, I've missed Arafat's praise of the first stage of our war on terrorism
10/04/01: What do we not know?
09/28/01: Machiavelli On Our War: Some advice for our leaders
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08/15/01: Bracing for war
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07/31/01: Consulting a legendary counterspy about Chandra and Condit, cont'd
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07/05/01: Let Slobo Go
05/30/01: Anybody out there afraid of the Republicans?
05/09/01: The bad guys to the rescue
05/07/01: Bye-bye, Blumenthal
04/20/01: Handling China
04/11/01: EXAM TIME!
04/05/01: Chinese over-water torture
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03/14/01: Big Bird, Oscar, and other threats
03/09/01: Time for a good, old-fashioned purge
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02/26/01: The Clinton Sopranos
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01/30/01: The Rest of the Rich Story
01/22/01: Ashcroft the Jew
01/11/01: A fitting close to the Clinton years
12/26/00: Continuing Clinton's shameful legacy
12/21/00: Clinton’s gift for Bush
© 2001, Michael Ledeen
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