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Iranian Official Declares Iran’s Intent to Acquire Nukes! (Or Not…)

by Feb 28, 2013Articles, Foreign Policy0 comments

Members of the priesthood are more than willing to convince themselves of their own propaganda out of devotion to the state religion.

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My friend Nima Shirazi tweeted:

So I checked it out. Indeed, it is bizarre. Roger L. Simon, the CEO of PJ Media, wrote:

Iranians from Ayatollah Khamenei on down have been insisting for years that their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, but a major Iranian official essentially denied all that today, making clear that Iran’s nuclear intentions are military:

Last week, Reuters reported world powers were planning to offer to ease sanctions barring trade in gold and other precious metals with Iran in return for steps to shut down Fordow [underground uranium enrichment].

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, referred to the reported offer on Sunday and dismissed any idea of a closure, the Iranian Students’ News Agency reported.

“Fordow will never be shut down because … our national duty is to be able to defend our nuclear and vital centers against an enemy threat,” Boroujerdi was quoted as saying by the agency.

“This suggestion (shutting down Fordow) is meant to help the Zionist regime (Israel),” he added.

“Enemy threat?” Unless Boroujerdi is referring to some mysterious Israeli plot to interfere with Iranian cancer treatments, what he is clearly saying is that the purpose of Fordow is to supply material for nuclear weapons.

Most people already suspected this, but the Iranians are evidently no longer bothering to hide it.

Simon was quoting from a Jerusalem Post article, which you can read by following his link. The byline of that article reads, “By HERB KEINON, REUTERS”. Simon was quoting from the Post article verbatim. Continuing from where he left off, it read:

“This suggestion (shutting down Fordow) is meant to help the Zionist regime,” he added.

The United States and its allies are particularly worried about Fordow because Iran is refining uranium there to a fissile concentration of 20 percent, which Iran says it needs for a medical reactor. Twenty percent purity is only a short technical step from weapons-grade uranium.

But now observe — and this goes to Nima’s point — what the original Reuters article said:

“This suggestion (shutting down Fordow) is meant to help the Zionist regime (Israel),” he added.

Israel has threatened to attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to curb its nuclear program, raising fears of a regional war.

The United States and its allies are particularly worried about Fordow because Iran is refining uranium there to a fissile concentration of 20 percent, which Iran says it needs for a medical reactor. Twenty percent purity is only a short technical step from weapons-grade uranium.

Did you notice what was missing from the article as it appeared in the Jerusalem Post? Here again is the part the Post omitted:

Israel has threatened to attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to curb its nuclear program, raising fears of a regional war.

There are three points I wish to make:

One, it is astonishing to me that it is accepted practice that so-called professional journalists may take news wire reports, rewrite them slightly, including by removing sentences that don’t suit them, and then republish them under their own name. How is that not considered plagiarism? Simply including the original source in the byline along with the name of the person who has rewritten the original report does not, it seems to me, make it not plagiarism. This practice should not be tolerated, much less considered totally acceptable and standard practice.

Two, and more directly to the point of this post, and of Nima’s tweet: it is indeed bizarre that Simon could take Boroujerdi’s comments and twist them into a declaration of Iran’s intent to acquire nuclear weapons. It is hard to fathom that Simon was not aware of the fact, when he wrote that, that “Israel has threatened to attack Iran”, regardless of the fact that the Jerusalem Post chose to excise that sentence from the article. And yet, the fact that that sentence was excised makes it plausible that, perhaps, just maybe, Simon is really truly just completely ignorant and honestly totally unaware of the facts of the situation. That he just has his head buried deeply up his ass is a very real possibility that just cannot be completely ruled out.

Three, with so-called “journalism” such as the above constituting the norm, it is little wonder that “99 percent of Americans believe the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is a threat ‘to the vital interests of the United States in the next 10 years,'” according to a recent Gallup poll. It is reminiscent of how 70% of Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks due to the constant propaganda from the government that was uncritically parroted by the mainstream media, by so-called “journalists”, members of the priesthood who are more than willing to convince themselves of their own propaganda out of devotion to the state religion.

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