Bogus Iran story in keeping with Next Hitler™ framework

Posted by Joshua Holland at 2:22 PM on May 23, 2006.

A bogus story first appearing in Canada's National Post spread around the world this weekend:

The National Post newspaper quoted human rights groups as saying that Iran's parliament passed a law this week setting a public dress code and requiring non-Muslims to wear special insignia.

Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear a yellow, red or blue strip of cloth, respectively, on the front of their clothes, it said.

But the whole thing was complete bullshit:

IRAN'S only Jewish MP strongly denied reports in a Canadian newspaper overnight that Iran may force non-Muslims to wear coloured badges in public so they can be identified.

"This report is a complete fabrication and is totally false," Maurice Motammed said in Tehran. "It is a lie, and the people who invented it wanted to make political gain" by doing so.

The story was pushed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, whose penchant for backing-up right-wing fabrications has made it -- in my mind -- no longer a credible source.

The guy who wrote the Post article, Amir Taheri, is a writer for, among other pubs, the National Review and Murdoch's New York Post. The National Post retracted the article hours after it was posted to their site, and blamed Taheri for the bad info.

Taheri's pimped repped by Benador Associates, a public relations firm that has all the leading neocon nutcases.

Jim Lobe of IPS wrote the following of Benador (via Sourcewatch):

When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been… But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months.

Benador also reps Judy Miller.

So here we go again, with the same crackpots coming out of the woodwork to make Iran the next Nazi Germany. What remains to be seen is how many suckers there are out there who will fall for the same trick twice.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.