Are the Protests in Iran Getting Hijacked?

By Jasmin Ramsey, PULSE. Posted June 18, 2009.

In the midst of all this there are people who are taking an analytical approach to events as they unfold, though they are hardly receiving the same amount of attention as the those who are blasting out updates (confirmed or not) from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, even well-respected mainstream news outlets are turning to sites like Twitter as a source of updates and while the Obama Administration has so far been treading lightly in response to questions about the Iranian elections, they have also directly communicated with Twitter, asking them to hold off on previously scheduled maintenance so as to not disrupt the flow of messages believed to be coming out of Iran. Similarly, on their official blog YouTube boasts about how they have become a “global forum for free expression” and are doing their “best to leave as many of [the videos] up” as possible.  This is of course particularly ironic considering how Max Blumenthal’s video “Feeling the hate in Jerusalem,” which does not contain any violence, was just recently removed by YouTube on the grounds of “inappropriate content.”

Fortunately, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has attempted to provide a bigger picture on the events of Iran:

I’m going to leave the debate about whether Iran’s election was “stolen” and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they’re talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge).  But there is one point I want to make about the vocal and dramatic expressions of solidarity with Iranians issuing from some quarters in the U.S.

Greenwald proceeds to discuss how

[m]uch of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com also goes beyond the election debate to argue that regardless of whether the accusations of fraud are true, Iran is a sovereign nation and must be treated as such by foreign parties:

Yet even if that were not the case -- even if our democratic procedures were flawless – that still wouldn’t give the U.S. government any standing to pass judgment, because how Iran conducts its presidential elections is not a legitimate concern of the U.S. government. The idea that the occupant of the Oval Office must pass moral judgment on all events, including other countries’ elections, is a byproduct of America’s imperial pretensions and delusions of “world leadership.”

Abbas Barzegar of The Guardian further builds on this notion that both Greenwald and Raimondo allude to, that the lack of unbiased, fact and context based reporting on Iran seems to be a historical constant which will only continue to prove harmful:

As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting.

While Barzegar asserts that this is “hardly a new phenomenon,” he ends with cautionary advice that many in the West would have problems accepting:

See more stories tagged with: iran, youtube, twitter, glenn greenwald, mahmoud ahmadinejad, iran election, mir-houssein mousavi, irshad manji, justin raimondo, abbas barzegar, joshua kucera

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