About fifteen years ago, I participated in some war games about the possibility of an attack on Iran, not unlike what now unfolds. I was on the Iran team. Our goal was to stymie the U.S. and Israeli assault by any means possible, especially given the West’s clear qualitative military edge. We detonated a bomb at a local school and then brought in Iranian film crews to view the carnage. We then sent press releases across the globe announcing a U.S. massacre of Iranian children with a goal to invigorate the progressive left and erode support for any anti-Islamic Republic campaign among centrist diplomats.
The headline that many critics of U.S. power seized upon was an alleged U.S. strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab.
Among the headlines today are stories of precise Western strikes taking out the minister of defense, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s daughter-in-law among other senior officials. But the headline that many critics of U.S. power seized upon was an alleged U.S. strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab.
Certainly, it is possible a bomb went awry; the elementary school is close to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. But, after decades of being deceived by Hezbollah “fauxtography” and “Pallywood” processions in which dead Hamas children get up and run off as soon as the Western cameramen or naïve human rights workers move on, news agencies should think twice about accepting at face value a claim that originated with the Islamic Republic News Agency and Tasnim, a hardline outlet.
As Combat Camera’s Dodge Billingsley, one of the world’s foremost experts of the Chechnya war, noted in lectures to the U.S. military, when Chechen rebels would attack Russian targets, they would always do so with a cameraman in tow. If the cameraman was wounded or killed, they would often abort the mission because spreading the imagery of the attack was often more important than the target itself.
If a U.S. or Israeli bomb did kill Iranian schoolchildren, that is a horrid mistake. But it would be a mistake.
The job of a journalist is not to report the rumor, but to get to the truth. The tendency of journalists to confuse the two or to rush to break unconfirmed news, such as 500 alleged deaths at Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, degrades the respect with which the public views journalists. When journalists or commentators knowingly allow themselves to be tools of propaganda, the issue gets worse. Simply put, there must be serious question marks over any Iranian story unless Western journalists are willing to put equal credence in other Iranian stories about how Zionists manipulated Iranian clouds to prevent rain, that they had created a hand-held coronavirus detection device, and Israel had coerced squirrels to spy on Iran’s nuclear sites, leading to the arrest of fourteen bushy-tailed rodents.
If a U.S. or Israeli bomb did kill Iranian schoolchildren, that is a horrid mistake. But it would be a mistake as opposed to the deliberate slaughter by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij paramilitaries of perhaps 40,000 Iranian protestors. They did not fall on bullets and axes, nor did the regime’s Brown Shirts then go bed-to-bed in hospitals to finish the job by accident. Nor was targeting a tourist hotel in Dubai the case of a missile gone awry.
Journalists may seek to spin tragedy, but they should take care and keep perspective. The simple truth remains: The region and the world will be much safer with Iran’s Islamic Republic eradicated.
