Journalists turn blind eye to Iran’s intent
As more people get their news from social media, it is no surprise experienced journalists and academics have sided with Iran against Israel’s Operation Rising Lion launched on June 13.
No surprise either that news the US had dropped bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites, including the nuclear facility under a mountain in Fordow, also came on social media when Donald Trump announced it on Truth Social.
Trump hit Iran’s facilities at Natanz and Isfahan as well.
Despite all the hand-wringing on our ABC by journalists such as Raf Epstein on Insiders on Sunday morning, Trump did the right thing.
Iran, once a thriving country with thousands of years of proud Persian heritage, is led by fanatical clerics who hate women, reject the democratic West, publicly advocate for the destruction of Israel and openly support Adolf Hitler and his Final Solution.
People tut-tutting on social media about Israel’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and rocket launchers seem to misunderstand the Iranian regime. They believe tiny Israel with only nine million people in a country one-tenth the size of Victoria is bullying a country of 90 million people in a land a third the size of Australia.
They discount attacks on Israeli civilians by Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis – over the past two decades and ignore 40 years of public statements by Iranian leaders promising to “drive Israel into the sea”.
Keyboard warriors who are trying to speak truth to power should ask why a country with huge oil and gas reserves languished with a national annual GDP of only $600bn in 2023, compared with little Israel’s $770bn. Australia’s stands at $2.7 trillion.
They could also ask why Israel has an early warning missile alert system but Ayatollah Khamenei has spent nothing to warn his people of attack. Yet he has found tens of billions each year to arm his proxies to keep attacking Israel.
Sceptics of this line could start by reading Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian academic imprisoned in Iran from 2018-20, in The Australian Financial Review last Wednesday, or tracking down her interview on ABC Radio National last Tuesday. She described the repression in 2023 of Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom movement that received no support from local Hamas backers such as academic Randa Abdel-Fattah.
To get a good idea what the most displaced people in the region think about the attack on Iran, The Free Press sent reporters to ask residents of places long part of Iran’s axis of resistance: Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
The Gazans quoted blamed Iran for the damage inflicted on their home since October 7, 2023.
In Lebanon, “still reeling from the months-long clashes between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, most residents we interviewed wanted nothing to do with further escalation”.
The heaviest criticism came from Syrians, victims of now deposed Bashar al-Assad, long propped up by Iran. “Praise be to God, we hope this gangster regime ends,” one Syrian is quoted as saying.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has virtually admitted he has two goals. Only those ignorant of Iran’s history would criticise Israel for wanting regime change. But as Netanyahu said on Friday, it is up to Iran’s people.
Left-wing commentators in Australia have cast doubt on Israel’s second goal – destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They liken it to Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”.
Regular Nine newspapers pro-Islam scholar Amin Saikal was rolled out in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on Friday to argue Israel has nuclear weapons and is hypocritical about Iran’s desire for them. Yet Israel has never used them. Israelis feel sure Iran would.
While doubt remains inside the US intelligence community about how close Iran is to weaponising its enriched uranium, sceptics need to read what the UN’s nuclear watchdog has said and ask why Iran has been enriching so much uranium to 60 per cent when only 3 per cent enrichment is needed for power generation.
David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, is no right-wing warrior – he has criticised Israel’s Gaza strategy and has superb political, intelligence and military sources.
He told Times of Israel readers on June 18 his sources believe Iran is closer to a bomb than Netanyahu has publicly admitted.
It’s also worth just looking at what Iranian politicians themselves have said.
MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, on May 15, 2024, quoted Iranian politician and academic Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani speaking to Iran’s Roydad 24 News.
He claimed Iran had already achieved nuclear weapons but was not announcing this “so as not to frighten its allies Russia and China, or the world”.
MEMRI on October 16 last year quoted an interview with Jaber Rajabi, a former adviser to the late president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“Iran is afraid to conduct a nuclear test. It is trying to find a place to test the nuclear weapons outside Iran’s borders,” Mr Rajabi said.
There is no hard evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon. Its cat-and-mouse game with the International Atomic Energy Agency may indeed be a strategy to make its enemies think it is. Yet enriching uranium to 60 per cent would be a very expensive ploy if a bomb was not being planned.
The IAEA censure of Iran the day before Israel launched its June 13 attack is explicit: Iran has enough enriched uranium now to make nine bombs.
Consider, too, the words of the Ayatollah and those closest to him.
On March 21, one of the Supreme Leader’s closest confidants, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, denied the Holocaust, saying: “All the stories about the Holocaust are a complete lie. England invented the Holocaust to compensate the Jews.”
Khamenei himself, celebrating Iranian rocket strikes on Israel on October 1 last year, said that “every blow to the Zionist regime serves humanity”.
“The Al Aqsa flood operation (Hamas’s October 7 attack in 2023) … was a correct and logical move, carried out in accordance with international law and the rights of the Palestinian nation,” he said.
That’s how Iran’s supreme religious leader sees a massacre of 1200 innocents in their homes and at a dance party for peace.
Reza Taghavi, a former member of Iran’s parliament and now a member of a committee that sets guidelines for Friday sermons across the nation, told IRINN Television on October 24 last year that German chancellor Adolf Hitler’s approach to the Jews was right. Zionists “must be persecuted, deported and killed everywhere”, he said.
A 2021 study by the US Jewish Anti-Defamation League found the Iranian senior, middle and elementary school curriculums full of “incitement to hatred of Jews and Israel” that “strenuously militarises young people, indoctrinating them for war’’.
Reporting of this conflict has been skewed by media hostility to President Trump. Yet Israeli sources make clear they believed there were other ways to destroy Fordow.
The US has seen through 20 years of failed diplomacy on Iran. Most Sunni Middle East states will privately approve.
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