I appeared on Press TV yesterday in a show titled "The Debate" which was anything but. Press TV is the controlled Iranian propaganda press and I suppose they have me on to try and suggest they are balanced in their reporting. Sadly, Press TV usually gets an American paid shill like Ken O'Keefe or Kevin Barrett to appear and back up the propaganda from the Velat-y-Faqih regime.
Yesterday Press TV brought in one of their news anchors. It's important that viewers of the show understand this is a man who is paid by a dictatorship to spin things for the dictatorship. As usual, the show was biased, but this time more so than usual; I was continually interrupted and had my comments spoken over by the Press TV flack and the "moderator" only encouraged this. When I attempted to address inaccuracies from the other side, the moderator would quickly move on to spread more propaganda.
The Iranians want the West to think they are a peaceful, humanitarian regime concerned merely with developing nuclear energy. They are in fact a repetition of what the Nazis were at the start of World War II. The issue of poison gas chemicals being used in Syria is a watershed moment in the confrontation with Iran by the United States.
My Iranian opponent did the classical bluff and bluster of tyrant regimes: The proof that Assad gassed his own people in a neighborhood of Damascus
(one that had been overrun by the Free Syrian Army) where 1,400 people including children were killed was dubbed a "false flag." In other words, any time the Iranians do something to promote nuclear proliferation it's America's fault. At the conclusion of the show when I pointed out some deficiencies in my opponent's argument he went to the standard staple of blaming it all on the Jews (Israel).
I have to admit the Iranian flack was good at propaganda. He smirked and laughed and shrugged his shoulders as I spoke. On the issue of French support for the US planned strike he suggested the French government was opposed to the planned attack when the opposite is true. The host, tried to imply my comments about Iranian human rights violations (well- known)
were somehow countered by statistics (unproven) that allegedly over 500 Americans died by being tasered by police last year. The nonsense is that the US has 300 million citizens and tasers are used as an alternative to shooting victims and usually save lives. Of course, the host didn't let me point out that when Iranians were protesting for democracy the regime brought in Palestinian and Hezbollah thugs to attack the demonstrators in the street. Everyone remembers the young woman bleeding to death in the street at one demo. Then there's the matter of public executions of homosexuals in Iran. My opponent saw nothing wrong with this.
My opponent then regaled America for dropping the Bomb on the Japanese in world war 2 "killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese." My late uncle had completed 35 bombing missions over Germany and was sweating bullets because he was being resent to continue bombing over Japan. Intelligence estimates back then predicted if the US had to invade the Japanese mainland it would be one million American casualties and an equal number of Japanese. Incidentally, the US didn't know for certain the Bombs would work and they had only two. The one dropped on Hisroshima
did not elicit surrender from Japan. The second on Nagasaki did because the Emperor Hirohito figured out such a weapon could reach him personally.
Few people know that after Hirohito submitted his surrender, the Japanese military tried to stage a coup to keep the war going that was put down by Hirohito's personal bodyguard. Despite all the murders by Japanese regime, Hirohito was allowed to remain as Emperor (part of the peace agreement Japan offered) and he lived into his eighties as such. His contemporary in Germany committed suicide. Iran while all this was happening was a Nazi ally and satellite during the war.
The Iranian newscaster tried to suggest the US used chemical weapons in Vietnam citing Agent Orange. Agent Orange was a defoliant to reduce the jungle canopy that was hiding NVA and Viet Cong troops. At the time it was not considered an anti-personnel weapon. True, twenty years later our own veterans were showing ill effects from the chemical. But it was never a chemical attack on the enemy.
President Obama is not a hawk. Even he has established the need to take action against Syria and Hezbollah as Iranian proxies using chemical weapons. If the Assad regime stays in power and the US doesn't stop this, it will send a clear message to Iran they can keep on using such weapons against the West and the West will be trapped by its own inertia. The Iranians talk of America being swallowed up in a black hole if the US takes action. I'm reminded of Saddam Hussein's The Mother of All Battles and how Iraq would devastate US forces. The Iraqis fought a stalemate war with the Iranians that neither side could win after 8 years. The Iranians sent thousands of young boys against Iraqi machine guns with plastic keys made in Hong Kong as their entry to Paradise for the Ayatollahs. The US military years later went through the Iraqi military in only six weeks. In the event of an inevitable showdown with Iran the result will be the same and the Iranians know this--unless they get the bomb and can use chemical weapons.
This is the reality of dealing with a dictatorship...
You can see the "debate" on Press TV Sept. 5th here:
http://www.presstv.ir/Program/322373.html
