It does not date back to the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's 2005 presidential election, neither to the era of reformist President Mohammad Khatami in which Iran officially embarked on its nuclear program, but to the victory of Islamic Revolution three decades ago that the acrimony and animosity of the Western world against Iran began to emerge and take shape…
Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution which drew an end to the monarchy of the U.S.-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and established a new political system on the basis of popular participation of the nation in determining its destiny drastically transformed the political equations of the world and rendered void the plots the major superpowers had planned for the Middle East.
The newly-born Iran the ideological foundation of which was based on confronting the imperialistic powers and defending the oppressed, subjugated nations revitalized hopes for a new world order which the international community hadn't experienced before: an equal right for every single nation to determine its political future without being pressured by the Western powers.
The anti-Western rhetoric of the Islamic Republic during the past decades has been quite disconcerting and disturbing for the United States and its European friends. Shortly after the victory of Islamic Revolution, the United States which had recognized that Iran is going to be an uncompromising and irreconcilable player in the region, mobilized its stalwart ally, Iraq, and its ruling dictator Saddam Hussein, to dilapidate the fruit of the newly-born revolution. The Baathist Iraq, with direct the help of several European and Arab nations, all of which were the close allies of the United States, imposed an eight-year war on Iran which claimed the lives of more than 400,000 Iranians and caused irreparable damages to the country's infrastructure.
As a counterbalance to the post-revolutionary Iran, the United States supported Iraq with several billion dollars worth of economic aid, the sale of dual-use technology, non-U.S. origin weaponry, military intelligence and Special Operations training.
A September 23, 2002 article by Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas in Newsweek straightforwardly pointed out what happened behind the scenes and what made the United States take the side of the most brutal and bloodthirsty dictator of its time in war with Iran. Although it might be a long quotation, but it is worth reading: "Like most foreign-policy insiders, [Ronald Reagan's then-special envoy to the Middle East Donald] Rumsfeld was aware that Saddam was a murderous thug who supported terrorists and was trying to build a nuclear weapon. But at the time, America's big worry was Iran, not Iraq. The Reagan administration feared that the Iranian revolutionaries who had overthrown the shah (and taken hostage American diplomats for 444 days in 1979-81) would overrun the Middle East and its vital oilfields. On the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Reaganites were seeking to support Iraq in a long and bloody war against Iran. The meeting between Rumsfeld and Saddam was consequential: for the next five years, until Iran finally capitulated, the United States backed Saddam's armies with military intelligence, economic aid and covert supplies of munitions."
So, the United States intentionally did what it knew was immoral: backing an all-out butcher whose entertainment was to kill the innocent civilians.
I don't want to go deep into the details of the backing and support which the United States and its European allies offered to Saddam Hussein in war with Iran, because it's a time-consuming and elaborate discussion; however, the point which I'm going to allude to is that almost 20 years after the conclusion of that unequal and unjustifiable war which sowed the seeds of hatred towards the United States in the hearts of Iranian people, the anti-Iranian war is still underway, but simply in a different style and manner.
It's true that the United States shipped 60 defending helicopters to Iraq in December 1982 on the third year of war with Iran; It's true that with the patronage and supervision of the United States, the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro of Italy and its Branch in Atlanta funneled $5 billion in unreported loans to Iraq for the purchase of computers, scientific instruments, special alloy steel and aluminum, chemicals, and other industrial goods needed for Iraq's missile, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs; it's true that in December 1983, the Reagan Administration secretly allowed Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to transfer United States weapons, including Howitzers, Huey helicopters, and bombs to Iraq to be used against the Iranian people; it's true that in May 19866, the U.S. Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax which were dropped on the heads of the innocent Iranian women and children; it's true that in December 1988 and in the ending years of the war with Iran, Dow chemical sold $1.5 million in pesticides to Iraq despite knowledge that these would be used in chemical weapons in war with Iran. The complicity of the United States and its European allies in the massacre of the Iranian nation by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein is true. But that hard war hasn't come to an end yet. It's continuing in a new fashion and style: a media propaganda war!
It's almost implausible to trace out who first set off the media war against Iran, because since the very establishment of Islamic Republic, an unstoppable wave of black propaganda by the Western media began to encompass Iran; however, it's quite easy to assert that today, many people in the world are contributing to this war!
The Western mainstream media, mostly funded and run by well-off Zionists, have their own agenda for soft war with Iran…Frequent reference to the November 1979 hostage crisis which has always provoked anti-Iranian sentiments among the American people, introducing the people of Iran as terrorists, extremists and conflating them with Arabs – while everyone who has read a single page of history and geography knows that Iranians are Persians and not Arabs, presenting Iran's nuclear program as a quest for the development of atomic bombs, accusing Iran of sponsoring international terrorism and degrading Iranians as an uncivilized and uncultured nation are the tactics which the mainstream media, from BBC, CNN and Fox News to Washington Post and New York Times conventionally employ in order to demonize Iran and the Iranians and put a distorted image of them before the eyes of the public opinion.
These state-run media which work under the disguise of independent entities, know well how to irritate the Iranian people and vilify them. They know which tactics are more effective in psychological operation against Iran. A simple example is the distortion of Persian Gulf's name. They know that Persian Gulf's name is representative of Iran's cultural and historical identity and its dominance as a regional superpower. This body of water has been called Persian Gulf for more than two millenniums; so the best tactic to undermine this magnificent identity is to distort its name and replace it with a controversial term: "Arabian Gulf!"
The other propaganda tactic is to draw Iran into an artificial conflict with Israel, the ideological ghetto of the West, and pretend that Iran wants to destroy Israel and wipe it off the world map! This pretension lays the groundwork for a massive psychological operation against Iran which consists of continuously warning Iran against a preemptive attack either by Israel or the United States which. An attack which would be allegedly aimed at preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons which are needed for vanishing Israel from the pages of the history!
The Western world's anti-Iranian bias, whether in the mass media or in the public sphere seems to be inhumanely endless: "According to the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), nearly half of Iranian Americans surveyed in 2008 by Zogby International have themselves experienced or personally know another Iranian American who has experienced discrimination because of their ethnicity or country of origin. The most common types of discrimination reported are airport security, social discrimination, employment or business discrimination, racial profiling and discrimination at the hands of immigration officials."
Western media's distorted portrayal of the Iran and the aggressive stance these media have taken with regards to the Iranian people leaves no doubt that the hostility of the West towards Iran have its roots deep in the history of Islamic Revolution and is not simply confined to the nuclear controversy. Who knows; maybe one day a conscientious journalist or media correspondent from the West, tell the world about the concealed realities of Iran, a nation whose 2,500-year-old civilization is matchless and unparalleled in the history.
