‘US sanctions campaign may close Iran’s antisemitic news outlets’
The American maximum sanctions pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran may lead to the closure of a number of foreign Iranian news outlets involved in spreading antisemitism and the use of torture against a former Newsweek journalist.
“US ‘maximum pressure’ vs Iran’s dictatorship is a great success,” tweeted prominent American scholar of Islam Daniel Pipes on Thursday. “For example, the head of its media service announced that @PressTV (its English news channel) & @AlAlam_channel (same in Arabic) will be ‘taken off the air in the days or weeks to come.’”
The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting director’s Peyman Jebelli told the Iranian regime-controlled Iranian Labour News Agency that “we expect our major networks, such as PressTV, Al-Alam... and Arabic iFilm, to be removed from satellite in the coming days and weeks. It is not clear to me why and with what reasoning this negligence and negligence takes place.”
PressTV played a role in the torture of the then-Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari during the 2009 Green Movement protests against an alleged fraudulent presidential election in Iran.
PressTV posted an article in 2008 that denied the Holocaust. The Jerusalem Post reported at the time that the massacre of Jewish people during the Holocaust was “scientifically impossible,” according to a PressTV article.
The Middle East Media Research Institute translated a November 2012 interview from Al-Alam TV with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Deputy Secretary-General Ziyad Nakhala. He declared: “We are on the brink of a great victory, Allah willing. This is a new stage in the conflict with the Zionist enterprise.” The Iranian regime-backed PIJ is a US-designated terrorist entity.
The US sanctions campaign against Iran’s clerical regime seeks the end of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and its terrorism activities across the globe.
In 2015, the Anti-Defamation League wrote, “PressTV, Iran’s government-run English-language news network, continues to provide a platform for American antisemites to spread hateful conspiracy theories, starting in 2015 with news reports that Jews are behind all that is wrong with the world.” Such examples included reports that “Jews and/or Israel were behind the attack at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, the creation of ISIS, the 2011 attacks in Norway that left 77 people dead and the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” the ADL added.
The ADL noted in its report, “PressTV is the Iranian government’s primary English-language propaganda tool, promoting a wide range of pernicious antisemitic conspiracy theories as ‘news’ to a worldwide audience.”
According to the ADL, “Kevin Barrett, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist and frequent PressTV contributor, stated on January 20, 2015, in a piece titled ‘Zionist NWO murders Iranian general, American filmmaker’ that ‘the Zionists created ISIL and sent it to fight Muslims and Christians in Syria and Iraq... New World Order Zionism is also targeting the USA for destruction.’”
Iranian foreign news services present fiercely anti-Western views and their news stories frequently provide no evidence for claims.