SlatteryPod

If something is said enough times, if you hear it from enough sources, even lies can begin having a “ring of truth” to them.

I read in the New York Times this week that Condoleezza Rice announced that the U.S. was enacting sanctions against Iran. She was quoted as saying that the Iran government was “threatening peace and security” by, among other things, “threatening to wipe Israel off the map”.

Reading that stopped me in my tracks.

I thought to myself, “How could she say something like that? Everyone knows that’s false.”

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad never threatened to “wipe Israel off the map,” this was a terrible and false translation. This is not a new revelation; here’s an article from January describing the absurdity of this:

To claim Ahmadinejad has issued a rallying cry to ethnically cleanse Israel is akin to saying that Churchill wanted to murder all Germans when he stated his desire to crush the Nazis. This is about the demise of a corrupt occupying power, not the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Ms. Rice no doubt knows “wipe Israel off the map” is a powerful piece of propaganda, but surely she must realize that it’s utterly false? How can she continue to perpetuate that myth? And if she doesn’t know that it’s false… how is that possible?! How could a policy maker make intelligent decisions while lacking command of such basic information?

Without a bulwark of basic journalistic skepticism, a lot of garbage can be firmly lodged into the public consciousness. All it takes is a little repetition.