“I Hate All Iranians” | Why Americans Really Have No Idea What’s Happening In Our Own Country.

For the past two weeks, PBS has been airing Ken Burns’ recent work, “The War”, a seven-part series about the Second World War. Watching it brought me back to my old high school history classes. (We called them ‘Social Studies’ classes back in the late ’70s.) One phrase that came to mind was, “loose lips sink ships”, a reference that, in World War Two, meant, watch what you say, the enemy might be listening. I also remembered learning about the events that lead up to the start of the First World War. As we all know, an activist student assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. One isolated event which led to another, and soon the entire world was at war.

Last month, on September 11th, no-less, during a visit to the Pentagon by six British Members of Parliament, Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Coalition and Multinational Operations to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and a close advisor to president Bush, said to the group of visitors, “I hate all Iranians.”

But you probably knew this already. No? Of course not. Ms. Cagan’s comment was as strong an indicator of this administration’s culture and mindset as was Sara Taylor’s “oath to the president,” and was widely publicized in other countries. Little attention, however, was paid to it within our own country. ‘The Mail on Sunday’, the London-based edition of “The Daily Mail,” a well-known U.K. tabloid newspaper comparable to Austrailian-born media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, ran the story, “I hate all Iranians, US aide tells MPs” last month. Comments to The Mail’s story, from readers across Great Britain, included, “How irresponsible”, “Incredible to think that these people are allies of ours”, “This woman should be fired immediately”, and “saying something like ”I hate all Iranians“ hardly makes her sound highly intelligent and well balanced. She probably seems like a genius to George W Bush, however”.

The Washington Post was the only major American newspaper to mention the story. Even then, the story was delivered only in the final two paragraphs of a report titled, “An Iranian University Invites Bush to Speak.” MSNBC’s ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann‘ was the only mainstream cable news network to report the story.

The New York Times did not report Ms. Cagan’s comments. The story was reported by news organizations in Italy, Canada, the Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, and Germany, according to a recent Google search. Even the blogosphere did not pay much attention to the story. Perhaps the best-know of the anti Bush administration blogs, Daily Kos, did not even make mention of Ms. Cagen’s remarks. A Google Blog Search did produce over four hundred references to Ms. Cagan, including a piece in ‘From the Left‘, a top-ranked political blog.

In an era when newspapers across the country are reporting large decreases in their own ad revenue, and are losing readership to the Internet, when broadcast and cable news networks seem to repeat and re-broadcast the same stories over and over again (leave CNN or MSNBC on for a few hours,) when we have both the executive and legislative branches with the lowest approval ratings in recent memory, when our military is stretched and overworked, and when few, in this country or around the globe, want us to continue to fight the war in Iraq, much less start a new one, it is appalling to see the fourth estate behave in exactly the same manner they did after 9/11, with their heads in the sand, reporting what the White House wants them to, and ignoring what they don’t.

Well, the enemy is listening. They hear this administration loud and clear. They see our Vice President standing on a battleship, just outside their territorial waters, condemning them. They see our President, already consumed by hate, fighting a war we cannot win, against an enemy we cannot know, and using America’s airwaves to inflict his fear-mongering brand of the war on terrorism onto America’s citizens and international allies. They hear our Senators and Congressmen buckling to the administration, again handing the President the key to another war, by voting to call Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization.” The “enemy” is listening. The American media, and, thusly, the American people, unfortunately, are not.

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