‘IRAN TALKS’: WHY DON’T AMERICANS LISTEN?
Shannon Bell Monitor Staff Writer
Los Alamos Monitor, NM
July 20 2007
Iran’s biggest problem may not be politics or the global oil
competition. It could be Paris Hilton.
"Corporate media is dumbing-down the population," said National
Public Radio talk-show host David Barsamian during his talk at UNM-LA
Thursday night.
The author is on tour discussing his latest book, "Targeting Iran,"
a collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky, Ervand Abrahamian and
Nahid Mozaffari that examine the rise of the Islamic regime and Iran’s
relationships with the U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan.
The T-shirt and shorts-clad Barsamian considered reasons why Paris
Hilton’s prison adventure is more newsworthy to Americans than Iran,
and linked the nation’s misperceptions of relevancy and reality to
the causes of the U.S. predicament in the Middle East.
Popular culture is a clue to what’s on people’s minds, he said, and
wondered about a world where sports fans apply the same analytical
vigor to Iran as they do to NFL draftees’ knee conditions.
He described the pawns of corporate media as "lapdogs with laptops,"
singling out Woodward, Bernstein and Connie Chung as journalists who
have become celebrities themselves, sucked in by the very establishment
they use to monitor.
The vocabulary and visual portrayals that the media and U.S. policy
makers use in reference to the Middle East further serve to cloud
American public opinion, he said, as he held up issues of Time and
Newsweek bearing covers of Middle Easterners with ever-scowling faces.
"Use of language shapes and frames the debate," he said. "When they
say ‘collateral damage,’ why can’t they say what they really mean?
‘Civilians were killed.’"
For Barsamian, the government not only has it all wrong, but President
Bush and his administration are committing war crimes.
"The U.S. is ruled by warlords," he said, adding that Iran isn’t a
danger to America; America is a danger to Iran.
"They don’t hate us for our values and freedom," he said, but because
we occupy their country, kill their innocent and take their most prized
resource, oil, with imperial entitlement. "This is what creates the
resistance and deep loathing of the U.S."
America’s ventures in Iran are no accident, he said. They’re "by
design of the U.S. foreign policy."
Amnesia has plagued the nation’s government officials since the 1950s,
Barsamian said, when they failed to listen to President Eisenhower’s
warnings of the dangers of a military industrial complex. Barsamian
insisted that while the term "imperialism" remains on the "no-no"
list of government vocabulary, the world is undeniably dominated by
American culture and power.
The author suggested that Americans remove the veil of corporate
media and "connect."
"One rock in the water can cause many ripples," he said, and displayed
T-shirts of New Mexico anti-conflict groups like Albuquerque’s Stop
the War Machine and N.M. Peace Action in Santa Fe.
"Democracy is in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit)," he said, calling
for citizen activism to breathe new life into government.
After the talk, the self-proclaimed "Armenian from New York who has
to make deals" plugged his merchandise, offering discounts and signed
copies of his books.