Bijan Nobaveh, a former correspondent for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting at UN headquarters in New York who later became a member of Iran’s parliament, said the Western governments are fairly wary of the revolutionary Iran and have established dozens of media outlets tasked with influencing the attitude of the Iranian people.
“To advance their agenda regarding the communists [Soviet Union], arrogant powers established a radio channel called ‘superior life’. But after the Islamic Revolution, they have created over 100 television and radio channels that publish anti-Islamic Republic content in Persian. This indicates the importance of the Islamic Republic, which is a source of fear for arrogant powers,” he said.
Speaking in a recent meeting on history of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran, Nobaveh said the Western governments have also employed western media giants to fight Iran.
According to my research, over the past 20 years, the three big news agencies of Reuters, AFP and AP have published two million words against the Islamic Republic, most of which were aimed at changing the Iranian peoples’ lifestyle and beliefs, Tasnim News Agency quoted him as saying.
Western Media’s Hypocrisy
The former lawmaker censured the Western-backed media for their hypocritical positions, saying they act to advance the agenda of western governments.
To give an example, Nobaveh drew a comparison between the Western media’s coverage of the Iraqi chemical attacks against Iran and their coverage of suspicious chemical incidents in Syria that western governments blame on the Syrian government.
“[Former Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks, which killed and injured thousands of people, were the gravest war crimes since the end of World War II, but there are no mentions of the attacks in the international media,” he said.
“Why were these outlets silent when forty German firms were providing chemical material to Saddam?” asked Nobaveh, himself a victim of Saddam’s chemical attacks.
Iran says the chemical weapons used by Saddam during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war were provided to the Iraqi regime by Germany and other western countries.
Nobaveh said when it comes to Syria’s chemical incidents, the western media do their best to highlight the incident and persuade the global public opinion into believing the Syrian government was behind the chemical attacks.
Western governments have accused the Syrian government of perpetrating the attacks, and conducted two missile strikes against the Syrian government as a punishment in 2017 and 2018.
Syria, Russia and Iran say the attacks have been fabricated by foreign-backed militants to justify the greater involvement of western powers in the conflict.
