During an interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (7/13/14), NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory made a very familiar–and very misleading–comment about what the “international community” says about Iran’s nuclear program:
So with respect, the international community is divided about a lot of things. They’re actually not divided about one thing. They think Iran is up to no good and wants to build a nuclear weapon. So why not say definitively that you will eliminate the bulk of your capacity, the bulk of your centrifuges, to say to the world: “We really won’t fight. We really won’t build a weapon.”
Iran has consistently told the world that it has no interest in developing a nuclear weapon. As of right now, there is no evidence that they are. But on the broader point of international unity, the fact that Zarif was even on the show meant that someone could challenge this falsehood:
First of all, that’s a different international community. They day I went to a meeting of 5+1 or E-3+3 in New York, they said we represent the international community, and I told them: “I’m just coming to you from chairing a meeting of 120 countries called the Non-Aligned Movement, where Iran has been the chairman and is the chairman. And they support us.” They believe, actually, 180-some members of the NPT believe, and they repeatedly said it in 1990 and in 2010, that countries’ choices of their fuel cycle should be respected.
So it’s not the international community. It’s a few countries that have concerns.
So the good news is that a journalist could be corrected on his false framing of a story. But that doesn’t mean all was well on Meet the Press; Gregory made two confused reference to Iran’s nuclear program (“this question of Iran and its nuclear weapons,” and then later on he referred to “this whole debate about Iran’s nuclear weapons.”)
The show’s roundtable–Republican Rick Santorum, conservative columnist Kim Strassel, Democrat Jennifer Granholm and Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press–were in total agreement. Strassel cheered pressure to continue sanctions on Iran as a “good example of bipartisanship in Congress.” Henderson said Zarif was irrational and that “we don’t need more nuclear states.” Santorum said that “we were in the green room watching your interview and all–Democrats, Republicans–we were all laughing.”
But perhaps the oddest part was that NBC gave time to a factcheck of the Iranian official’s interview:
Jeffrey Goldberg is here now, columnist at Bloomberg View, national correspondent for The Atlantic. And Jeffrey, a lot of our audience may not have heard Foreign Minister Zarif in that kind of detail. What’s the reality check on his views and what he’s saying?
That would be the same Jeffrey Goldberg who famously wrote long pieces for the New Yorker falsely alleging that Iraq had extensive weapons of mass destruction and that the Saddam Hussein was linked to Al-Qaeda (FAIR Blog, 8/12/10). This is the journalist NBC tapped to do a fact check of another country’s nuclear program.
You can’t make this stuff up.
“You can’t make this stuff up.”
The corpress is pretty goddamn good at doing just that, wouldn’t you say?
Thank you, Mr. Hart!
The United States developed nuclear weapons and has been the only country to use them in war.
These shows are rigged every which way and NBC , CNN or FOX are no more neutral than PRAVDA was .. it’s all propaganda and always has been and David Gregory is one of the many shameless propagandist pretending to be a Journalist …..
NBC’s Jihadist Roundtable.
Santorum, as usual, is “a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter …”
Actually, the US is the world, or the main force building the world. Flawed, like Roman, but still the hope for progress in the world – especially when compared to the closest alternatives.
Can anybody point to a specific accomplishment brought about by U S imposition of sanctions? Not just against Iran; anywhere, ever?
I would say that Iran probably noticed how the US destroyed and dismantled two countries that did not threaten the US, namely Iraq and Libya, both of whom had largely given up nascent nuclear weapons programs under international pressure. Those regimes would still be in place today had the US had to reckon with the prospect of a nuclear change. When they backed down from that option, we seized upon that vulnerability..
Iran is, I think, is probably still in technical compliance with the nonproliferation treaties, but has probably accelerated its research to the point that it may know how to assemble a nuclear weapon within a month, should the Iranians feel their national security is threatened.
And the gall of Israel, with its 7 million, just one of one thousand of the 7 billion on earth, to pronounce that it has the right to be the only nuclear power in a neighborhood of 500 million Arabs or Persians, is beyond words. Israel, in 1973, threatened to bring the whole world down with its nuclear-tipped Jericho missiles, relenting only when the US flew in decisive military supplies to halt the Arab offensive. Now, that kind of nuclear blackmail was a real threat to the entire planet. Israel basically told us all that you can’t live in this world if we can’t rule these occupied territories the way we want to rule them. Like Samson, they’d bring down the whole house with them.
George Ball and Dean Rusk were right. Israel is an impediment to US interests. JFK was trying to stop its nuclear program up to the day he died in Dallas.
Iran, on the other hand, is suffering under the yoke of a NATO policy subservient to Israeli interests. In fact, NATO has declared de fact war against Iran by conducting cyber attacks, murdering Iranian nuclear scientists, and encouraging if not financing certain terrorst groups that infiltrate Iran. Some of these group have politicilans like Governor Ed Rendell on their payroll.
And, yes, the coverage of the Ukraine, Iran, Gaza and Israel gets worse and worse. The worse our conduct gets, the shriller the media defense of officialdom, and the less real information the MSM imparts. It’s the same way with the US economy. Well, time to read the next piece.
Thank you, FAIR, for being a voice in this wilderness of impending doom.
Goldberg’s a fake. His expertise on the Middle East goes only so far as his understanding of what Israel wants from the Middle East. He’s a talking head with nothing to say — which is why he’ll keep on talking, because empty pro-Israel platitudes are just what the powers that be want to hear. For a critique of Goldberg’s misunderstandings of Egypt, see http://paper-bird.net/2013/12/25/the-warped-reality-therapy-of-jeffrey-goldberg/
Brux, I think you need a reality check, as you Yanquis say. The idea that “the US is the world [or] still the hope for progress in the world” is dangerous nonsense.