The Iranian Presidential election, judging by the reaction of the mainstream media across America and Europe, appears to be an open and shut case with the victory of incumbent President Ahmadinejad being widely denounced as a fraud. I have no intention of wading into that debate as only time will tell what really happened in Iran. However, the quality of western reporting on the election has undoubtedly been a major cause for concern.
In America, the New York Times declared the result a massive shock after “unofficial” polls had given Ahmadinejad’s closest rival Mir-Hossein Moussavi a clear lead. In the UK, the Financial Times railed that the “election bears all the hallmarks of a stolen vote” with Germany’s Die Welt adding that: "it seems their real leaders decided that 95 percent control was not enough – they wanted it all".
This has placed western leaders, eager to avoid destroying tentative hopes of detente with Iran, under enormous pressure to condemn the very regime with whom they are seeking to build a relationship. U.S President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, wary of their countries’ past involvement in Iran, have wisely refrained from doing so. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, however, have openly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the result.
To be sure, accurate facts and figures in a world of 24 hour news and instant reaction are often hard to come by even at the best of times. Nevertheless, journalists have to write something and with little time to check their sources, they often resort to hearsay.
The unofficial polls cited by the New York Times and various other publications are a good example of this. Iran has no system for conducting independent polls of its people and the most reliable western poll was carried out three weeks before the election. As a result, the press, eager to be seen as the most authoritative source of public information, took to reporting speculation as news.
The effect of this was to create a narrative, widely accepted by many as fact, that a victory for Moussavi, was a near certainty. So, when the election was called for President Ahmadinejad, the media leapt on opposition claims of widespread fraud as this appeared to fit the story best.
That one reliable poll, however, carried out by American think tank ‘Terror Free Tomorrow’ who published their findings and methodology in full, gave President Ahmadinejad a clear lead of over 2:1. While almost a third of those surveyed had not yet decided who to vote for, an extrapolation of the likely result based on their answers to the remainder of the survey, according to foreign policy blog ‘Just Foreign Policy’, forecast Ahmadinejad winning at least 57% of the popular vote.
The coverage of the protests themselves, however, represents perhaps the most serious manipulation of information by the media. According to former CIA operative and Middle East expert, Robert Baer, the protests have so far been confined to northern Tehran where Mr Moussavi’s most avid supporters reside. Yet they have been depicted by the press as the tipping point of a popular revolution.
Baer claims that “for too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class — an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press...” Undoubtedly, the Iranian regime has not helped itself though by restricting the movements of journalists, thereby increasing their dependence on the highly one-sided versions of events presented by Tehran’s ‘twitterers’. Moreover, its heavy handed response towards protesters has made it look more like an angry dictatorship than anything close to a democracy.
At the time of writing, Barack Obama has stepped up his criticisms of the Iranian regime following the tragic death of 26 year old student, Neda Soltani. The media, now more than ever have a responsibility to resist the urge to make a bad situation even worse just for the chance to score a prize scoop. The real danger, however, is that instead their willingness to pass off rumours and guesswork as news may end up reaffirming Iranian suspicions of western meddling and fuelling their determination to develop their own nuclear deterrent in response.
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Euro-sceptics pose a bigger threat to Britain than BNP
Written for the-vibe.co.uk
Last Sunday, a day after the free world celebrated the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Fascism, the British National Party won its first seats in the European Parliament. While the thought of Nick Griffin representing Britain in Brussels is admittedly horrifying, I found the Queen’s absence from the D-Day celebrations the day before far more disconcerting.
I take comfort in knowing that actually winning two seats in the European Parliament is just about the worst thing that could have happened to the BNP. Denied the freedom of being the in vogue black sheep of British politics (pardon the irony) and constrained by the responsibilities of office and the realities of accountability, their base incompetence and sheer racism will undoubtedly prove their undoing.
Britain’s remaining euro-sceptics, on the other hand, have a simple message. Led by the Conservative party, they say that close ties with the European Union will erode Britain’s sovereignty and undermine the national interest. As a result they have shunned the European People’s Party (EPP), the parliamentary grouping in which most centre-right MEPs sit, on the grounds that it is not euro-sceptic enough.
It is ultimately their overwhelming success in the European elections that will prove far more damaging to Britain’s standing in the world and harder to undo. Their approach to Europe threatens to widen the divide that underlined French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s snub of the Queen last weekend. He saw the D-Day celebrations as a Franco-American occasion. Gordon Brown was only there because he begged for an invitation and Prince Charles had to rely on American diplomacy for his ticket.
This unfortunate episode was symptomatic of a recent shift in global power that has seen France, led by its most pro-American President in years, become the new ‘special friend’ of the United States leaving the United Kingdom sidelined and irrelevant. Indeed, during Barack Obama’s first trip to Europe as President, he singled out as priorities of the transatlantic relationship, European integration and rapprochement with France, whom he hailed as America’s “oldest ally, our first ally”.
The reason for this shift is simple. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught America that there are limits to what they can do alone. So, they have sought to repair their relations with Europe. However, as the EU lacks a single foreign policy, a single partner who can maximise American influence in Europe is needed. This was traditionally a role played by the UK, but the Iraq war and the rise of euro-scepticism have since allowed France to take over.
It is true that many European countries, including France and Germany, leaned to the right in last week’s elections, albeit for mostly domestic reasons. However, there is no question over their commitment to the European project of ever-closer integration. While the policy of the UK Conservatives towards Europe though is predictably hazy, their intentions have been made clear by leader David Cameron’s appeasement of the Euro-sceptic wing of his party.
Along with withdrawing his party from the EPP and calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Cameron recently even described the EU as “completely unaccountable to the people of Britain.” During that same speech he also blamed the electorate’s disillusionment with politics on the EU and promised to negotiate the return of powers to Britain.
One can only hope that such promises were designed merely to outmanouver UKIP at the European elections and that in the event of a Conservative victory at the next general election, now a near certainty, he will take a more sensible approach advancing the national interest.
Last Sunday, a day after the free world celebrated the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Fascism, the British National Party won its first seats in the European Parliament. While the thought of Nick Griffin representing Britain in Brussels is admittedly horrifying, I found the Queen’s absence from the D-Day celebrations the day before far more disconcerting.
I take comfort in knowing that actually winning two seats in the European Parliament is just about the worst thing that could have happened to the BNP. Denied the freedom of being the in vogue black sheep of British politics (pardon the irony) and constrained by the responsibilities of office and the realities of accountability, their base incompetence and sheer racism will undoubtedly prove their undoing.
Britain’s remaining euro-sceptics, on the other hand, have a simple message. Led by the Conservative party, they say that close ties with the European Union will erode Britain’s sovereignty and undermine the national interest. As a result they have shunned the European People’s Party (EPP), the parliamentary grouping in which most centre-right MEPs sit, on the grounds that it is not euro-sceptic enough.
It is ultimately their overwhelming success in the European elections that will prove far more damaging to Britain’s standing in the world and harder to undo. Their approach to Europe threatens to widen the divide that underlined French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s snub of the Queen last weekend. He saw the D-Day celebrations as a Franco-American occasion. Gordon Brown was only there because he begged for an invitation and Prince Charles had to rely on American diplomacy for his ticket.
This unfortunate episode was symptomatic of a recent shift in global power that has seen France, led by its most pro-American President in years, become the new ‘special friend’ of the United States leaving the United Kingdom sidelined and irrelevant. Indeed, during Barack Obama’s first trip to Europe as President, he singled out as priorities of the transatlantic relationship, European integration and rapprochement with France, whom he hailed as America’s “oldest ally, our first ally”.
The reason for this shift is simple. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught America that there are limits to what they can do alone. So, they have sought to repair their relations with Europe. However, as the EU lacks a single foreign policy, a single partner who can maximise American influence in Europe is needed. This was traditionally a role played by the UK, but the Iraq war and the rise of euro-scepticism have since allowed France to take over.
It is true that many European countries, including France and Germany, leaned to the right in last week’s elections, albeit for mostly domestic reasons. However, there is no question over their commitment to the European project of ever-closer integration. While the policy of the UK Conservatives towards Europe though is predictably hazy, their intentions have been made clear by leader David Cameron’s appeasement of the Euro-sceptic wing of his party.
Along with withdrawing his party from the EPP and calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Cameron recently even described the EU as “completely unaccountable to the people of Britain.” During that same speech he also blamed the electorate’s disillusionment with politics on the EU and promised to negotiate the return of powers to Britain.
One can only hope that such promises were designed merely to outmanouver UKIP at the European elections and that in the event of a Conservative victory at the next general election, now a near certainty, he will take a more sensible approach advancing the national interest.
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
Why the Church was wrong to call for a boycott of the BNP
The latest poll for the European elections has put the Conservatives at the top with over 29% and the British National Party (BNP) at the bottom with just 5%. Yet following a recent call from the Archbishops Sentamu and Williams of York and Canterbury respectively to boycott the BNP, you’d think they were up there with the Conservatives. Consequently, much has been said of whether the nationalists are actually a threat to our democracy, but very little about what kind of threat is posed by the Church telling people who to vote for two weeks before an election.
It is one thing for a political organisation to take sides in an election, but as the officially recognised religion of the United Kingdom, the position of the Anglican Church is particularly tenuous. After all, its Archbishops are handpicked by the government, its Bishops sit in Parliament and, most importantly, the Head of the Church is also the Head of State, the Queen.
In the nineteenth century its power was so immense that anyone who refused to swear an oath to the faith itself was barred from holding any public office. In 1926, they attempted to intervene in the coal miners' strike, prompting then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to ask how they would like it if he referred the revision of the Athanasian Creed to the trade unions. Even as recently as two years ago, they attempted to de-rail the Equality Act, outlawing the discrimination and harassment of homosexuals.
If the Church continues to undermine the sovereignty of the people by taking sides in political debates and challenging laws drawn up by their elected representatives, they will risk dividing the loyalties of their own followers, whose numbers are already dwindling. In the best case scenario, they will render themselves irrelevant and undo the funding and support for all their charitable works from which society derives a great benefit. In the worst case scenario, they will trigger a constitutional crisis normally only the stuff of die-hard republicans’ dreams.
Perhaps the single most important reason not to boycott the BNP, however, is that it doesn’t work, as Labour minister Margaret Hodge would surely testify. In 2006, she publicly declared that 8 out of 10 white voters in Barking might support BNP council candidates, after which 11 of them were duly elected. Rather, the way you beat the BNP is not by raising their public profile through needless scaremongering, but by giving the electorate a good reason to vote for somebody else instead.
It is one thing for a political organisation to take sides in an election, but as the officially recognised religion of the United Kingdom, the position of the Anglican Church is particularly tenuous. After all, its Archbishops are handpicked by the government, its Bishops sit in Parliament and, most importantly, the Head of the Church is also the Head of State, the Queen.
In the nineteenth century its power was so immense that anyone who refused to swear an oath to the faith itself was barred from holding any public office. In 1926, they attempted to intervene in the coal miners' strike, prompting then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to ask how they would like it if he referred the revision of the Athanasian Creed to the trade unions. Even as recently as two years ago, they attempted to de-rail the Equality Act, outlawing the discrimination and harassment of homosexuals.
If the Church continues to undermine the sovereignty of the people by taking sides in political debates and challenging laws drawn up by their elected representatives, they will risk dividing the loyalties of their own followers, whose numbers are already dwindling. In the best case scenario, they will render themselves irrelevant and undo the funding and support for all their charitable works from which society derives a great benefit. In the worst case scenario, they will trigger a constitutional crisis normally only the stuff of die-hard republicans’ dreams.
Perhaps the single most important reason not to boycott the BNP, however, is that it doesn’t work, as Labour minister Margaret Hodge would surely testify. In 2006, she publicly declared that 8 out of 10 white voters in Barking might support BNP council candidates, after which 11 of them were duly elected. Rather, the way you beat the BNP is not by raising their public profile through needless scaremongering, but by giving the electorate a good reason to vote for somebody else instead.
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