Thursday, July 15, 2010
[The following, by Ben Cohen, is crossposted from Z Word.]
Periodically, I've written about the loathsome Holocaust denial outfit Press TV (see here and here and here, for example,) a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime that masquerades as a legitimate broadcaster.
In the Jerusalem Post, Benny Weinthal reports the following:
Executives from two public TV channels last week hosted Ezzatollah Zarghami, the president of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, who allegedly has ties to the Revolutionary Guards, prompting criticism on Monday.
On July 4, 2009, Zarghami told the press that the videos of Neda Agha Soltan's death during the 2009 Iranian election protests were all fake and were produced by BBC and CNN. Zarghami has been the head of IRIB, the corporation controlling Iranian national radio and television broadcasting, since 2004. His predecessor was Ali Larijani, now speaker of the Iranian parliament.
"It is not clear which is more bizarre and scandalous: that ARD and ZDF, personally represented by ARD chairman Peter Boudgoust and ZDF director Markus Schächter, received a delegation from the state broadcaster of the Islamic Republic of Iran, led by its head, Ezzatollah Zarghami, as well as the Iranian ambassador in Berlin, Ali Reiza Sheik Attar, for a nice chat at Lerchenberg - or that no one in Germany was interested in this chat. As if it were completely normal," author and journalist Oliver M. Piecha on Monday, wrote on the popular Wadi blog site.
Here's a video of top executives from ARD and ZDF giving Zarghami a tour of the facilities, using their taxpayer funds to provide him top notch hospitality, and shaking his bloodstained hand:
It's shameful on so many levels. There's Press TV's slavish advocacy of the regime's official Holocaust denial position, of course. But there is also the matter of Press TV's complicity in the brutal muzzling of genuine journalism in Iran. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 37 journalists currently languish in the regime's dungeons, with another 19 on short-term furloughs outside jail. Says CPJ:
In many of the cases documented by CPJ, Iranian authorities have filed vague antistate charges; other cases are shrouded in secrecy, without even formal charges being disclosed. Many of the detained and furloughed journalists are under extraordinary physical and psychological pressure to "confess" to crimes they have not committed, CPJ research shows. Many detainees have been denied family visits and access to legal counsel.
Those who have been tried have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Many have also been banned from writing or taking part in social and political activities. Others have been sentenced to internal exile, far away from their friends and families.
This is the moral cesspool which ARD and ZDF are currently wallowing in. Just as German business needs to heed its government and stop trading with the Iranian regime, so do German broadcasters need to distinguish free journalism from the fetid propaganda put out by the poodles of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
