OTTAWA (Reuters) - A Canadian newspaper apologized on Wednesday for a story that said Iran planned to force Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing to distinguish themselves from Muslims.
The conservative National Post ran the story on its front page last Friday along with a large photo from 1944 which showed a Hungarian couple wearing the yellow stars that the Nazis forced Jews to sew to their clothing.
The story, which included tough anti-Iran comments from prominent Jewish groups, was picked up widely by Web sites and by other media.
"Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany? Share your opinion online," the paper asked readers last Friday.
But the National Post, a long-time supporter of Israel and critic of Tehran, admitted on Wednesday it had not checked the piece thoroughly enough before running it.
"It is now clear the story is not true," National Post editor-in-chief Douglas Kelly wrote in a long editorial on page 2. "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story."
The story was based on a column by Iranian expatriate writer Amir Taheri, who said a law being debated by Iran's parliament would force Jews to sew a yellow strip of cloth to their clothes. Christians would wear a red strip while Zoroastrians would wear a blue one.
Iranian legislators dismissed the story.
The story and the column appeared at a time when the international community is pressuring Tehran over its nuclear program. Iran is also under fire for comments by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which he doubted the scale of the Holocaust.
Asked about the Post story last Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Iran "is very capable of this kind of action." He added: "It boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the Earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany."
A spokesman for Harper said the prime minister had started off his comments with the words "If this is true."
This reminds me of the Niger uranium hoax, in which "intelligence" from a crudely forged packet of documents alleging that the Iraqis were trying to purchase weapons-grade uranium in order to fuel their nonexistent nuclear weapons program somehow made it into the president's 2003 State of the Union speech. In short, this isn't an honest error, but evidence of outright deception.
The same neocons who lied us into war with Iraq are now trying for a repeat: they hope to lure us into a conflict with Iran, on the strength of dubious war propaganda and clearly phony "intelligence" about Iran's alleged nukes. You would think that the American people, once burned, would have learned – but what the neocons are counting on is the famous aphorism of P.T. Barnum to the effect that no one ever went broke overestimating the gullibility of the American people. All one has to do is flash the magic words "Hitler, Holocaust, nukes" across the screen in mile-high letters, and – the reasoning goes – they will react with Pavlovian regularity, no matter what. Or so the neocons hope.
The propaganda campaign on behalf of war with Iran is just beginning: and you can bet that the Amen Corner will be manufacturing new lies just as fast as they can be debunked. The idea is to get so many falsehoods into circulation that, no matter how hard the debunkers try, they will never be able to clear the air, and war will become inevitable. It doesn't matter that one lie is exposed as a brazen fraud: what matters is that the War Party keeps throwing accusations in the hope that at least a few of them will stick. Then they can say, in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iran, that "everybody" believed the Iranians were on the verge of acquiring WMD; "everybody" thought they were about to reenact the Holocaust; everybody believed, and we didn't know… "
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