Ayatollah Khomeini
Is Twitter going easy on dictators because the platform is too busy censoring conservatives? Several Twitter accounts belonging to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were suspended early Tuesday March 31, according to Al Arabiya English. Khamenei maintained multiple accounts in various languages that would tweet to audiences that spoke English, Farsi, Russian, and Spanish. After reinstating his accounts, a Twitter spokesperson responded to a NewsBusters inquiry, explaining that “These accounts were immediately reinstated. They were mistakenly caught in a spam filter.”
On Tuesday’s Hardball and reacting to Iran having launched missiles at an Iraqi military base housing U.S. soldiers, NBC News Tehran bureau chief Ali Arouzi likely bolstered his perch in the eyes of the Iranian regime, promoting one propaganda point after another to MSNBC host Chris Matthews. This included the utterly false claim that “30 U.S. soldiers have been killed in this attack.”
Friday’s NBC Nightly News capped an ugly 24 hours for the liberal media after U.S. airstrikes killed Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani by doubling down on its bias, flashing outrageous chyrons, and fluffing pillows for the Iranians over the course of nearly 12 minutes of coverage. With help from anchor Lester Holt’s August visit to Tehran, this kowtow came at the expense of the President and supporters of the strike as that side only fetched about two minutes of either direct soundbites or attributions.
There isn't enough room in a single post for all of the contempt and ridicule NBC's latest hiring move deserves. The PR department at its MSNBC cable outlet waited until early Saturday morning to tweet its announcement that Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration's Deputy National Strategic Advisor for Strategic Communications, would be joining both NBC and MSNBC as a "Political Contributor." Who knew that systematically misleading and ridiculing the press while in office in the name of selling the fatally flawed Iran nuclear "deal" would be a resumé enhancer?
While Donald Trump was hate-tweeting on Monday morning about Morning Joe and the gossip site rumors surrounding co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the latter co-host prided himself as being a Trump critic (he wasn’t) but more importantly called out the Obama administration and government for collectively having “blood on our hands” for the inaction in Syria’s civil war to, in part, preserve the Iran nuclear deal.
A year ago, Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted that the New York Times was "offering 13-day tours of Iran guided by Times journalist Elaine Sciolino" at the bargain rate of $6,995 per person. Among other things, it promised "excellent insights into ... (the) life and accomplishments" of Ayatollah Khomeini, the ruthless Islamist leader who posed as a liberator, but then imposed a fundamentalist Islamic state after taking control of that country in the late 1970s. Those tours are still active, and popular.
Given that background, I suppose we really shouldn't be all that surprised that Ira Stoller at SmarterTimes.com reported a related development this morning. With the imminent lifting of Western sanctions against Iran, the ever-opportunistic International division of the Times is cohosting an October 6-7 "Oil and Money" conference in London (I promise, I'm not making this up).
On Wednesday night, ABC was the lone network to omit from their coverage of the Iran deal rally that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei offered a new rant hours earlier in which he promised the country will not cooperate with the U.S. on any other issue beyond the deal in addition to predicting that Israel would not exist in 25 years.
For Iran, Mike? On today's Morning Joe, reliable Obama fan Mike Barnicle managed to keep a straight face while lauding the Iran deal as an "extraordinary feat." He did so despite poll numbers displayed showing that a huge majority of Americans don't think the ayatollahs will keep their promises.
Let's see: sanctions lifted while centrifuges keep spinning and nuclear scientists beaver away in hardened, bomb-resistant facilities. Extraordinary, yeah.
Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Channel brought on MRC’s Tim Graham last night to discuss the sad fact that Miley Cyrus is leading Time’s online poll for Person of the Year. Cavuto said it’s a done deal. “I am here to tell you, Tim, confirm this is going to be the end of civilization as we know it, she will be.”
“If they’re going to do that, it ought to be more controversial than them putting Saddam on the cover, or the Ayatollah Khomeni,” Graham shot back. (Video below)
Update (13 Feb. | Ken Shepherd): Tomaso responds here, dismissing the notion that he exhibited any liberal bias. Commenters to his blog post are divided.
Condescending secular elitism isn’t just for the coasts anymore. It can even come from red state Texas.
On The Dallas Morning News’s Religion blog Feb. 12, Bruce Tomaso wrote a post called “Alabama and Iran Have Something in Common.” It stemmed from a recent Gallup poll that asked people around the world, “How important is religion in your daily life?” The poll found, among many other things, that nearly the same percentage of the population of Iran (83 percent) and Alabama (82 percent) said that religion was important to them.
Tomaso thought this was a riot: “Since I've never been to Iran and haven't spent enough time in Alabama to have a well-formed opinion, I refrain from cleverly drawing further comparisons,” he wrote. “But that doesn't mean you wiseakers can't!”