Amir Taheri
Amir Taheri is an Iranian-American right-wing commentator. He is represented by the Benador Associates. His targets have included Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and the film Syriana. More recently he was engaged in a black propaganda hoax to smear Iran.
Yellow Badges
Taheri was the fabricator of a hoax meant to smear Iran, namely that it sought to force Iranian Jews to wear "yellow badges". The story was spread by Benador Associates, through Canada's National Post, obtaining confirmation by Rabbi Cooper at the Wiesenthal Center. Once the hoax had been published several major zionist lobbying groups emailed "alerts" on the issue, e.g., AIPAC sent out an "alert e-mail blast to reporters hours after the story appeared".
Journalistic Felon
The Yellow badges story, however, is not the first time Taheri has been exposed as a fraud.
- It was in 1989 that Taheri was first exposed as a journalistic felon. The book he published the year before, Nest of Spies, examined the rule and fall of the Shah of Iran. Taheri received many respectful reviews, but in The New Republic Shaul Bakhash, a reigning doyen of Persian studies, checked Taheri's footnotes. Suddenly a book review became an investigative exposé. Bakhash, a history professor at George Mason University and a former fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, detailed case after case in which Taheri cited nonexistent sources, concocted nonexistent substance in cases where the sources existed and distorted the substance beyond recognition when it was present. Taheri "repeatedly refers us to books where the information he cites simply does not exist," Bakhash wrote. "Often the documents cannot be found in the volumes to which he attributes them.... [He] repeatedly reads things into the documents that are simply not there." In one case, noted Bakhash, Taheri cited an earlier article of his own--but offered content he himself never wrote in that article. Bakhash concluded that Nest of Spies was "the sort of book that gives contemporary history a bad name." In a response published two months later, Taheri failed to rebut Bakhash's charges.[1]
External Links
- ^ Larry Cohler-Esses, Bunkum From Benador, The Nation, July 3, 2006
- Jim Lobe, Iran Target of Apparent Disinformation Ploy, Inter Press Service, May 22, 2006
- Larry Cohler-Esses, 'YELLOW' JOURNALISM!!, The Jewish Week, 25 May 2006.
- Amir Taheri, “Where American Self Loathing Meets Arab Conspiracy Theories”, Asharq Alawsat, January 6, 2006
