For about 30 years, Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister of Israel, has been making the claim that Iran is on the verge (one month, two weeks, a few weeks, not very far from or variations of that theme) of having a nuclear weapon.
Thus far, there is no sign at all that Teheran has acquired nukes. Given this fact, who would air such a ridiculous claim during a program that claims to be taking a serious look at Iran and the nuclear issue?
Well, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had no qualms about running a program on Monday (April 6) — made by the American public broadcaster PBS — which put the square-jawed Netanyahu on-screen — among others — questioning if the Islamic nation had gone nuclear. And that too, during an ongoing attack by Israel and the US which is claimed to be aimed at preventing Iran from getting such weapons (which they don’t have).
The puff for the program reads: “As the US bombards Iran, sparking region-wide conflicts and unleashing a global economic crisis, Four Corners interrogates one of President Donald Trump’s key reasons for war: Did Iran pose a nuclear threat?” The short answer is no and even a man of my IQ (which, admittedly, is not much seeing as I come from a nation of brown-skins) can give a response in about 10 seconds flat. It is a ridiculous question. One might as well ask, does Sri Lanka pose a nuclear threat?
This slagging off of Iran is the height of journalistic fraud, but the ABC has abandoned any standards if it ever had any. What’s worse, this PBS program, titled Iran: The Nuclear Question, ran in the slot reserved for the broadcaster’s main investigative program, something that goes by the name 4 Corners. How much investigation was needed to ask and answer such a silly question?
Exactly why the government-funded ABC — which is given $1.2 billion of Australian taxpayer money each year — could not run something made by its own highly-paid staff in this slot is also a question that demands an answer. One would understand if a program from an outside source was screened towards the end of the calendar year, as that is the time when ABC staff start to go on holiday.
But this is March and nobody, not even those in a laidback country like Australia, can claim that March is peak holiday season. It is pertinent to note that the same ABC staff are agitating for a pay rise over and above that which has been offered by the management, and even went on strike for a day a week or so back. What’s more, the staff are threatening to strike again!
It is passing strange that the PBS effort did not raise the question of Israel’s own nukes (Tel Aviv has some 200 warheads, according to the latest reports; for a full account of how it got those weapons read investigative guru Seymour Hersh’s excellent book The Samson Option). Do Israel’s nukes posed a danger to the Middle East? Tel Aviv has never declared its nuclear status and thus evades inspections by the global nuclear inspector; this means, the country is on the same level as North Korea which is often referred to as a pariah state.
But one doubts if any of the Western powers will dare to refer to Israel in this way. There would be protests galore and accusations aplenty of “antisemitism”, whatever that is. (I have always been puzzled as to how a country where the residents are all converts to Judaism and come from nations all over the world, can claim to have even a drop of Semitic blood in their veins.)
Pyongyang had a good excuse for developing nukes; it was being harassed no end by the US and its Western allies before it got its own weapons. Now, Washington gives the country a wide berth.
Does one expect the ABC to fess up to the fact that it screened a third-rate program because its own staff were too lazy to create something? I would advise against holding one’s breath and waiting for such developments. One of the ABC’s “stars”, Sarah Ferguson, spent three full hours on a program that made the dubious claim that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections. Nearly seven years later, there is no sign that Ferguson is willing to admit that she screwed up badly, even though her rash conclusions have been thoroughly debunked.