It hit early Friday morning with all the subtlety of a punch in the solar plexus: Iran's parliament had just passed a law requiring all non-Muslims to wear colored badges. Suddenly, the rantings and ravings of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of wiping Israel from the face of the map didn't seem like the strident delusions of a madman as much as a template for the kind of institutionalized evil the world hasn't seen since Nazi Germany.
The story, which ran in the National Post, a Canadian newspaper printed online and affiliated with canada.com, quoted the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles as saying the Iranian decision was reminiscent of the Holocaust. It also quoted a member of the Iranian embassy in Ottawa as saying that the situation in Iran had nothing to do with people in Canada.
Rush Limbaugh picked up on the story immediately, and his millions of faithful listeners between San Bernardino and Philadelphia ate it up like their obese hero gobbling a handful of Oxycontin. Fox News and MSNBC reported it. The blogsphere ignited. People were posting it on their Myspace bulletins. It was an incendiary story.
And it was all complete bullshit. And anyone could have checked it out for themselves by going to their Google search button, typing in 'Iranian badges' and looking at the top news stories of the day. Within an hour or so of the Drudge Report plastering a screaming headline across the top of its website, which linked to the National Post story, Jewish websites, including a newspaper in Jerusalem, were posting alerts that the story might be phony.
Soon, the story on canada.com was "no longer available," although the Drudge Report still had the link on its front page — long after (somewhat) reputable news agencies like CBS had run stories online saying that neither its TV network or radio network would report the story until corroborated.
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
Great job on this, Joel -- as the news cycle ever quickens we're going to see more-and-more of this. I know that I've developed my own sense of second-guessing "breaking news" stories.
2 - JP
Glad I wasn't the only one skeptical about this piece when the immediate inflamatory references to Hitler were being made. Talk about pulling the strings!
3 - Mortimer N. Cobblepop
Because Ahmadinejad looks like Mr. Rogers, now that we know it was a hoax.
4 - Ruvy from Jerusalem
I looked this stuff over on the various sources. What I saw seems more cofused than anything else, and I do know that the reports mention a "draft law" - meaning a bill - something that could yet undergo change in the legislative process. Iran may look like a dictatorship, but the Majlis does have a legislative process. I'll say this much. Were I a Jewish legislator in a country like Iran, I would deny that discriminatory laws were being considered. My life probably would be at stake, not to mention my legislative seat...
5 - firstprimate
Don't forget that the quote attributed to Ahmedinejad about wiping Israel of the face of the map is incorrect as well:-
6 - Dave Nalle
Limbaugh is not currently obese, btw.
Firstprimate, if the origin of your disputation of Ahmedinejad's statement on destroying Israel is Juan Cole, as it seems to be then it's almost certainly wrong. Cole is notoriously ill-informed on the part of the world he's fooled some people on the left into thinking he's an expert on. Being a vindictive socialist is actually not the primary qualification for expertise on the middle east.
What I wonder is where this rumor originated. There has to be something that set it off, and I bet that with more investigation it's going to be something like what Ruvy describes, some proposal made by an extremist element within Iran which hasn't actually be acted on.
Dave
7 - Dave Nalle
And BTW, although the Natonal Post has dropped the story, it has been picked up by UPI and it does indeed appear to be a proposal in Parliament on which no actual action has been taken. If the US were judged by the idiocy which people like John Conyers and Charles Rangel propose in the legislature we might easily be mistaken for Nazis or Communists ourselves.
Dave
8 - Justene
There does seem to be a draft law promoting more traditional Islamic dress. That seems to be the source of the rumor. One could speculate on all sorts of ways that it got spun out to "badges." The National Post now reports that there were badges in earlier parts of history but that could be another rumor.