by Jonathan Sacerdoti, The Jewish Chronicle
Ali Larijani was no reformer but a central figure in repression – and yet much of British media coverage blurred that reality
A few days ago I watched Sky News with amazement as they showed Iranian propaganda images of Ali Larijani walking down the street in Iran on Al Quds Day. They kept commenting how it showed Iranian strength that he was able to walk so freely without fear of assassination, among his people.
I have long been concerned about Sky News’ coverage of the Middle East but even I was a bit shocked they appeared to be regurgitating such transparent Islamic Republic propaganda without any hint of intelligent cynicism. So today, when it was announced he was killed by an Israeli strike, my heart went out to Sky News. Perhaps they’ll join the British Foreign Office and ministers at a wake in South Kensington, or at that Islamic Centre opposite my favourite Persian restaurant in London, where they mourned the deaths of Ali Khameini and Qasem Soleimani.
The BBC were no better.
Our national broadcaster’s response managed to go further still, into a kind of analytical absurdity that would be comic if it were not so dangerous. The newsreader, in a tone of concerned moderation, warned of “the slight problem here” that Israel had eliminated figures “considered moderates,” suggesting this might empower “more hardline, less experienced people” and make regime change “more complicated.”
Jeremy Bowen followed: Larijani, he ummed and ahhed, was “seen as a pragmatic figure… a man of flexibility… somebody you can do business with.” Sure, he said “some very tough things, war-like things, in recent weeks,” but who among us hasn’t?
This peculiar BBC effort to rehabilitate an Iranian regime monster is more than a little weird. It takes a man embedded for decades at the core of a coercive theocratic system and recasts him as a regrettable casualty of strategic impatience, a lost interlocutor in some imagined future negotiation. A man who once talked about an “overreaction” to the Holocaust, adding that he was “neither for, nor against” the idea that the Holocaust had really occurred, saying it was an “open question.” When did Jeremy Bowen last “do business” with him? Who exactly was doing business with him? Was the BBC? Or did they mean Israel should negotiate how much annihilation it could talk them down to? How many Jews to wipe from the face of the earth? Maybe the Iranian people could negotiate access to water, the Internet, or their relatives if thy just did business with him.