Voice of Iran: An enemy broadcaster in our midst
The voice behind that call sign will probably be unfamiliar to most people born during the last 50 years, but it would have been instantly recognizable to many who belonged to our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations.
The speaker was William Joyce, a traitor who absconded from London to Berlin in 1939 to broadcast Nazi propaganda to listeners back in Britain.
Nicknamed “Lord Haw Haw” because of the way his lazy, upper-class drawl inflected his pronunciation of “Germany Calling,” Joyce — who was actually an American born in Brooklyn to an Irish-Catholic father and an Irish-Protestant mother of modest means — became one of the leading hate figures of World War II.
His final broadcast in April 1945 ended with the words, “Heil Hitler and farewell.” He then tried to escape Germany, but was captured by British troops and returned to London, where he was executed for high treason at the beginning of 1946.
The case of Joyce, as well as that of the American poet Ezra Pound — a hysterical antisemite who performed a similar function on Italian radio during Mussolini’s dictatorship — has become a cautionary tale about the perils of siding with the enemy.
Still, in nearly every war, you will find one or more individuals happy to follow Joyce’s example.
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The current conflict with Iran illustrates this point. Iran has demonstrated on numerous occasions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires in 1994, the killing of more than 600 US service personnel in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 — that the regime and its proxies are waging a “forever war” against the United States and the broader Western alliance. Israel may be the first target in the Iranian line of attack, but it is not the last.
The Iranian regime’s allies in the West are presently fighting this assertion as hard as they can, aided by the official media outlets of the Islamic Republic.
Last week, Israel bombed the Tehran headquarters of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) while one of its presenters was ranting on air, correctly pointing out that as the main vehicle for the regime’s propaganda, it qualifies as a legitimate military target.
This justification is not unique to Israel; NATO did the same when it bombed the Belgrade headquarters of Serbia’s main broadcaster during the liberation of Kosovo in 1999, while further back, the Royal Air Force ruined the radio broadcast of a German official ceremony in 1943 celebrating Hitler’s 10th year in power by flying its planes loud and low, drowning out the proceedings as bewildered Germans tuned in.
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Iran is not the only state opposed to Western democracies that is using media to reach the restive citizens of those democracies, in English, French and Spanish, among other languages. The best-known example is Al Jazeera, the Qatari state-owned network that has spent millions on burnishing its image as a fearless, independent source of journalism. Russia’s RT network is another.
For its part, IRIB has an international arm, Press TV. I recall seeing posters advertising Press TV on public transport during a visit to London in 2007, billing it as the only channel willing to speak truth to power, piercing through the lies and deceit of the Western media. Nowhere was its IRIB connection mentioned. Even now, you have to burrow deep into Press TV’s website to discover that its CEO, Ahmad Noroozi, is also the vice-president of the IRIB World Service.
In the United States, Press TV has been designated since 2013, a move that was followed up in 2023 with its addition to the Treasury Department’s list of specially designated nationals and blocked persons.
Broadcasters and governments in other countries have also taken action against the network, including Germany and the United Kingdom. In the UK, the revocation of its license in 2011 was triggered by its broadcast of a “confession” from Maziar Bahari, an Iranian dissident, which was obtained under torture. (This flagrant violation of humanitarian law is standard practice for IRIB, which earned it the moniker “Torture TV.”)
Yet London remains the only Western city where Press TV maintains both a bureau and a studio that produces and transmits news shows and panel discussions.
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Among its nastiest offerings is a full-throated antisemitic conspiracy show titled “Palestine Declassified,” produced in London and anchored by Chris Williamson, a former parliamentarian, a stalwart ally of Jeremy Corbyn, the antisemitic former leader of the British Labour Party and a prime candidate for the mantle of William Joyce. (Incidentally, Corbyn has also anchored shows on Press TV, as has George Galloway, another former member of the British parliament who never met a dictator whom he didn’t fawn over.)
Williamson’s regular guests include David Miller, a disgraced Scottish academic who is, in my view, the most blatantly antisemitic agitator in a constellation that also includes several far-left outlets in Europe and North America. Miller’s favorite hashtag is “#dismantle Zionism,” by which he means shutting down Jewish organizations, schools and charities that have any affiliation with, or even affection for, the State of Israel, claiming that this is a manifestation of “Jewish supremacism.”
All this is being beamed out of London by the same network that broadcasts the confessions of Iranian opponents of the regime obtained through torture. There is a method here; as my colleague Toby Dershowitz has written, “IRIB, and the regime more broadly, attempt to tie prisoners to the foreign powers the regime frequently vilifies, principally the United States and Israel. It aligns with IRIB’s pattern of vilifying the ‘great Satan’ and ‘little Satan’ in television, radio and written reporting.”
With the exception of the United States and perhaps Germany, Western countries have been feeble in their response to Israel’s current campaign, acknowledging that Iran is a very real threat but keeping their distance from Jerusalem’s necessary actions. Still, is it too much to ask the UK government to shut down Press TV’s London operation entirely?
Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
