Deconstructing Roger Cohen's manufacturing consent on Iran vote fraud

According to Bill Keller, a New York Timesexecutive editor, "We've tried to be careful not to say what we don't know, and the biggest thing we don't know is whether the election was rigged."

That must come as a shocking surprise to all of us who have been reading Roger Cohen's sure-footed conclusion, reflected in half a dozen of his articles since the June 12 elections in Iran, that consistently refer to "Iran's ballot-box putsch."

Whereas Keller has admitted that "getting reliable information [about the election- KA] form outside Tehran has been difficult," such difficulties have presented no small obstacle on the path of Cohen's absolute certainty about "usurpers" who stole the 2009 presidential elections.

A recent report in Washington Post flatly admits that there is "no hard evidence" of rigged elections in Iran and, yet, with or without evidence we are led to believe by Cohen and his colleagues in the New York Times that the debate on this matter is over and the issue is rather moot. As a result, in the U.S. nowadays there are a lot of "talks" about Iran and the (post) elections, but hardly any debate. Both the mainstream and non-mainstream media, such as the Nation, have already issued their verdict and the idea of an election coup in Iran is on the verge of acquiring the status of a self-evident truth.A historical de javu, this has the air of 2002-2003 media hype about Iraq's WMD, where the New York Times exceeded itself by, among other things, having one of its reporters, Judith Miller, run front page disinformation stories funneled by the Israeli sources. There are good reasons to believe that we are dealing with a similar, carefully cultivated, hoax, call it the great voting fraud hoax.

Of course, Mr. Cohen would have none of that and is, on the contrary, quite adamant about a "last minute putsch" though without presenting even a scentilla of evidence to support his conspiracy theory and or, without paying any attention to the anomalous facts that undercut his effort, e.g., he does not bother with why Mr. Mousavi called a press conference and declared himself the "definite winner" one hour after the polls had closed? If he had probed this pertinent question, may be Cohen would reach a different conclusion, about sour grapes and a "winner syndrome" of a reformist candidate previously known as an unreconstructed leftist with a triumphalist weltanschauung. And then there are the purely factual errors on Cohen's parts, including the following:

his claim that "Ahmadinejad won in other candidates' hometwons, including Mousavi's" is wrong: Mousavi won in his birthplace of Shabestar;

Cohen's other contention that Mousavi should have carried the Azeri votes because of being an Azeri does not work either: in 2005 elections, an Azeri candidate, Mehr Alizad, received only 28 percent of Azeri votes;

Cohen is also wrong in saying that Ahmadinejad "won in every major city except Tehran." Actually, Mousavi won in Yazd, Zahedan, Zanjan, and Ardabil, and came pretty close to winning in Tabriz, where he lost by some 2000 votes;

Cohen gives the impression that Neda Agha-Soltan was killed in a rally. Not so, even Shireen Ebadi, the leading human rights attorney, has admitted in a statement that Nead "was not killed in a rally." Cohen's colleague in Tehran, Nazila Fathi, has actually been closer to truth, by reporting that Neda and her music teacher pulled in a "quiet side street" for a respite from a hectic traffic. This makes Cohen's exaltation of Neda as a "martyr" and as "Iran's Marianne" rather questionable, no matter how badly Iran's feminist movement may want to tap her name recognition for its politics of power, they should prioritize a politics of truth instead, otherwise they are destined to dustbin of history;

Furthermore, with respect to Neda, Cohen's claim that Neda's video shows "her last moments" is not strictly true either, since we know from her music teacher, in his interview with the LATimes reporter, Borzou Daragahi, that Neda was alive when she was rushed to the hospital. Cohen has apparently bought into the official story put out by an Iranian residing in England, Arash Hejazi, who instead of heeding his call of responsibility and accompanying the wounded girl to hospital, rushed instead to upload her video on Youtubewith a succinct paragraph citing his heroism. An objective New York Times reporter would catch Hejazi's lies and cast doubt on his version, contradicted by other witnesses, that is lavisly received by the western media, but not Cohen, who is too busy bashing Iran's election "usurpers."

In conclusion, the egregious flaws and shortcomings of Cohen's discourse on post-election in Iran indeed leaves a lot to be desired and once again reminds us that the engine of demonization of (nuclearizing) Islamic Republic is still in full throttle in the pages of New York Times.