By Iqbal Suleman
The genocidal Israeli regime launched an all-out war on the Islamic Republic of Iran on Friday, June 13, in brazen contravention of international law amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
It bombed Iran’s nuclear civilian infrastructure and assassinated some veteran nuclear scientists, as well as high-ranking military commanders, in indiscriminate attacks.
Western countries have again refused to condemn these unlawful and barbaric actions by the Israeli regime led by war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who claims to be launching this war on behalf of the “civilized West” against “barbaric Muslims.”
The reaction of Western countries indicates that they have no commitment to international law or any concern for the lives of Muslims, from Palestine to Iran to Yemen.
They urge Iran to show restraint but refuse to call out the unlawful actions of the Israeli regime. This stems from a deep-rooted Western Islamophobia. These wars against Muslim countries have been incessant after Palestine was depopulated and occupied and the Zionist entity was created through illegal means in 1948.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iranian government and people have been the greatest supporters of the struggle for Palestinian national liberation. The people in the Global South remember the principled position taken by Iran in 1979, immediately after the revolution to cut off all economic and diplomatic relations with Apartheid South Africa and Apartheid Israel.
Iran has supported Palestinian liberation movements politically, financially, and militarily. This is the actual reason for Israel’s war on Iran. Its stated reason is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, but its actual reason is regime change.
Iran poses no nuclear threat to Israel or any other entity in the world. Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and there is a religious decree against it in the Islamic Republic.
Israel, on the other hand, possesses nuclear weapons. The US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2025 that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
The record shows that Netanyahu is a chronic liar, but the Western media seems to continue to peddle his lies. In two short sentences, Malcolm X describes the power of the media:
“The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent look guilty and to make the guilty look innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
How apt and accurate are the words of the great Malcolm X. It behoves us to rewind our minds to the US invasion of Iraq and the shameful conduct of the mainstream Western media.
War, War, War, War is all you need. Remember the song by the five-piece band WAR CRIMINALS. The songwriter was Netanyahu, on vocals and lead guitar, George Bush, on rhythm guitar and vocals, Tony Blair, on drums and vocals, Donald Rumsfeld, on backing vocals and harmony Colin Powell.
They sounded awful. They were always out of tune (truth). But the mainstream media promoted their lies as though it were the gospel truth and in the process manufactured consent for the unjustified and unlawful war on Iraq.
After the 9/11 attacks in the US, the mainstream media went into overdrive in pushing the narrative of the Muslim terrorist and the “war on terror.” This “war on terror” was used as a means to advance the Islamophobia project.
The language and the imagery used by the media were powerful and repetitive until the construct of the Muslim terrorist was firmly entrenched in the public mind.
The medieval Mideasterner, primitive, dirty, and bloodthirsty, seeking to impose “Sharia law” in the West and wanting to slaughter all Westerners. There was no mistaking who the terrorist was. He wore a beard. She wore a headscarf.
The public mind was conned into believing this Islamophobic trope and bought into the justification of the unlawful wars. Mainstream outlets like the New York Times, BBC, and CNN showed that they lacked the basic journalistic methods that a student learns in Journalism 101.
It was 2003 when the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq took place. An atrocious war that, according to the medical journal Lancet, killed approximately 600,000 Arab Muslim people in Iraq. The war created 3.9 million Iraqi refugees.
The stated reason for the war was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was about to produce nuclear weapons. The other stated reason was that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, once the darling of the West, had an operational relationship with Al Qaeda and was somehow linked with the September 11 attacks on the US.
The illegal war was based on lies. By repeating these lies and flooding the public mind, the mainstream media succeeded in manufacturing consent for war.
The prime mover orchestrating the war against Iraq was Netanyahu, who in 2002 stated that “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is wanting, and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons.”
Today, the very same Netanyahu is the one who claims that Iran is a nuclear threat and has brazenly launched an unlawful war on another Muslim country.
His lies are repeated like a mantra in mainstream media. Netanyahu has been telling the world for the last three decades that Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.
What are the facts though? Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has pronounced that it is immoral, unlawful, and un-Islamic to produce a nuclear weapon.
Iran maintains that its nuclear programme is for civilian use only. Iran abided by the terms of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which was signed in 2015 by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France, as well as the European Union.
It was, however, the United States that unilaterally tore up the agreement that it was a signatory to. Under the JCPOA, the inspectors from the IAEA had unfettered access to all of Iran’s nuclear facilities and there was transparency on Iran’s nuclear programme.
In 2002, Iraq complied with the terms of UN resolution 1441, but America, without any consideration to international law, went to war with Iraq at the behest of Israel.
Even according to US intelligence agencies, Iran is not on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon as Netanyahu would have us believe. Israel, however, has a nuclear weapon. Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. It has invaded its neighbours in Lebanon and Syria. It unlawfully occupies and steals land from Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.
The Israeli regime has publicly stated that it wants to expel Palestinians from Gaza. Yet the world powers and the mainstream corporate media seem fine with a nuclear Israel behaving the way it is.
You would expect the mainstream media to question the narrative presented by the American and Israeli regimes. Surely, after the imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and the current Israeli genocide in Palestine, the public should never believe anything that seeks to justify this Islamophobic war on Iran.
The media in the West is neither independent nor cultivated by democratic values. Millions of us, as ordinary citizens from all over the world, took to the streets to oppose the American war on Iraq, but the media were not listening to the democratic voices of the people. It served the interests of its corporate and elite paymasters.
In 2002, Netanyahu, whilst zealously beating the drums of war against the Muslim people of Iraq, stated that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you, it will have enormous positive reverberations throughout the region.”
Positive reverberations? Six hundred thousand Arab civilian deaths. 3.9 million refugees. The creation of the Daesh terrorist group, the spectre of head chopping, civil strife, blood everywhere, and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of the Arab country.
This is simply another Islamophobic war launched by Netanyahu and his allied criminals in the West.
In the Global South, we don’t listen to the music of war criminals. We remember the lyrics of Bob Marley: “You can fool some people some time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time, get up, stand up, stand up for your rights, get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight.”
Iqbal Suleman is a research associate at the Media Research Network, South Africa.
Press TV’s website