Sigh-Ops

by digby

I’m sure most of you have heard this bizarre story about Iran forcing Jews and other religious minorities to wear badges. (In a nice touch of historical color, the Jewish badges are allegedly yellow.) Well, it turns out this was simply made up out of whole cloth and filtered into the media through an affiliate of the Benador Group which include such credible wingnuts as Laurie “Saddam is comin’ ta git yah” Mylroie and Michael “let’s invade France” Ledeen. You have to wonder what they thought they would accomplish by putting out something so falsifiable. I think Jim Henley has it right:

Why? So that months from now, someone hearing about plans to bomb Iran, or seeing footage of bombing on TV, will say to themselves, “Didn’t I read that Iran was going to round up all the Jews and make them wear yellow stars like the Nazis? Something like that. Well, good riddance.” All the story had to do was live long enough to get into circulation.

I actually have a personal anecdote that pertains to exactly that. Before the first Gulf war I was talking about whether or not we should intervene with my brother-in-law, a decent liberal who normally is not one to get onboard military adventures unless something very important is at stake. He was a big supporter of the Gulf War based on that story about killing the babies in their incubators (which had set my bullshit detectors to screaming when I heard it.) He believed it and it made him very hawkish.

It’s as Henley says, these things make their way into the consciousness and pop out down the road when people are being forced to decide if a military action is necessary. They’re planting seeds.

The press is not running with this en masse the way they did with all the earlier nonsense, but it’s all over the rightwing noise machine so there will be plenty of people who believe this crap. Still, it’s a small comfort that the mainstream media is getting a little less easily played.

Update: Greg Sargent has more.

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