We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Guardian’s Correspondent “Pinocchio” in Tehran: Demonizing Iranians, Nonsensical Propaganda

Click here to access article by Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich from Global Research

Lying in support of the political agendas of the Empire is a common practice among all major Empire media corporations. But a recent article published in the liberal Guardian from an unnamed source from the Guardian's Tehran Bureau, who the author identifies as "CP", about the awful sexual harassment she, the Bureau correspondent, experienced in Iran was simply too much for this author to ignore because she had been in Iran and her experience was radically different.
...as a scholar of US foreign policy I pay close attention to propaganda. Misinformation is nothing new to me and I don’t like to spend my time and energy responding to all the lies. But this particular article by CP hit me hard because I happen to be in Iran at the moment and in the same exact location/neighborhood she mentions in her tall tale. And t had it not been for the fact that the evening prior to reading her story I had been talking to my husband in California telling him that never had I felt more safe and comfortable walking alone and eating alone in a restaurant than I did here, I would have dismissed CP’s propaganda.  But CP’s lies had a personal effect on me and I could not let it rest — especially in light of Tehran Bureau’s malicious history.