Iran Threatens Trump, US Media Forgets Soleimani's Assassination
The Independent breathlessly reports on Iranian state TV displaying a graphic threatening Donald Trump, featuring a past assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan's press secretary, James Brady. This sensational framing paints Iran as an unhinged aggressor, completely sidestepping the inconvenient fact that it was the Trump administration, in an unprecedented act of state-sponsored assassination,
that ordered the drone strike killing Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. ( New York Times ) We are consistently presented with only one half of the equation: Iranian threats are condemned, but the West's escalatory actions, like the targeted killing of a foreign general on sovereign Iraqi soil, are conveniently memory-holed. One might ask, if the US can assassinate a
high-ranking Iranian official, how many retaliatory graphics does it take for the media to acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship, rather than just the 'effect' they deem newsworthy?