Claudia Rossett has a great pice in the Philadelphia Inquirer illustrating why we should all be extremely concerned about Iran’s ad looking for countries to help them build nuclear reactors. Interestingly, Israel noticed the ad, but it seems like no one else, anywhere, either noticed or thought it worth bringing to anyone’s attention. Except the blogosphere and Rossett, of course.
Among the surreal events becoming ever more frequent in the nuclear showdown with Iran was the appearance of an ad last week in the International Herald Tribune, inviting bids to build “Two Large Scale Nuclear Power Plants in Iran.”
The ad ran in all editions of the paper, which is owned by the New York Times, and reaches more than 240,000 readers in more than 180 countries. Somehow this outrageous solicitation escaped the notice of major world media. That’s remarkable, at a time when Iran has been flagrantly defying United Nations Security Council resolutions calling on Tehran to halt its nuclear bomb program – with both the U.N. and U.S. Treasury calling for a freeze on the assets worldwide of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on behalf of which the ad was placed.
The ad did get noticed in Israel, a country that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said he would like to see wiped off the map. Bloggers picked up the story, and a scanned version of the ad began circulating, with commentary, on the Internet. It smacked of Iranian nose-thumbing so extreme one had to wonder if it was a spoof.
It’s no joke…
The equivalent would be if in 1938, Hitler’s Third Reich, realizing that their traveling gas vans were just too inefficient, decided to put an ad in the NYT soliciting for other countries to help them build the concentration camps, where so much more could be accomplished. And what does the IHT (the NYT) have to say when questions about the appropriateness of carrying an ad for an a nation which has declared it wishes to wipe Israel and the United State off the face of the map?
“We believe that advertising should be as free and open as the dictates of honesty and decency allow. In our view, advertising is an essential ingredient in the broad concept of a free press.”
In the age of the death of right and wrong, it shouldn;t surprise anyone that a representative for the international version of the NYT thinks shilling for Iran and their nuclear ambitions falls into the category of a “decent” thing to do.
There is something extremely fishy about this story. The are very few organizations that are capable of building a nuclear power plant. I am sure they are known to the Iranians. The ad makes no sense.