Roula Khalaf

Author: Binam Irani

The Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, once remarked: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Roula Khalaf, the Foreign Editor at The Financial Times, understands this all too well.

It is a sad fact that a number of journalists and scholars of Middle Eastern origin have sought a career in the Western media by prostituting themselves at the service of wealthy and powerful elements that effectively own and control the production and distribution of news. Roula Khalaf, a Lebanese national resident in London, epitomizes this type of meretricious profession. The daily that she works for as foreign editor, The Financial Times, happens to be the mouthpiece of the cabal of bankers and kleptocrats who have brought economic ruin to Britain , leaving millions of young people jobless and destitute while they have enriched themselves beyond all measure. The newspaper tries to avoid admitting this fact by hiding behind a veneer of respectability for its (mis)reporting. But its main objective is to keep the entrenched ruling political and economic structure in place, and advance its interests overseas. Of concern to Western elites, and the British royalist establishment in particular, is the problematical situation in the Middle East which for so long has suffered the ignominy of foreign interference, subversion and complete domination. This has often involved, and led to, wars and interventions of various kinds. But violence and destruction is not the only tool of control. Western foreign policy has, in the post-colonial/imperial era, been largely predicated on a two-tier strategy consisting of providing massive political and financial support for the Zionist regime of Israel in its occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people, and in the forging of strong alliances with the feudal despotisms in the oil-rich Arabian Peninsular who buy copious quantities of arms (that they patently dont need) and allow western forces on their soil. Two states in the region, however, continue to resist outside hegemonic powers, namely the Syrian Arab Republic and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Instead, they pursue an independent course directed according to their own national security and sovereignty. It is
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thus not surprising that these two nations should come in for unrelenting assaults in the Western corporate and state media, including The Financial Times. A mixture of hyperbole, distortion, propaganda and outright lies characterize this type of politicized journalism. Perhaps one of the most salient episodes of an attempt to write an entirely alternative history of events in the Middle East was in the 2009 Iranian presidential election. The outcome of the election, a landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was largely expected in Iran since no incumbent president has ever been voted out of office and it was adjudged by even the presidents critics that he had handsomely won the live televised debates with his opponents. The duty of a true journalist is to report the facts, rather than to make them up or misrepresent them. But the latter is exactly what Roula Khalaf is guilty of. The Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who once famously remarked: If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.3 Khalaf emulated this adage with her own big lie, namely that the election was rigged and stolen, and even that the 40 million or so votes cast were not counted (an extraordinary claim for which there is absolutely no evidence). She has since repeated this over and over again to make it appear to be totally certain . It is often asserted that journalists like Roula Khalaf were actually just reporting the fact that the losing opponents themselves claimed the results had been manipulated, and also that large protests followed in response (i.e. where theres smoke there must be fire). While it is true that, in their bitterness and frustration, the rival candidates complained of irregularities and/or fraud, the same charge was in fact made in the 2005 presidential election when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then a political outsider, triumphed over the clerical oligarchs Mehdi Karroubi and Hashemi Rafsanjani. Both men back then blamed cheating as the reason for their defeat but could produce no evidence . Moreover, President Khatami, who campaigned side by side with Mir Hussein Mousavi, has to this day never claimed any rigging took place. Neither, indeed, has Mousavis own campaign manager, Dr. Abbas Akhoundi, who was in charge of 40,000 monitors on polling day 6. This fact has never been reported by Khalaf and the equally mendacious Tehran correspondent, Najmeh Bozorgmehr, since they both wanted to give the impression that the outcome was challenged by all reformists. And the post-election protests by the opposition, while undeniably large, were nonetheless centred in Tehran where Mousavi won and mostly absent from the rest of the country where the majority of Iranians live: Mashhad, Irans second largest city, was relatively quiet in the aftermath of the vote. Also, the massive Friday prayer rally on June 19th,, and huge anti-opposition demonstration on December 30th 2009, was dismissed as rent-a-mobs that did not reflect any popular sentiment.
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It should be acknowledged that Roula Khalaf was herself hardly alone in perverting the truth. Many in the western media out of sheer desperation cited secret government polls that purportedly showed that the incumbent was heading for defeat 7, or leaked Interior ministry

memos that claimed that the result was quite different 8, or unnamed government officials admitting that the results were fabricated 9. It is ironic that those who despised the former Iranian president for allegedly denying the Holocaust (or rather daring to even question the accepted narrative of it) were the very same people so quick to deny his victory. The reason for this deception was to condemn the Iranian government as illegitimate and thereby to prepare the grounds for further sanctions and pressure. On June 14th 2009, two days after the election, Roula Khalaf wrote an insight piece, The result in Iran defies belief
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where she

advanced an argument from personal incredulity that only the most stupid and ignorant make. The next day, however, in an article published by The Washington Post, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty provided the results of one of the few scientific pre-election polls taken before the election, and they explained that the official results were, in fact, very believable:

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election. 11
Also on that day, a piece appeared in Politico, authored by former Bush administration security officials Flynt and Hillary Leverett entitled: Ahmadinejad won, get over it 12. They explained that the notion of a rigged ballot was based on faulty assumptions and nothing else:

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and Iran experts have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud. They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejads 62.6 percent of the vote in this years election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani.
Others joined in: Former U.S assistant Treasury Secretary, Paul Craig Roberts, wrote that it was absurd to suppose that the election could have been fixed when the candidates were all vetted and approved by Irans electoral and legislative watchdog, the Guardians Council
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Mir Hussein Mousavi was, after all, an establishment insider and the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic. Like award-winning French journalist, Thierry Meyssan, he claimed that the unrest had all the hallmarks of similar colour revolutions fomented in the former Soviet Union by the CIA and NED
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. For their part, the Iranian authorities were determined

to allay any legitimate concerns. They carried out a televised partial recount of 10% of randomly selected ballot boxes, conducted in the presence of candidate representatives, and agreed to investigate all complaints of irregularities and anomalies some of these included the fact that ballots had run out in certain places due to the high turnout 15. Also, for the first time in Irans electoral history, all of the ballot box results were published nearly 46,000 of them in total. This degree of transparency was not provided when, for example, President Khatami was re-elected in 2001. The release of the disaggregated data also made it very

difficult to seriously claim that massive fraud had taken place. Not one of these tallies has ever been questioned or been found to be fraudulent. Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy even offered a financial reward to those who could prove manipulation by showing that these precinct-level results were incorrect
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. Roula Khalaf, and those of her ilk, clearly did not

expect to find that many commentators, even those burnishing reputable credentials, would oppose their concerted attempt to deny the facts and suppress the truth regarding the election. But on June 22nd, Khalaf and the others found something to justify their agenda. A report was published by Chatham House (i.e. The Royal Institute of International Affairs) that offered a preliminary analysis17 of the election results which questioned the credibility of the official figures, although it did not claim to have any definitive evidence of fraud. In reality, the report was written by two graduate students, Tom Rintoul and Daniel Berman, and edited by Dr. Ali Ansari, a British-Iranian historian and an overt supporter of the opposition. Central to its argument was that, in the first round of the 2005 election, Ahmadinejad received just 5.7 million votes compared to 24.6 million votes he received in the 2009 poll. It deliberately ignored the fact that he had won 17.3 million votes in the decisive second round. The report has since been taken apart by two Iranians18 , and also by an American lawyer, Eric Brill, who painstakingly and thoroughly investigated all the issues related to the election, concluding that there was no basis to suppose the outcome wasnt genuine or that fraud had taken place . The entirely bogus narrative of a stolen election was finally falsified in the subsequent months when the results of telephone polls, conducted after the election by reputable western organizations, were announced. These scientific surveys20-21 included those living in small towns and villages across Iran in their sample and not just the liberal-leaning urban middle class that formed the bedrock of Mousavis green wave whom Khalaf herself sympathized with. All of the polls showed that around 60% of respondents had voted for Ahmadinejad, congruent with the official data. Dr. Steve Kull of World Public Opinion explained this:
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Indications of fraud in the June 12 Iranian presidential election, together with largescale street demonstrations, have led to claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not actually win the electionan analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different sources finds little evidence to support such conclusions These findings do not prove that there were no irregularities in the election process but they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad. 20

But none of this fazed Roula Khalaf who was determined to misrepresent the reality of the election to her readers. Instead of providing the public with this important information, Khalaf and her colleagues decided to ignore these facts and stick with their oft-repeated line of fraud irrespective of the complete lack of support for it and the substantial evidence to the contrary.

To compound her lies with utter hypocrisy, having claimed that Iranian reformists were denied a victory and would never vote again, Khalaf welcomed the outcome of the 2013 presidential election as a democratic decision
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. The poll was won by moderate cleric,

Hassan Rouhani, and the turnout of 73% was the third highest in the history of the Islamic Republic. Incidentally, Dr. Ansari, the editor of the Chatham House report had predicted that turnout would be just 40% also on the basis that voters would not be fooled again
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But instead of admitting the error of her ways in smearing the results of the 2009 presidential election, and in so doing the verdict of the Iranian people, she yet again declared that the 2009 election was flawed
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. There was even an attempt to suggest that the victory of the

reformist-backed Rouhani in the first round proved that the earlier poll had been rigged even though no pro-Ahmadinejad candidate was on the ballot this time around. This is despite the fact that election was conducted using exactly the same process, and supervised by exactly the same officials, as in the 2013 poll. The only difference was that the candidates agreed not to declare themselves the definite winner before any results were known as the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Mousavi, had disgracefully done in 2009 to discredit its outcome . The reason behind the enthusiasm for President Rouhani exhibited by Khalaf and the editorial staff of The Financial Times stems from the fact that he is the protge of Hashemi Rafsanjani, widely considered to be one of the most corrupt politicians in Iran and the head of a large mafia-like empire. This naturally makes him an ideal candidate to do business with! His technocratic and free market predilections, coupled with his perceived pragmatism on relations with the West, make him a popular figure among those who want Iran to change its ways without having to resort to force (which would be disastrous to the global economy). There is a hope among elites that Rouhani will agree to do a deal on the nuclear program by greatly limiting Irans enrichment capabilities. They also expect him to end support for the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad (so that they can install a pro-Western client regime) as well as to back the moribund idea of a two-state solution to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict. Decreasing assistance to Lebanese Hezbollah and radical groups is probably another demand. If after agreeing to this, sanctions could be lifted and western firms given the green light to pillage the countrys natural resources by way of their investments. The same expectations, of course, existed when President Khatami was in office but the reformist leader wasnt willing to compromise on Irans basic commitments to its own region. And Rouhani has not signalled willingness to do any of this: He has insisted that Irans nuclear program is irreversible and that he will not support any transition of power in Syria to unelected opportunists on the payroll of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. There is also zero chance of Iran lending support for a Middle East Peace Process that has allowed Israel to triple the number of settlers in the occupied territories over the past couple of decades. It should also be remembered that, while Roula Khalaf and The Financial Times have always presented
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Ahmadinejad as an extremist, he was willing to a do a deal to send most of Irans stock of enriched uranium out of the country before this was undermined by his political enemies at home. Rouhani and Rafsanjani, moreover, were both central to restarting Irans suspended nuclear program in 1989. Despite the huge technical advances over the last decade, it is their project. Should a final deal fail to be negotiated, expect to see Khalaf blaming hardliners in Iran for sabotaging the opportunity by not being willing to compromise in much the same way that Yasser Arafat was blamed in 2000 for his failure to capitulate to U.S and Israeli terms for a peace deal. The fact that Irans nuclear program reflects the aspirations of its people, and is symbolic of the countrys independence and sovereignty, will not be taken into account at all. Iran is not the only subject area that exemplifies Roula Khalafs unmitigated mendacity. Her coverage of the situation in Syria is probably equally bad, in that she portrays an armed insurrection that has recruited terrorists from all over the world as a popular uprising and revolution. But here she can be forgiven for offering a gross misrepresentation rather than a categorical rejection of the facts. Predictably, The Financial Times has only adulation for its foreign affairs editor who still speaks English with a thick Arabic accent. In September 2013 she was promoted from the position of Middle East editor to that of foreign editor. Lionel Barber, the editor-in-chief of The Financial Times was effusive in his lavish praise for Khalaf:

Roula has been an outstanding Middle East editor for more than a decade, overseeing the launch of the Middle East edition and leading our coverage of the Arab spring. She is admired among peers and colleagues worldwide for her work as a reporter, commentator and team leader, and will be crucial to the development of our award-winning foreign coverage in her new position. 26
This promotion of a journalist who is so unscrupulous as to deny overwhelming evidence of an event in recent political history is as preposterous and outrageous as the awarding of a medal by President GHW Bush for outstanding service to Captain Will Rogers, the commander of the USS Vincennes that accidentally shot down an Iranian civil airliner on a routine flight. This reflects the sorry state of Western journalism and of values and ethics too.

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you. Friedrich Nietzsche

References

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