An elementary school in Iran was hit by an unknown missile during the first day of our bombardment of that country. The press in the U.S., as well as in Iran and other countries, is desperate to blame the explosion on the United States. Leading the way, as usual, is the New York Times.
The Times goes to great lengths to try to blame the school bombing on the U.S. military. Headline: “U.S. Tomahawk Hit Naval Base Beside Iranian School, Video Shows.” That’s odd: not that the Tomahawk hit the school, but rather that it hit a nearby military target. So what? The subhed is an outright lie by the Times: “The evidence contradicts President Trump’s claim that Iran was responsible for a strike at the school that killed 175 people, most of them children.”
The Times story is based on two sources, Iranian state media and a “research collective” called Bellingcat. It involves painstaking reconstruction of a video that shows a Tomahawk missile hitting its target. The emphasis is on evidence that the missile was indeed a Tomahawk, which is unique to the U.S. military. But so what? This is the key information, which a casual reader of headlines will not catch:
A Times analysis of the video shows the missile striking a building described as a medical clinic in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base. Plumes of smoke and debris shoot out of the building after it is hit as the distant screams of onlookers are heard.
As the camera pans to the right, large plumes of dust and smoke are already billowing from the area around the elementary school, suggesting that it had been struck shortly before the strike on the naval base.
So the Tomahawk didn’t hit the school, it hit the naval base. And the video indicates that at that point, the school had already been struck. By what? We don’t know, but the one thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t the Tomahawk. My guess is that the military investigation will conclude that the school was struck by an errant Iranian missile, but by that time the left-wing press will have firmly implanted the assumption that it was ours.
The story was picked up by the London Times, which did exactly the same thing: the headline says “Tomahawk video adds to evidence US hit Iranian girls’ school,” but the story demonstrates the opposite:
Video footage appears to confirm that an American Tomahawk missile hit an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) facility near an elementary school in Minab, Iran.
The footage adds to mounting evidence pointing to the United States being responsible for the airstrike on a girls’ school that killed 175 people, most of them young girls.
That is, to put it mildly, a non sequitur. The Times helpfully adds this graphic from Bellingcat showing the hypothetical impact zone of the Tomahawk that hit the naval base:
Weirdly, the paper doesn’t comment on the fact that the impact zone does not include the school.
Journalism as we once knew it has effectively ceased to exist. What we have now is a permanent war against the West, the United States, the Republican Party and the Trump administration. We are past the point where you can rely on anything you read in a newspaper, other than sports scores.
