Western Coverage of the Nuclear Issue Is Deeply Flawed

The question of an illegal military attack on another country is usually treated as a practical problem to be solved rather than the act of criminal aggression that it would be.

Bloomberg News published a report today that exemplifies what is wrong with most Western media coverage of Israel and Iran’s nuclear program:

All of these developments, along with a political crisis in Israel triggered by Netanyahu’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary, have pushed the government in Jerusalem into a position from which it’s issuing daily warnings and letting everyone know that it would not hesitate to act, even alone, if it felt enough of a threat from Iran.

Reading this report, you would not know that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program and that Israel has an arsenal with dozens of deliverable nuclear weapons. The headline describes Israel as “cornered” and claims that Iran “emerges from isolation” when the former enjoys the uncritical backing of the world’s most powerful state and the latter is subjected to a punishing economic war waged by Israel’s patron. The reader would also be left in the dark that Iran’s nuclear program has advanced as far as it has in direct response to that economic war and Israel’s own backfiring assassination and sabotage attacks.