Iran hawks have long seen the Islamic Republic as the center of the “Axis of Evil” for its support of Palestinian groups and regional ties to the likes of Hezbollah, Syria and, more recently, Turkey. The tendency is to link Iran to any and all nefarious activity anywhere near the Middle East.
But the National Review Online took the ‘blame Iran’ theme a bit farther than it usually does.
In a one sentence post on NRO‘s ‘the Corner’ blog called “Violence in Kashmir, Inspired by…”, Jonathon Foreman writes:
Indian-controlled Kashmir has exploded into violence, Indian security forces losing control of the streets — all because Press TV, the Iranian-run satellite channel, announced that a Koran was burned in Florida.
Of course, the announcement of such a burning would be much more difficult to do if there wasn’t an American behind it all — Pastor Terry Jones — who was actually trying to burn Korans. Or, for that matter, a U.S. press eager for sensational stories that pushed the issue to the front pages. (Tony Karon takes on both themes in his comparison, published at the National, of Terry Jones to Osama Bin Laden — i.e. threats over-hyped by the media.) And remember that the story was helped along by warnings about burning Korans from neocon darling Gen. David Petraeus.
But NRO proclaims that Iran is to blame for spreading the story to Kashmir, where riots broke out, because a semi-official (state-run, with some autonomy) news channel from the Islamic Republic picked up on one of the hottest news items from the U.S. and ran with it.