Pedestrian

Iranian State media is using the “student” label to address the hooligans who stormed the UK embassy earlier today. I can’t help but  laugh at the irony of the situation. Ever since the election in Iran, the protesters (many of them REAL students) were labelled “hooligans”, “thugs” and “goons” by state media and now those same outlets are calling the embassy mobsters, “students”.

I sense a bit of linguistic deconstruction going on here …

To give them the benefit of the doubt, I will assume that many of these delinquents have a university card or two in their pocket, but I can still conjure of a dozen other labels to name them with before their “student”ness (or lack of) comes to mind.

But what perplexes me is the enthusiasm with which Western media were quick to follow suit. Following the 2009 selection, Iranian state media was overtly zealous to call demonstrators, protesters, prisoners and activists, “hooligans” and the Western press hardly ever bothered to note this, calling the people out on the street by their rightful name.

What’s up with it this time? Where is the proof that these mobsters are “students”?! And why has the BBC, AP, the Huffington Post, CNN, etc so enthusiastically followed Ahmadinejad’s RAJA NEWS?!

Could it be that labeling these thugs as ordinary Iranians, (a label such as “student” gets that across completely) helps the warmonering imagery that has been building momentum in Western press? (and which the IRI goons are only too happy to reinforce?)

Either way, someone tell CNN et al.:

Iranian “students” have either been expelled, detained, suspended, been forced to flee, disillusioned, are watching satellite TV, conversing indoors, hiking outdoors …. doing pretty much everything and anything but breaking windows and ripping pictures of an old, tired queen and her henchmen. There is as much “student” in these thugs as there is in the Football Hooligans who your own press dubs the British Disease.