If I had been smart enough to become a neurosurgeon, you would have to believe me, if I told you that the organ inside your skull cavity was your brain. If I had been talented enough to become a soul food chef, you’d have to believe me, if I told you that the piece of meat in your “greens” was a ham hock. But no, I went to school for marketing and journalism and chose to do strategic communications. That being the case, I can recognize “good PR” and “bad PR” a mile away.
In my opinion, what’s going on right now in Iran, related to the election results, between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Mousavi, is a bad PR campaign, and whoever is responsible for it should be replaced, immediately.
Clearly, somebody, somewhere, is doing more than simply reporting the news, they're managing a huge public relations campaign to convince people in the U.S. and in Europe that the Iranian presidential election was "rigged." While I have traveled to the Middle East, to Israel and to the West Bank, I have never actually set foot in Iran, itself. So, like virtually all of us, I have to take someone else’s word, if I want to understand what’s happening there, on the ground.
Perhaps the most blatant example of "bad PR," to me, is the fact that, in virtually every demonstration scene, we see protesters holding up signs expressing their outrage about the Iranian election. I can clearly understand that. I’ve been involved in a few protests, myself, over the years, and I know that that’s what protesters do – they carry signs.
The thing that throws me off about the photos and video images we’ve seen from Iran, however, is that many of the protesters are holding up signs that are printed – in English.
Some of the signs say: “God bless humanity.” Others have said: “We want democracy.” I saw one, held by a young man in a brown tee shirt, that read: “We lost our work. We need protection. We want to return.” There was even an Iranian, English sign-carrying protester on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer last week.
The curious thing about those signs is that, according to every source that I’ve checked, virtually no one in Iran is an English speaker. In fact, 58 percent of Iranians speak Persian or a Persian dialect, 26 percent speak Turkic or a related dialect, 9 percent speak Kurdish, 2 percent Luri, another 3 percent either Balochi, Arabic or Turkish. And the remaining 2 percent speak some “other language.”
That certainly raises the question: if English is so rarely spoken or read in the country, who are the "protesters" trying to influence with the English - language signs?
When we see old news accounts of 1963's March on Washington, each Black History Month and each Martin Luther King's Day, you see a great number of white, neatly printed, mass-produced signs carried by the demonstrators. Not one, however, that I recall, was ever written or printed in a foreign language – no French, no Portuguese, no Amharic(Ethiopian), no Chinese and, certainly, no Farsi/Persian, the language of most Iranians.
For perfectly good reasons, foreign-language signs were not used when we were trying to address the negative treatment of black folks, here in this country.
So, what’s the real reason why CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other mainstream media outlets are all so rabid about the election results in someone else’s country, and why are the signs being printed so that their reporters and their audiences can understand them?
Haven't we had our share of disputed presidential elections, right here? As I recall, after a hard-fought campaign, in the Year 2000, Al Gore initially wound up with the most "popular votes" for president, i.e., more Americans voted for Gore than for George W. Bush. Somehow, despite how Americans actually voted, George Bush eventually won the mysteriously calculated “electoral vote” and was named President of the United States, more than a month after the polls closed that November.
There was evidence of black voter disenfranchisement in several states, even the threat, by Jesse Jackson, of a “civil rights explosion," but, as I recall, not a single protestor was seen carrying a sign printed in a foreign language.
Back in Iran, the mobs of people who are opposed to the country’s official election results have been readily recognizable because they’ve been encouraged, or paid, to wear bright green shirts, hats, scarves, and banners, when they go to the streets.
Somehow, someone working for Mr. Mousavi, the candidate supported by the West, even arranged to have the Iranian World Cup Soccer team, during a qualifying match in South Korea, last week, wear special wrist bands printed in Mousavi’s green logo colors. At the same soccer match, Iranian “fans” staged small protests outside the stadium, held up a banner that said, again in English, the language that most Iranians don’t speak, “Go to hell, Dictator,” and carried the most popular of all the omnipresent English-language signs, “Where is my vote?” Some even carried Iranian flags, on which the words “Free Iran” were printed, also in English.
It's obvious that the people who are “packaging” Mr. Mousavi, creating his green-branded campaign and making sure his English-language signs are shipped out to demonstrators, in Tehran and around the world, aren’t really trying to have a dialogue with the Iranian people, at all. It seems, instead, that they are trying to convince us, right here in Philadelphia, in New York City, in Dallas, Texas, and in Los Angeles, that Mr. Ahmadinejad is the “bad guy” and that Mr. Mousavi, the “pro-Western,” "reform candidate," is the “good guy” and the best man to be president of Iran.
What business is any of this of ours?
Maybe it’s all as simple as was explained by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in 2000, when she said: “In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons, but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And, it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America into their internal affairs.”
Maybe it’s as simple as John Perkins explained in his 2004 New York Times best seller: “Confessions of An Economic Hit Man.”
In trying to regain control of Iran’s nationalized oil reserves, Perkins wrote, the U.S. sent CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt to the country. He won some Iranian “people over through payoffs and threats. He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh (the Iranian Prime Minister, at the time) was both unpopular and inept.”
Sounds strangely familiar, huh?
From where I sit, if this is all just a continuation of the U.S.’s on-going strategic pursuit of oil reserves, and the political control to ensure that, then, in the interest of “transparency,” somebody in our government should simply say so.
With the price of gas at the pump returning to $3 a gallon, recently, the American people will understand. They may not necessarily like it, but they will certainly understand.
Maybe, then, we can get away from the 24/7 daily onslaught of contrived demonstrations, green logos, hats and tee-shirts, and signs, curiously and clumsily, printed in English, carried by people 6,500 miles away.
Like I said, I know good PR when I see it, and this ain't it.
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