It’s hard to tell which is more brazen.
The Islamic Republic of Iran reportedly has issued an arrest warrant for President Donald Trump for his role in the January killing of Quassem Soleimani, Tehran’s terrorist general who was responsible for any number of attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq as well as on Israelis through Iran’s client groups in Lebanon.
As bad as that is, though, the American news outlet The Daily Beast was even worse: using a tweet to take Iran’s side in the matter.
As news spread Monday that Tehran prosecutor Ali Alqasimehr told the Islamic Republic News Agency that Trump and others were facing “murder and terrorism charges” related to Soleimani’s death in a Jan. 5 missile strike, the blatantly anti-Trump outlet The Daily Beast was cheering the mullahs on.
“You can’t blame them for trying,” The Daily Beast said on Twitter.
If this might look like a case of ludicrously provocative Twitter language aimed at generating clicks, it’s worth noting that those are the actual first words of The Daily Beast’s story capsule – a brief summation that links to a larger story by, naturally enough, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera.
According to The Associated Press, Iran isn’t stopping with its own efforts. It has also requested a “red notice” from the international law enforcement organization Interpol, which — theoretically, at least — could put the president in danger of arrest while in another country.
A “red notice” is not an arrest warrant technically, and Interpol cannot force any country to comply according to the police agency. But as a propaganda strike, the Iranian move was provocative, and naturally will attract Trump haters around the world and — disgracefully enough — in the United States.
Enter The Daily Beast tweet and its jocular approach to a move by an avowed enemy of the United States on the world stage. A normal person might think the fact that the Islamic Republic is a country that has spent the 40 years since its founding engaged in a shadow war with the United States — no matter which party was in the White House — would have given the editors of The Daily Beast a second’s pause.
A normal person might think that even blinkered American liberals would understand how evil the murderous mullahs of Tehran are, what with their relegation of women to second-class citizenship and the fact that homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in the land they rule.
But for a news outlet like The Daily Beast, convulsed with Trump Derangement Syndrome, the enemy of the enemy is a friend — even if it’s one of the most repressive, backward, barbarous regimes on the planet.
As usual when it comes to anything to do with Trump, there were a distressing number of Twitter replies that took cheered The Daily Beast.
This is worth noting because, even during the worst of President Barack Obama’s abysmal eight years in the Oval Office, it would never have been respectable for conservatives to openly side with an enemy against the president. (Obama did enough siding with enemies all by himself — Iran principally among them.)
Fortunately, though, there are still enough normal Americans out there to point out how appalling The Daily Beast’s take was.
And a final one describes the mindless, reflexively anti-Trump attitude among the American left perfectly.
Anyone who remembers the Soleimani operation — as richly deserved an execution as the Osama bin Laden raid during the Obama presidency — remembers how the doomsayers of the anti-Trump media — and Democrats running for president– saw it fomenting a new war in the Middle East.
They might also remember the short-lived siege at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that many in the mainstream media were comparing — hopefully — to the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini’s savages (and the ensuing humiliating hostage crisis).
That January siege ended when Trump responded with force. And it’s worth noting that the president’s use of force to destroy the loathsome Soleimani hasn’t resulted yet in any outbreak of warfare in the half-year that’s followed.
There has never been a question whether the majority of American news outlets consider themselves at war with the Trump administration — they do. And while The Daily Beast isn’t quite a mainstream media source the way The New York Times, The Washington Post and non-Fox television news networks are, it’s not too far from them, either.
Nonetheless, it’s still surprising to see a prominent news outlet openly cheering on a country that has been engaged in war with the United States for two generations now.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, with its incessant “Death to America” chanting and “Great Satan” worldview, has never pretended to be anything other than a blood enemy of the West, and of the United States most of all.
Outlets like The Daily Beast, however, have engaged in their sniping attacks against the Trump administration while protected by exactly the freedoms the mullahs would stamp out if they had even the smallest chance.
Yet its staff is brazen enough to implicitly praise the mullahs for an openly hostile act against an American president?
No question about who’s more brazen. The Iranians look downright honest compared with The Daily Beast.
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