The lies about Iran are just getting started. There will be more. Don’t buy into any part of this scam.

Caitlin Johnstone

June 16, 2025

4 minutes

fox news, iran, israel, netanyahu, news, propaganda, trump, war

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

Benjamin Netanyahu was given a platform to spout lies and war propaganda on Fox News in an interview with a groveling Bret Baier, who not only allowed the Israeli prime minister’s lies to cruise by unchecked but actually invited him to expand upon them.

Netanyahu promoted countless incendiary falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims throughout the interview, including the assertion that Iran was working on producing nuclear weapons and intended to give them to Yemen’s Houthis to facilitate global terrorism, and that Iran was working on intercontinental ballistic missiles to nuke the east coast of the United States as well.

Perhaps the most ridiculous and brazenly propagandistic claim advanced by Netanyahu was that Iran had twice attempted to assassinate the president of the United States.

“These are people who chant ‘Death to America.’ They’ve tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” said the prime minister.

 

Rather than push back on this claim or point out that there’s been no reported evidence that any such thing has occurred, Baier instead offered Netanyahu the opportunity to drive the narrative home further with claims of secret intelligence about these alleged assassination plots.

“You just said Iran tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” Baier said. “Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?”

“Through proxies, yes, through their intel, yes, they want to kill him,” Netanyahu asserted.

Netanyahu had previously made this claim on his own platform in a statement on Friday wishing President Trump a happy birthday, and now he’s carrying it into the mainstream news media of the United States.

Netanyahu’s claim has already been repeated in outlets like The New York Post, Washington Examiner, Breitbart, and The Independent. So it’s in the blood stream now. The information ecosystem of US politics has already been infected with the virus.

 

It says so much about how comfortable Israel is with lying and how eager the western media are to help promote those lies that Netanyahu could go on Fox News and just casually assert that Iran “tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” only to have the Murdoch muppet host invite him to expound upon this assertion rather than challenging the Israeli prime minister’s evidence-free claim.

Netanyahu was fully aware that he was lying, and Baier was fully aware that Netanyahu was lying. They collaborated to push this lie before Fox News’ aging audience without the faintest whisper of journalistic ethics anywhere to be heard, knowing that this one baseless assertion would help turn their Trump-sympathizing viewers toward supporting a US attack on Iran.

If you weren’t around for the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, this is what it was like. Brazen lies with a fully complicit media, with the most frenetic war propaganda circulated by the Murdoch press.

Rupert Murdoch is intimately intertwined with Israel’s political elite and has a financial stake in Israeli energy which depends on Israel’s ongoing military occupation of the Golan Heights. Murdoch largely has the assistance of the US government to thank for his mass media empire. He personally funded the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2002 told the US Congress that “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam [Hussein] is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons,” and that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

 

The US does not have a free press, and neither do any of its allies in the western world. Under the western power alliance the mass media operate as the propaganda services of the US-centralized empire, and the public is fed whatever narratives serve the information interests of that empire.

The lies about Iran are just getting started. There will be more. Don’t buy into any part of this scam.

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Feature image is a screen grab from Fox News (Fair Use).