The Independent has offered Darius Guppy the opportunity to write back against the dominant ‘Iran narrative’ in the Western media. Guppy argues that there is no hard evidence for rigging in the recent Iranian presidential elections (an argument made here and here too), and criticises the easy assumption that Ahmadinejad’s victory was fraudulent, as well as, more generally, the West’s usual double standards when it comes to the Muslim world. He questions the complacent expectation that most young Iranians wish to emulate our ‘free’ society, and contrasts the UK unfavourably with Iran in terms of authoritarian surveillance, public ethics, and culture. “Visit Iran and you will see a people polite, hospitable, cultured, noble and brave,” he writes. “Look at Britain’s urban hell and you will see young girls and boys armed with knives, swearing, half naked, vomiting the previous night’s attempt to stifle their pain and their emptiness.” Guppy here is employing the rant genre, as I often do myself. Like all op-ed journalism, his piece is necessarily partial and incomplete. He generalises, and fails to mention, for example, Iran’s galloping heroin problem. But he surely makes some very good points, and makes them very eloquently. The Independent is to be congratulated for giving him the space.
Or is it? Two paragraphs into the online piece, the reader is directed to another article which mocks the author. This framing piece doesn’t engage Guppy’s arguments but simply launches ad hominem attacks against him. It turns out that Guppy was imprisoned for insurance fraud in 1993. This is relevant information, but not so relevant that we need to be informed even before we’ve finished Guppy’s piece. Then the Independent’s omniscient voice implies Guppy is not a genuine enough native informant because he’s only half Iranian. (Guppy does use the rhetorical ‘we’ in his piece, but also describes himself as an old Etonian. He isn’t pretending to be anything he isn’t.) The framing article also subtly distorts Guppy’s perspective, for instance by claiming that he mocks the idea that Iranians long for democracy. In Guppy’s article, democracy is written inside inverted commas – ‘democracy’. In other words, Guppy is not writing against democracy, but against the propagandist use of the word in the West.
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