UPDATE:
The Jerusalem Post today has a pretty good take on Fars’ “dramatic scoop.”
Fars — in all seriousness— reported that revelations of mass NSA surveillance made public by Edward Snowden were actually an effort by the American-Nazi extraterrestrials to hide their nature to a human world they hoped to dominate.
Read it here.
==
Original Post:
These days it is difficult to tell farce from Fars News. But the Washington Post and several other news and gossip sources are reporting on a story supposedly published by the hard-line, semi-official Iranian Fars News.
The Post cautions that the Iranian semi-official news outlets “have something of a reputation for taking conspiracy theorism to the next level. They’ve written on Israel’s secret plans to annex Iraq, the conspiracy to fabricate quotes by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani condemning the Holocaust and the secret Jewishness of the British royal family.”
The story (allegedly) starts as follows:
Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed documents providing incontrovertible proof that an alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, some media reports said.
A stunning Federal Security Services (FSB) report on the nearly two million highly classified top-secret documents obtained from the United States Department of Defense (DOD) run National Security Agency-Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) by the American ex-patriot Edward Snowden states that this information is providing “incontrovertible proof” that an “alien/extraterrestrial intelligence agenda” is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945, Whatdoesitmean.com reported.
Edward Snowden is a computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former NSA/CSS contractor who disclosed these classified documents to several media outlets in late 2012 and was granted temporary asylum in Russia in 2013 after his designation by the Obama regime as the “most wanted man on earth.”
And it gets “better” or worse from there.
Max Fisher at the Post comments:
The best part to all this, to me, is the sourcing. Fars News takes us through a veritable hall-of-mirrors of sources “confirming” their scoop. The progenitor of it all, of course, is ostensibly NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has waited until now to reveal that the real reason for all those NSA programs is aliens. As best I can tell, Fars claims that Snowden gave this information to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). They also say it was independently confirmed by former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer. (Hellyer, who is 90, does indeed argue that aliens have visited Earth many times, though I haven’t seen him comment on this particular story.) The FSB, they say, put all this information down in a secret report, which was inexplicably obtained by the ultra-fringe conspiracy theory Web site, Whatdoesitmean.com.
Yes, this story is highly entertaining, as are many of the bizarre conspiracy theories proposed by official or semi-official news agencies in authoritarian states. But there’s also a more serious undercurrent here. A worldview that sees the U.S. as an evil hegemonic force so irrationally driven toward global domination that it must be run by space aliens is not a worldview that is predisposed toward negotiation or accommodation. It’s one that justified, or perhaps even necessitates, total resistance and a refusal to compromise. To be clear, this does not appear to be the present view of the Iranian president; the ongoing and highly public friction between Rouhani’s moderate-minded camp and Fars is proof enough of that. But the fact that there are people anywhere within the Iranian system sympathetic enough to this viewpoint to let through an article like this is a reminder of how some hard-liners see the world.
A reader comments on Fisher’s column:
A quick check of the WhatDoesItMean? website (linked by FARS) would have established this report was not written by anyone at FARS, but reprinted word for word from that website which gives Sorcha Faal the byline. Though obviously re-circulated by FARS, this is very different from having been written by them. I think Mr. Fisher should have checked his sources more carefully.
So, the plot thickens. But if you are into such plots, please read the entire farce or FARS piece here.
Lead image: Screenshot of Fars News’ English edition.
