Iran and the Badge – True or False?

Yesterday morning I noticed a picture of Jews from World War II wearing identification badges on the front page of the National Post newspaper. This, of course, caught my attention, so I stopped to read the leading story–Iran had past a law requiring all non-Muslims to wear an indemnifying badge. I was shocked. Why hadn’t I heard about this on the news this morning? Had the National Post managed to get a massive scoop?

Today I decided to look for a story about this online. I couldn’t remember which newspaper I had seen the story in yesterday, so I decided to try both CBC Newsworld and CNN. Strangely, neither of them had any stories about a dress code in Iran for non-Muslims. Hmmmm… what’s going on here? Sure, the National Post is a conservative newspaper (for Canada anyway), but they would check their facts before printing such an inflammatory story. Right?

Well, it turns out that their story was at the very least exaggerated, and at the very most outright false. I found this story on their site today: Iranian embassy denies dress code.

So what was the purpose of this story? Why did the National Post run it without checking to see if such a law really was in place? The fact that both stories ran together with a picture of a Jewish badge from WW2 says to me that they are trying to elicit feelings of anger. I still don’t understand their motivation, though.