Anti-Zionism and the Iranian Press

Abstract

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, anti-Zionism has remained an important ideological building block of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This paper examines the manifestation of anti-Zionism in the English-language Iranian Press in order to elucidate how this ideology is ‘exported’ to an international readership. The paper presents the results of an empirical study of two leading English-language Iranian newspapers: The Tehran Times and Press TV. The study uses critical discourse analysis and draws upon tenets of Social Representations Theory and the notion of Delegitimization from social psychology. The following themes are outlined: (i) “Problematizing Israel’s right to exist”; (ii) “Unveiling the global Zionist conspiracy”; and (iii) “Leading global anti-Zionism – the declining ‘Zionist regime’”. Both anti-Zionist and antisemitic representations are observable in the corpus. The paper identifies three key components of the delegitimization process in textual representations of Israel, and discusses possible implications of outgroup delegitimization for identity, emotion and action.