Western media have demonised Iran for 40 years, especially in the US. A selective memory of recent history greatly helps the tone and content of that demonisation.

July 3, 1988: the day the US downed an Iranian Airbus A300, killing 290 civilians Norbert Schiller · AFP · Getty

Imagine an Iranian drone had been shot down over Florida or just off its coast. Rather than arguing about its exact position, we would surely be shocked at its presence 11,000km from Iran. But on 20 June, Iran downed a US drone that had come close to its territory (according to the Pentagon) or violated its airspace (according to Tehran), and almost nobody asked if the US military presence in the Persian Gulf was justified.

Gregory Shupak, a media expert at the University of Guelph-Humber in Canada, warns that in the current escalation between the US and Iran, ‘presenting Iran as a threat, nuclear or otherwise, over and over again, carries the clear message that it must be confronted... It’s much more accurate to say that the US is a threat to Iran than the opposite; after all, it’s the US government that is destroying Iran’s economy through sanctions that limit Iranians’ access to food and medicine, while surrounding Iran with military bases and land, sea and air forces. Iran has done nothing remotely comparable to the US’.

This inversion of reality, which favours US military might, is strengthened by selective political memory and by the media’s lies of omission. Who in the West remembers Iran Air Flight 655? On 3 July 1988 the USS Vincennes, patrolling in Iranian territorial waters, downed an airliner with 290 passengers en route for Dubai. The US initially denied responsibility, then claimed that the Vincennes was in international waters and that the Airbus, which it had mistaken for a fighter jet, was descending towards it in a threatening manner. The US later admitted that both statements were untrue, expressed its ‘deep regret’ and paid $61.8m to the families of the victims.

Though Flight 655 was soon forgotten (except in Iran), a similar incident long remained fresh in western memories. On 1 September 1983 a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor downed a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 carrying 269 passengers from New York to (...)