Residents light candles in their front yard f
Residents light candles in their front yard fReuters

Iran’s state-run PressTV, which has developed a well-earned reputation for publishing incendiary anti-Israel conspiracy theories, ran a story Tuesday espousing the belief that Israeli "death squads" are to blame for the Sandy Hook shooting.

Michael Harris, a one-time Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, cited “Israeli revenge” in, what he called, “the terrorist attack in Connecticut.” 

Harris, who came in third place in the 2006 Republican primary, which Len Munsil won before falling to Democrat Janet Napolitano, is now the Phoenix-based financial editor of Veterans Today, a conspiracy-minded “military and foreign affairs journal” whose editorial board includes former Pakistani and Russian spies, The Hill reported.

“The facts are now becoming obvious,” Harris told PressTV. “This is another case where Israel has chosen violence and terrorism where their bullying in Washington has failed. Israel believes the US ‘threw them under the bus,’ particularly after the recent Gaza war, allowing Israel to be humiliated in the United Nations. Their response was to stage a terror attack, targeting America in the most hideous and brutal way possible, in fact, an Israeli ‘signature attack,’ one that butchers children, one reminiscent of the attacks that killed so many children in Gaza?”

“They target the innocent, they target the children, they target women and they avoid the issue because they are angry,” Harris continued. “They did not get their way and now Palestine has standing at the UN and Israel is going to be subject to the international criminal courts and their leadership is going to be taken to task.”

Press TV followed up by running a column written by Gordon Duff, the senior editor at Veterans Today, summarizing Harris's points and pointing to Jewish opposition to former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) as secretary of Defense as further proof of an Israeli conspiracy.

“Washington is terrified of Israel, their powerful lobby and its relationship with organized crime,” Duff wrote. “Now, a key former Senator, Chuck Hagel, who has helped expose this fact, is likely to be nominated as the secretary of defense, despite vocal protests from Israel.”

Max Fisher of The Washington Post exposes the blatant fallacies and misguided theories propagated by the Iranian news agency, writing that the “PressTV story is sad and upsetting, mostly for its incredible insensitivity but also, to a lesser degree, for the obvious bankruptcy of Iranian propaganda.”

“[B]eyond the Mike Harrisses of the world,” writes Fisher,  “it doesn’t seem likely to exactly turn American opinion away from Israel or toward Iran. And yet here it is, outrageous, offensive, and clearly counterproductive, for all the world to see.”