Second Vermont Republic's Thomas Naylor Has Given Repeated Interviews Over the Years to Iran's State Run "Press TV"

I've blogged in the past about Thomas Naylor's appearances on the racist, Holocaust denying, anti-Semitic and homophobic, to name just a few of the hatreds espoused there, Internet radio program hosted by the white supremacist League of the South honcho, James Edwards, called The Political Cesspool here and here.

It really should come as no surprise then that for years the Dixie singin' Thomas Naylor, baas of the Second Vermont Republic, has also been doing interviews with Iran's state run English news service, Press TV, which was launched in 2007 by Iranian President and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Press TV has established a reputation for providing a forum for Holocaust deniers, and while Naylor hasn't himself commented, that I can find, about the Holocaust, he's had an SVR advisory board member with long ties to the League of the South who's published Confederacy claptrap in a well known Holocaust denial publication, The Institute for Historical Review (IHR formerly was advertised on Edwards' Political Cesspool - small world!).

Press TV has a sordid history of taping the "confessions" of Iran's political prisoners in interrogation chambers, while Iranian security interrogators remain in the room to ensure that the prisoners stick to the "script."

"Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist, spent three months in prison after the Iranian election in 2009. Bahari, who made confessions under duress, told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that his taped confession was a fabricated show, coordinated by Iranian state television and certain press outlets close to the Iranian government..."

"One was a reporter from the IRIB Persian service, one was a reporter from the English language Press TV, and the other was a reporter from Fars News Agency. All three of them and I were reading from a script. The IRIB reporters read the interrogator’s questions. When I made a mistake, just like an interrogator, the reporter would say ‘It’s better if you say it this way.’”

"According to Bahari, there was complete coordination between his interrogators and the IRIB team. “The room where I was interviewed by Press TV was the same as my interrogation room. Only that during the taping, a red curtain was put up behind me and my interrogator sat behind the curtain making sure I spoke as they wished,” said Bahari."

Read the complete August 2010 report, "Iranian State TV Acts as an Arm of the Intelligence Apparatus" at the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran here

More on Press TV' "collu(sion) with the torture and illegal detention of (the) journalist" here

You can watch Naylor's two part secesher talking point interview here and here. In these October, 2009 interview segments Naylor repeats his oft told fiction that, in this telling, 11.5 to 12 percent of Vermont's registered voters support secession. Last year's result for his handpicked gubernatorial candidate, Dennis Steele, revealed how fraudulent Naylor's figure is; Steele's candidacy was rejected by more than 99% of Vermont's voters. The irony of Naylor's appearance on an Iranian propaganda outlet mere months after the Iranian government crushed public protests over the sham re-election of Ahmadinejad and the death of hundreds of demonstrators while Naylor was denouncing the US seems to have escaped the secesher Godfather. In one instance of a sniper's attack by a member of Ahmadinejad's Basij militia (government paramilitary) that has been called "probably the most widely witnessed death in human history," Neda Agha-Soltan was murdered for attempting to reach a demonstration a kilometer away from where she was shot. Rather than come to his senses and offer a belated condemnation over Ahmadinejad's many wicked crimes and state sanctioned murders of the peaceful election protesters, as well as the ongoing criminal executions of Iran's gay youth and citizens, Naylor issued this statement a couple of months after his Press TV interview:

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of the few leaders in the world who possesses the courage to confront the United States and Israel."

Source

If Time magazine named a Scumbag of the Year for 2009, Naylor surely would have been a finalist.

So, here are his entries for being the 2011 Time Scumbag of the Year, two more appearances attacking the US for an Iranian audience (February 11 and October 22) based on pieces he'd written, although for the Iranian listeners he threw in a little additional Jew-baiting, red meat:

"... the "Israeli lobby" essentially (has) hammer-lock control over the US government"

The gay genocide being perpetrated by his friends in the Iranian government shouldn't have come as news to Naylor in 2009 or this year since officials of Ahmadinejad's regime have been saying that gays"deserve to be tortured and executed" since 2007 and, for e-confirmation, Robert Cook, a Salon.com blogger suggests going to Google Images, "type in 'gay Iranians,' and you’ll see that most of the images are images of young Iranian men being hanged."

Additional sources of information about Press TV that Naylor should have consulted before contributing to Iran's propaganda machine are readily available from the Iranian democracy movement here and here. Or maybe he should have recalled the woman condemned to be "stoned" that blanketed the real press and Press TV's involvement in producing and airing her "voluntary" media confession or the condemnation from the world human rights community of Press TV's despicable act of working hand-in-hand with Iranian thugs.

For years the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force has funded the Lebanese Hezbollah militia in Iraq that have been killing Americans according to this CNN report:


I keep wondering if Naylor and the clowns in his Vermont secession movement can come up with anything dumber than they have in the past, and they seem incapable of disappointing in that regard.

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