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‘Bomb Iran’ Is the Parody Song That Just Won’t Die
For four decades, a catchy riff on the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” has helped normalize violence in the Middle East.
In April 2007, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain stood onstage during a primary campaign stop in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, blew his nose, and fielded a question about sending “an airmail message” to the “real problem” in the Middle East: Iran. Rather than an off-the-cuff riff, his joke was a reference to an existing parody song that, improbably, traces the story of the past four decades of U.S.-Iran relations — up to and including the recent bombing by the U.S. of three nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21. In response to the U.S. granting asylum to the brutal and recently deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — whom it had previously installed by engineering a coup of a democratically elected leader — a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans captive.
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