Major news organizations covering the extraordinary Flydubai incident have omitted a striking piece of context: five days earlier, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader warned that if Iranian aircraft could not use regional airports, nobody else should expect to fly either.

On September 25, Mohammad Mokhber, Iran’s former acting president and current adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared:

“Flight in the region is either free for all, or for no one.”

He added: “If Iran is denied the possibility of flight and access to airport services, no country in the region will have this possibility either.”

Days earlier, another senior Iranian official, Mohsen Rezaei, had issued a similar warning concerning neighboring airports.

Five days after Mokhber’s statement, a Flydubai aircraft carrying mostly Israelis from Dubai to Tel Aviv suffered an attempted hijacking. The captain was attacked, the aircraft rapidly lost altitude and the flight made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. The motive remains under investigation. There is no immediate evidence connecting Iran to the incident.

But Iran’s warning is missing from major coverage reviewed from Reuters, the Associated Press, the Guardian, Al Jazeera and The National. Reuters had itself reported Mokhber’s statement when he made it.

That omission is difficult to understand. A senior Iranian official had publicly warned that regional aviation could be disrupted. Five days later, an Emirati aircraft carrying over one hundred Israelis is put at risk by an Omani pilot.

Consider that Al Jazeera and the Guardian continue to say that Israel is at war with Iran even though that hasn’t been true for many months. They insert Israel into the war against Iran while they leave Iran out of the discussion about a potential killing of nearly two hundred Israelis.

Readers are being lied to by acts of insertion and omission, especially about Israel and Iran. It is critical to understand those basic facts and begin to ask why.