By Latheef Farook
It is often said that ‘Whoever controls the media controls the world’. This is more pertinent to today’s world than ever in view of the extremely decisive and destructive role played by the Western media in influencing people worldwide.
The media today is controlled by the US - led Europe. Almost all leading media outlets which feed information to the world remain in the West and are owned and controlled by corporate conglomerates. Their power has been such that they not only shape public opinion worldwide, they even make and unmake governments from the United States, United Kingdom to France and the rest of the world.
According to reports, six Zionist Jewish companies own 96 % of the Western media and thus play the powerful role of shaping world opinion to suit their agendas. It was this power of lies, deceptions and disinformation, which made even Americans pay the price for collective stupidity.
The degree to which the Americans are manipulated was revealed by Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache, who once said; “You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American President can be in a position to challenge us, even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…”
This is the state of affairs in the United States, the most powerful empire in the human history, which is devastating the world with its wars to plunder the world.
However, the Middle East remains one of the most distorted and demonized regions in the world where injustice inflicted upon people and their decades old sufferings remain ignored by the Western media.
Throughout the last century, the Western media twisted events in the Middle East to suit the Zionist agenda - first to justify the establishment of the racist State of Israel and then to dominate the entire Middle East.
Cover up Zionist crimes
As part of this conspiracy, the Western media covered up Zionist crimes and the expulsion of Palestinians from their traditional homes and lands to establish a Jewish State in Palestinian lands. Over the years media has played a crucial role in getting recognition for Israel, while Palestinians remain demonized as terrorists.
This situation continued even after the establishment of the State of Israel. For example, during the June 1967 war of aggression, Israel captured Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and South Lebanon. This war was always projected by the Western media as a war imposed on Israel. However, forty-five years later, today, Israeli officials admitted that it was a war they planned and executed.
Since June 1967, Israel, in violation of all canons of human decency, not only oppress and brutalize Palestinians but also build hundreds of thousands of settlements on occupied Palestinian lands exclusively for Jews brought in from Russia and other places. This heinous crime was done with the American tax payers’ money. The American media ensured that Americans remain ignorant of how their wealth was misused by their governments to perpetrate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
However, the Western media, which claim to be promoting freedom, democracy, human rights and other cherished human values, turn a blind eye to all these crimes including occupation, atrocities against Palestinians, illegal settlements and the like.
Rarely does an article appear in the Western media on the plight of Palestinians driven by Zionist gangs with British cooperation to refugee camps in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Syria and Lebanon where they languish in appalling conditions even today. Instead never a day passes without an article hailing Israel in one way or the other. When the Western media ignores, automatically, even the media in the developing countries, extension of Western media, too ignore these issues. Mainstream media in Sri Lanka is no exception to this trend. In the post-Soviet era the role of the media has become more dominant than ever. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall crumbled and the almost half a century of Cold War ended, in 1989 the hope of the world was that the planet earth would no more be a killing field but a peaceful and prosperous one.
People all over the world dreamt of a conflict free world because the Soviet Union, described as the ‘Evil Empire’, was no more and the US, claimed itself the guardian angel of democracy, freedom, human rights and all such cherished human values emerged as the most powerful sole super power, pledging to spread democracy and democratic values.
Corporate agenda
However, the world was in for the worst ever shock as this very same United States and Europe, run by corporate conglomerates such as arms industries, oil companies, financial oligarchies and other corporate conglomerates, had their own agenda to control and plunder the resources of the world .
Once again the task of misguiding the world to justify their hidden agendas was entrusted to the media. The result was a carefully planned and executed fierce media campaign misleading the world.
For example, to plunder the Gulf oil wealth, the US triggered the Kuwaiti crisis in July 1990 when it used its Ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, to trick deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, promoted by America during the Iraq-Iran war, to invade Kuwait. Once Iraqi troops entered Kuwait, the US, UK and France and the Zionists set in motion their conspiracy to destroy Iraq and the oil rich Gulf countries and loot the oil wealth of both.
According to reports, the US dropped more than 200,000 tons of all types of destructive bombs killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. An Arab League report stated that the Arab world lost more than US $620 billion besides creating deep bitterness between the Gulf countries and Iraq. Saudi Arabia, the so called guardian of holy cities of Makkah and Madina, alone spent US $60 billion.
Who benefited? Certainly arms manufacturers and others in the West including politicians who sold their souls and served as corporate mercenaries in waging wars against innocent people.
It was often said that the media won this war long before the military did. In the aftermath of the controversial and mysterious 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the media unleashed a fierce and vicious campaign blaming the Muslims without any basis, for the tragedy.
Under this campaign, every Muslim with a beard and every Muslim woman with a scarf were projected as terrorists to be killed. Exploiting the mood of the nation, President George Bush invaded within 27 days the war battered Afghanistan and turned this impoverished nation into a slaughter house.
Some British reports estimated that more than 50,000 people were massacred during the early stages. They toppled the Taliban Government and installed a puppet regime, which now helps the US implement their designs on the region and Central Asia. America established around 20 military bases all over Afghanistan covering the entire region. However, no media speaks about the American military designs on Afghanistan and the region.
In its wake, once again the media began an intensive disinformation campaign to justify Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, an almost developed country where people enjoyed a very high standard of living. So far more than a million and half people, most of them innocent civilians were killed, hundreds of thousands of innocent young girls and women were raped, more than four million became refugees within the country and more than two million ended up as refugees in Syria and Jordan while the Israeli Jews who went around killing Iraqi professionals and intellectuals got a firm footing in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region.
The US and UK-sponsored United Nations sanctions, supported by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries and described by the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday as ‘genocide’, killed over a million innocent Iraqi civilians. What did the Western media do when the United Nations imposed sanctions which killed more than 500,000 children in Iraq justified by former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright as an exercise worthy to achieve their political goal? Where are the pictures of raped and killed women and men who were tortured and slaughtered only because they happened to be Iraqis? Where was the Western media when the US troops, using banned napalm bombs, indiscriminately burnt and killed fasting Iraqi men, women and children in the Iraqi city of Fallujah? Perhaps two paragraphs buried in page six of their journals.
Where are the reports and pictures of unfortunate American soldiers returning home in coffins from Iraq? What is the plight of their loved ones? Governments won’t allow the media to highlight these morbid aspects fearing a backlash. Where is journalistic honesty?
When the Arabic TV channel Al Jazeera tried to highlight these crimes, the US tried to bomb and silence this independent voice.
Under this global campaign, the US got Ethiopia to invade Somalia to loot its oil, wealth. From the sea coasts of Somalia to Middle East and Central Asia there is a large reservoir of oil which the US and Europe wanted to plunder as they started doing in Iraq. The world will never know these designs due to the Western media’s disinformation campaign underway in full swing.
The US and European media aggressively spread disinformation and shaped public opinion to help their governments implement their military, political and economic designs on Muslim countries. However, the Muslim world, mostly ruled by corrupt dictators, was not prepared or equipped to meet the challenges by Western media campaign.
The hate campaign had caused serious damage to the image of Muslims all over the world as misguided Americans and Europeans and their followers started to detest Muslims.
The US media
This destructive campaign continues to date distorting anything and everything about Muslims and Islam .Commenting on the performance of the US corporate commercial news media after 9/11, a US journalist described it as “the most profound and dangerous failure of journalism in my lifetime”.
He said that “performance of journalists in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq was so abysmal that the country’s top two daily newspapers, the Washington Post and The New York Times, were eventually forced to engage in a bit of self-criticism, albeit shallow and inadequate. The US news media’s willingness to serve as a largely uncritical conduit for the lies, half-truths, and distortions the administration used to create the pretext for war, showed just how easily journalists can become de facto agents of a state propaganda campaign, which in this case mobilized public support for an illegal war”.
He added “that the lies that led to the Iraq War are only part of a bigger story: The Bush administration’s manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to extend and intensify the long-standing US programme of empire building. No publication or network in the mainstream of US journalism has offered an independent, critical analysis of that programme. Only a few journalists, mostly on the margins, have even dared to take a crack at it. The best consistent work has been in the foreign press or the alternative media in the US”.
The Western media remain complicit in a crime against humanity of immense proportions, one that dwarfs any crimes committed by various political leaders who have been targeted for destruction by the American ruling elite in recent years. In reality, the US media’s disinformation operation is among the most striking and significant expressions of the collapse of American democracy.
No country’s media is more cowardly, or more artful in churning out the official line and excluding any serious criticism or analysis, than that of the USA. It would be absurd to hold up the British media as a model of conscientious and objective reporting, but even there, articles occasionally appear that provide some insight into the reality of the situation in Iraq.
Unfortunately for them, despite all their proud claims, the Western media is not even free to insist on freedom of speech on matters dealing with Jews and the holocaust. The iron grip of the international Jewry on US and Europe has been so great that in many European countries such as Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia, there are holocaust denial laws in force making it a criminal offence to deny the Holocaust. So much so, that many European countries wouldn’t even allow an anti-Semitic book, however accurate it may be, to be published. In fact, in November 2005, Austrian authorities refused bail to British historian David Irving who was subjected to holocaust denial charges for refuting the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz in two speeches he gave in Austria more than a decade and a half ago in 1989. He also argued that the scale of extermination was exaggerated; an offence which, if found guilty, carries a ten-year jail sentence.
If this is how the Jewish political rights were protected, the inevitable question is why the Western media cannot learn to respect other religions and cultures. As rightly pointed out by Terry Davis, the head of leading human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe: “All freedoms, including the freedom of speech, come with responsibility”.
Now, US and Europe bombed and destroyed Libya under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Cities after cities together with their modern infrastructure were destroyed; hundreds of thousands of people who lived in peace were simply slaughtered under the watchful eyes of the world. Today, this richest country in Africa is a wasteland where the societies remain torn apart.
Do the Western media highlight these heinous crimes by US and Europe?
The West, in general, and their leaders in particular, rush to honour a Muslim who would criticize Islam out of sheer ignorance. The warm reception at the White House by former President George Bush given to Salman Rushdie, who wrote ‘The Satanic Verses’ and the way the Indian media hailed the Bangladeshi Muslim outcast Taslima Nasreen as a celebrity, were two such classic examples. This in a nutshell has been the role of the Western media, which remains an integral part of the Western war machine.
