The Professional Idiot On Iraq : We Won, We're Winning, We've Almost Won



By Darryl Mason

When you're a Murdoch media pro-war gatekeeper, you're not paid to be right, or even mildly accurate, you're there to maintain the illusion that war can achieve more than it costs, in treasure and life and dignity.

The Professional Idiot's very professional propaganda :

November 2, 2007 : "The Iraq War Has Been Won"

January 29, 2008 : "...the news about Iraq gets better..."

June 11, 2008 : "Challenges remain....the cost has been high..."

July 19, 2009 : "...Iraq is essentially won..."

From "We Won!" in November 2007, to 'We've Almost Won!' in July 2009.

Spin spin spin spin.

Whenever I see talk of "We're Winning This War!" or "We're Close To Victory!" I think about a hand-written sign I saw at a school students' anti-war rally in 2004. It read :

'War Is So 2oth Century.'

Reality Has A Hamas-Related Bias

By Darryl Mason

The Australian newspaper reveals there is outrage, from some, that Australians are angered and outraged now they are finally seeing the true horror of what Israel has done to Gaza on the evening news. The outrage that Australians are disgusted by what they see and hear about Gaza on the news is now becoming shrill :

Sure enough, some television programs did invite a token Israeli guest who tried to explain Israel's case. But the answers given seemed to be presented as propaganda, and the implication was that the only story to be believed was the Hamas narrative.

When news finally gets out about how those hundreds of women and children died in Gaza, the news takes on a 'Hamas narrative'. If you believe the stories from the UN, from the Red Cross, from the BBC, from CNN, from ABC, from the Murdoch media, from The Australian itself, about children hiding in UN safe houses and hospital being shelled by Israel, you are believing 'The Hamas Narrative'. It is implied.

Wow.

...the strategy has worked for Hamas: it produced the images that screamed from the front pages of newspapers and TV screens, pushing the buttons of people across the world.

Yes, why would people across the world have their buttons pushed by images like this?



Presumably, the preferred reaction to images of civilian slaughter by an Australian ally is to not have any buttons pushed at all.

It gets a little creepy.

Emotions cloud the context; the result is a circus.

Don't become emotional when you hear and see on the evening news that an Australian ally, an ally in the 'War On Terror', is slaughtering women and children by the hundreds.

By forgetting the context, voluntarily or not, much of the Western commentators have implied this: it is permissible for terror groups to use civilians as human shields, but not for a legitimate country to mistakenly kill civilians in the course of battling enemy.

The latter is being portrayed as a crime against humanity.

It usually is when hundreds of civilians are killed, and when it keeps happening, to UN buildings and schools, when the UN has told the legitimate country that those buildings belong the UN, and have civilians in them.

The worry about 'Western commentators' forgetting "the context" of how missiles tear off children's legs and shred their faces with shrapnel is misplaced concern. Those who have to sell Israel's side of the state terror attacks on Gaza have got far bigger problems than 'Western commentators' nosing around the words "war crimes".

When even the Murdoch media are running news caps like the one below, on News.com.au's main page and the Daily Telegraph online front page, for almost 48 hours, you've got a serious, devastating public relations disaster on your hands :

Apparently the people of Gaza got off lightly, writes Albert Dadon, founder and chairman of the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange :

The only surprise is the low number of civilian casualties in an area where 1.4 million Palestinians live....

1300 dead, more than 5000 wounded, thousands of buildings destroyed, including schools and hospitals, playgrounds bombed....

This is a result of the care with which Israel has operated.

Imagine the death toll if they didn't care?

Israel says 12 per cent of casualties are civilians, Hamas say 40 per cent. Whatever the percentage, it is a tragedy. But citing numbers and showing images while forgetting the context creates one more casualty: the truth.

I think you will find The Truth became a casualty in what Israel is doing to Gaza a long time ago.

The headline for the opinion piece quoted above, published in a newspaper, is extraordinary.

Images Of Bloodshed Obscure Truth

A newspaper is telling you not to trust the usually non-bloody images they allow you to see.

But even those images don't obscure the obvious truth of the bloodshed in Gaza, and who is responsible for it.

You've Got Your Notes, You've Been Briefed, Now Go Write Some Blogaganda

Iran! Hitler! Genocide! Iran! Hitler! Genocide! Iran! Hitler! Genocide!

Murdoch Media Pumps Incredible Pro-Iran War Propaganda

When you own 70% of Australia's city newspapers, and a fat market share of online news, you can shamelessly promote the next war that will earn you another few hundred million dollars via increased readership.

Smell the classic Murdoch stench of propaganda!


From here :

An Israeli Cabinet minister involved in the operation to kidnap Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann says the same tactic could be used to bring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to trial.

Rafi Eitan said Mr Ahmadinejad, who is aggressively pursuring nuclear technology and has repeatedly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, had to be brought for trial in The Hague.

"A man like Ahmadinejad who threatens genocide has to be brought for trial in The Hague," Mr Eitan said.

Asked if kidnapping was acceptable, Mr Eitan told the Associated Press: "Yes. Any way to bring him for trial in The Hague is a possibility.

"All options are open in terms of how he should be brought."

Mr Eitan, a former spy who is now a member of Israel's inner cabinet of ministers with security responsibilities, said he was expressing his own opinion.

Mr Eitan, 81, helped kidnap Eichmann from Argentina in 1960. Eichmann was tried and executed in Israel for carrying out Adolf Hitler's "final solution" to kill European Jews.

The Murdoch media fails to mention that Eitan was involved in the recruitment of at one least spy, who was jailed for stealing secrets from the United States government and military.

This trash also gets a run in The Australian, the supposed newspaper of record in these lands.

It's obvious the Murdoch media backs War On Iran over its nuclear energy programs, that only the United States and Israel ceaselessly claim are being used to create nuclear weapons.

It's nothing new. The pro-Iran war lobbyists and media regurgitators have been at this "Try DinnerJacket For Genocide" shriek since mid-2006.

Here's how Benjamin Netanyahu hysterically launched the "Iran = Genocide" media psy-op back then :

"We must cry Gevalt before the entire world. In 1938, Hitler didn't say he wanted to destroy [the Jews]; Ahmadinejad is saying clearly that this is his intention, and we aren't even shouting. At least call it a crime against humanity. We must make the world see that the issue here is a program for genocide."

The claim that the Iranian president declared he wanted to "wipe Israel off the map", thereby promising genocide against Jewish and Arab Israelis alike, has been thoroughly discredited, countless times.

It is the Pro-War crowd's version of the anti-Bush crowd's "plastic turkey".

And yet it appears in the Australian Murdoch media endlessly.

It's called propaganda, but it's also called Preparation, so if our allies Terror From The Sky bombs start killing thousands of Iranians while they're busy watching DVDs of The Sopranos and bopping along listening to Lil' Wayne on their iPods, you won't be too shocked, or surprised.

"Why are they killing Iranians?"

"Oh, I read about that in the Daily Telegraph. Iran's got nukes and want to wipe out Israel like Hitler or something."

This kind of 'journalism' is a fucking crime against humanity.