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Last week (23rd Oct.) The Guardian issued an 8-page pull-out entitled ‘The war logs: Iraq’. “Great,” I thought, “Iraq hasn’t been forgotten and now a major broadsheet is going to tell the truth over eight pages.” My interest was instantly vaporised when I read the line ‘a sectarian civil war merged with a war of “resistance”…’ Oh, the arrogance and stupidity of those quotation marks! So the most powerful country in the world illegally invades an oil-rich country and the people there are meant to just accept this? Is that what those quotation marks mean? Or do they imply that anyone opposing the illegal occupation with weapons is simply mad and murderous? Rant over. Now I’ll quote from an email David Edwards sent on 30 September 2009 to Terence Blacker, columnist at the Independent: ‘The British media really are complicit in terrible crimes against people and planet…The fact is that media corporations are hierarchical, in fact totalitarian, organisations. Control resides entirely at the top – there’s no democracy, no sharing of power. It is actually one of the wonders of the modern world that a collection of private media corporations can combine together to persuade the public to wage war on a country like Iraq, while the public has essentially no ability to challenge that private propaganda. Media power, although immense, is almost completely unaccountable.’* |
Archive for October, 2010
The Guardian’s Iraq war logs: questionable resistance, questionable journalism
10.29
Annie Lennox – when caring means ‘antisemitism’
10.18
Just been reading an Observer magazine piece about Annie Lennox. This bit made my eyes widen:
‘I was critical of Israel’s policy of bombing Gaza,” she explains, “that was populated by mainly children in a space where they couldn’t escape from. I said that it was not the way forward to peace.” However some felt that, in attending the demonstration against Israel, she was effectively supporting the Palestinian Islamists, Hamas, a suggestion she flatly rejected. Even so, she was accused of naivety and even antisemitism.’ [1]
Is the word ‘Islamist’ a lazy euphemism for ‘terrorist’? I reckon so. And who was accusing Annie Lennox of naivety and antisemitism, Andrew Anthony? I expect it was those anti-human people who think nothing of repeatedly providing justifications for the bombing of innocent Palestinians. But I might be wrong…
Meanwhile, while I’m ranting, the latest Gaza aid convoy is making good progress… [2]
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/10/annie-lennox-eurythmics-christmas-cornucopia-universal-child
[2] http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/10/20101013203915141175.html
Obama: The Audacity of Lies
10.01
In the New Statesman’s ’50 people who matter today’ feature (NS, 27/9/10) there is speculation that Barack Obama might ‘secure his place as a great president’ and no mention of the war crimes that he’s involved in right now. [1] On the adjacent page Hugo Chavéz is said to have ‘a wavering commitment to human rights’ and it is speculated that he might ‘one day live up to his firebrand rhetoric’. Let’s judge both on their actions not their rhetoric. Obama has sanctioned, escalated and repeatedly justified war crimes in countries he has no right to interfere in, yet apparently he is a man of peace and might turn out to be great.
Here’s Obama, man of peace, being quoted in The Guardian recently:
‘Obama conspicuously did not talk of a military option. “I don’t take war lightly…I was opposed to the war in Iraq. I am somebody who’s interested in resolving issues diplomatically.”’ [2]
How does he get away with such blatant lies?! He goes on…
“Understandably, Israel is very concerned when the president of a country, a large country near them, states that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.”
Hasn’t this one been cleared up enough times? According to Professor Juan Cole, ‘Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for “this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.”’ [3]
Obama says:
“We have no interest in meddling, in the rights of people that choose their own government, but we will speak out forcefully when we see governments abusing and oppressing their own people.”
No interest in meddling?!? What, as in no meddling in other countries thousands of miles away from your own? Of course not, Mr Obama, there’s absolutely no evidence that the US is meddling in other countries…
[1] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2010/09/laurie-penny-progress-harman
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/24/barack-obama-mahmoud-ahmadinejad-un
[3] http://www.juancole.com/2007/06/ahmadinejad-i-am-not-anti-semitic.html