Image by Julio Martinez via Flickr
This is inspired by a COTOL post “Blaming the Muslims” By Robert C. Koehler.
It specifically deals with the recent Norway incident involving Anders Behring Breivik but raises general issues regarding who actually instigates terrorist acts, who benefits from them, who gets the blame and the culpability of the media in mis-reporting and sometimes downright lying.
We all need to ask ourselves ‘why is it so’? To believe the mainstream media is to risk ever knowing the truth about the real world. To believe government, (any government), issued information without considering their agenda(s), is to risk being brainwashed.
There invariably are ulterior motives, the least likely of which are to be of benefit to the public.
The war machine, inspired by several interests but put into practice by the US and now NATO, is founded on false premises and kept alive by the lie that Al Qaeda and Islamic jihadists are threatening the world. Certainly they are threatening the Western practitioners who have invaded their countries, why would they not defend their own people?
Anyway, this is not intended to be a definitive coverage of what is largely the farce of the ‘War on Terror‘, but is to highlight the failure of the media to provide correct information to the public. To appeal to the public to expand their sources of information to deep inside the internet sources of real information. Not believe what I say personally but believe that the truth is out there if you are interested.
From Robert’s article:
For me, the question in the wake of any coolly planned slaughter, whether political or personal, becomes: How do we minimize our collective risk from armed true believers and the righteously aggrieved?
The day after the tragedy, the mayor of Oslo stated the complex answer as simply as possible: “I don’t think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect.”
But the major media outlets, so vast in their reach and full of themselves, spent little time grappling with the implications of this comment or thrashing in horrified uncertainty beyond their political comfort zones. They became predictably preoccupied with the lesser question of Breivik’s political agenda, focusing much attention on the 1,500-page “manifesto” he had written (which his killing rampage successfully publicized), about the liberation of Europe from the clutches of non-believers and liberal accomodationists.
In other words, the major media failed utterly —as usual — to look at the issue of violence itself, and its causes, and lapsed into analyses of viewpoints and sides. The sinister irrelevance of this analysis — at least in the absence of deeper and more complex coverage — was revealed in the first wave of mistaken commentary, before it was known precisely who had perpetrated the mayhem. Some pundits, reporters and editorial writers jumped the gun and blamed . . . OMG, Muslim terrorists! And the word went out.
“Norway certainly did not buy itself much grace from the jihadis for staying out of the Iraq war, or for Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s demand that Israel open its borders with Gaza, or for his calls for a Palestinian unity government between Fatah and its terrorist cousin Hamas.”
Thus the Wall Street Journal, in its lead editorial in the first edition of the paper to come out after the shootings (as pointed out by David Dayen at FireDogLake), immediately began grinding an anti-Islam political axe, embarking on a neocon clash-of-civilizations diatribe. Oh the innocence of the freedom-loving West! And Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, reminding us that the Bush-Cheney doctrine lives, used the occasion to call for more defense spending so we could continue to fight al-Qaida.
Fox News, not so surprisingly, was quick to blame Muslim terrorists for the Norway killings, and juxtaposed a false news story asserting this with a report bashing the planned Islamic community center near the site of the World Trade Center.
And even the New York Times had a hard time letting go of the idea that Muslim terrorists killed the Norwegian teens, or at least acted as spiritual brethren and teachers for evildoers with other political agendas. Their point was that all evil is lumped on the other side of the war on terror. No matter who killed the Norwegians, Muslim extremists are the permanent bad guys. And our hands and our wars are clean.
This is worse than bad reporting. It’s a massive cover-up of the roots of human violence. What if Breivik, who demonstrated, after all, a capacity for meticulous planning, had managed to steal or, what the heck, build a drone aircraft, and had bombed Utoya Island from the safety of his apartment complex? Would that have exonerated the Muslims?
Related articles
- Poll: U.S. Muslims don’t back terror (politico.com)
- Funny How Knee-Jerk Reacton To Oslo Attacks Was To Blame Muslim Jihadists (alan.com)
- Where are all the Islamic terrorists? (oup.com)
- Looking No Further Than the Muslim Community (desertpeace.wordpress.com)
- The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of “Terrorism” – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com (underpaidgenius.com)
- Coming out of vacation to post this brilliant piece by Glen Greenwald (miscellany101.wordpress.com)
- Who Commits Terrorism? (tipggita32.wordpress.com)
