An extract: “Whereas Arab violence generates adrenalin-pumping headlines and is mostly reported outside any serious context — e.g., the U.S. devastation of Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Koran burnings, the ongoing drone assassinations — the violence that emerges from U.S. policy is softened with so much context it’s often a struggle to figure out if anything happened at all.”
By Robert C. Koehler
COTO Report
The Saturday headline in the Wall Street Journal was: “Anti-U.S. Mobs on Rampage.”
The next day, a NATO airstrike killed eight women collecting firewood in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an event that garnered virtually zero mainstream U.S. headlines.
Somewhere in the gap between these two phenomena — the overheated news about our violent, irrational enemies in the Middle East and the silence surrounding our war and occupation of the region — lies American politics, values, the presidential race, the national identity. Beyond that gap lies the truth about who we are, and only when we have access to it does the future turn into creative possibility and peace become possible.
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