One of the oldest excuses for war is that the enemy is irredeemably evil. He worships the wrong god, has the wrong skin and language, commits atrocities, and cannot be reasoned with. The long-standing tradition of making war on foreigners and converting those not killed to the proper religion "for their own good" is similar to the current practice of killing hated foreigners for the stated reason that their governments ignore women's rights. From among the rights of women encompassed by such an approach, one is missing: the right to life, as women's groups in Afghanistan have tried to explain to those who use their plight to justify the war. The believed evil of our opponents allows us to avoid counting the non-American women or men or children killed. Western media reinforce our skewed perspective with endless images of women in burqas, but they never risk offending us with pictures of women and children killed by our troops and air strikes.
(The desecration of Martin Luther King--especially around the time that his birthday is celebrated--is one of my major objects of antipathy and scorn. I'll have more to say myself on Monday. This gift just fell into my lap. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
According to the Pentagon's lawyer, Martin Luther King Jr., if alive today, would view the US war on Afghanistan as both the act of a Good Samaritan and as necessary self-defense.
Jeh C. Johnson, the "Defense" Department's general counsel, said, on the one hand:
"I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack."
On the other hand, he also said this:
"I draw the [Good Samaritan] parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes. [They] have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people. Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness -- the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968."
Now, when President Barack Obama in 2009 gave a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he had the decency to admit that he was disagreeing fundamentally with King's position:
"There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.'...But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [King's and Gandhi's] examples alone."
To understand just how bad the 112th Congress, elected on November 2nd and taking office on January 3rd, is likely to be for peace on Earth, one has to understand how incredibly awful the 110th and 111th Congresses have been during the past four years and then measure the ways in which things are likely to become even worse.
There's no doubting that, when they feel like it, the current Administration have a certain way with words when characterizing its supporters; like Robert Gibbs'professional left.
When Scott Roeder shot Dr. George Tiller in church last year, media accounts described him as a lone wolf. Roeder acted alone on the day of the assassination, but he was part of a community of career anti-choice terrorists, as Amanda Robb reports in Ms. Magazine.
ACORN is shutting down because of a fraudulent video pimped by the corporate media. U.S. forces in Afghanistan have heroically laid seige to and conquered a fictional city, helping build the case for further escalation. A cable news channel has created a right-wing mass movement by pretending it already existed. Congressman Dennis Kucinich voted for a health insurance bill he believed would deprive more people of healthcare (and wealth and homes), because fraudulent reports had convinced his constituents of the opposite. The peace movement was defunded in November 2008, because of a fraudulent presidential election campaign. 71% of Americans believe Iran has nuclear weapons. 41% of Americans think the quality of the environment is improving. Has the power of the corporate media to overwhelm all before it begun to sink in yet?
The only subtitle appropriate for this diary is Dick Cheney's version of the hackneyed saying: "You can put all the lipstick you want on a pig. But at the end of the day, it's still a pig." Maybe he was talking about his boss at the time. Who knows. But the saying is also well suited to the Israel Hasbara Committee, in this portrayal by Phillip Weiss of Mondoweiss.
The Israel Hasbara Committee claims it is concerned with disseminating truth about Israel and the Jewish people. Hasbara in Hebrew means, in the neutral sense, explanation, but in the hard sense, it refers to propaganda, and when Israel is the issue these days, it most always refers to the hard view, propaganda.
The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn't do it to ourselves, and we shouldn't use fear for political purposes-scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex."
The notion that the military would actively propagate falsehoods in order to stir up war is something which most morally upstanding citizens find too reprehensible to even consider. However, as Sherlock Holmes put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
President Obama has shattered the budget record for first-year presidents -- spending nearly double what his predecessor did when he came into office and far exceeding the first-year tabs for any other U.S. president in history.
In fiscal 2009 the federal government spent $3.52 trillion -- $2.8 trillion in 2000 dollars, which sets a benchmark for comparison. That fiscal year covered the last three-and-a-half months of George W. Bush's term and the first eight-and-a-half months of Obama's.
That price tag came with a $1.4 trillion deficit, nearly $1 trillion more than last year. The overall budget was about a half-trillion more than Bush's for 2008, his final full fiscal year in office.
That's a big increase. But compared with other presidents' first years in office, Obama is running circles around them.
It goes on like that.
Fiscal 2009 started October 1, 2008 and ended September 30, 2009. This was Bush's last budget, beginning before the election.
It included a bit of the stimulus spending.
There is a propaganda drumbeat aimed at DC lawmakers, that the deficit is too large. Question, will they attack the largest item in the budget, spending about $1 trillion total on military? Or will they go after what our government spends to benefit us?
My question, whose job is it to counter this kind of thing? The Obama administration is just letting it hit them. In fact, instead of fighting back, they validate the perception that they have ballooned the deficit. The problem is this hurts the rest of us out here. What to do?
News is 'news' in our corporatacracy. Currently, for example, we have the Israeli-Warmongers-Only-Perspective 'News'. See below for how the release of a UN report on the war criminal conduct on both sides of the Gaza war is widely headlined in the mainstream news (to see how news of 320 dead Gazan children in that massacre is handled (hint: 'not at all'), see NPR's Linda Gradstein):
Where the Iranian spokesperson is allowed to dispel the headline's glaring implication in paragraph 20:
Javanfekr said Iran is ready to face the six powers and "during the talks we will definitely speak of banning nuclear arms globally because it is not a problem for us as we do not possess any nuclear arms."
So, obviously 'nuclear power' means 'nuclear power power'. Some of you got your war on before you realized that, right? That was the intent.
Meanwhile, McClatchy continues to be a source of news. Here it provides some reality on the domestic side, first the real health care catastrophe:
Richard Silverstein writes (link below excerpt): The hasbara brigade strikes again! You always hear about Israeli attempts at media manipulation. Everyone knows it's going on but usually the process happens through dedicated volunteers like those involved with Giyus. Now, we know that the Israeli foreign ministry itself is orchestrating propaganda efforts designed to fill news websites with pro-Israel arguments and information.
A friend has received the following e mail which documents both the efforts and the agency that originated them. The solicitation to become a propagandist also includes a list of media links which the ministry would like flooded with pro-Israel comments:
Dear friends,
We hold the military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net. The ministry of foreign affairs is putting great efforts in balancing the media, but we all know it's a battle of numbers. The more we post, blog, talkback, vote - the more likely we gain positive sentiment.
I was asked by the ministry of foreign affairs to arrange a network of volunteers, who are willing to contribute to this effort. If you're up to it you will receive a daily messages & media package as well as targets.
If you wish to participate, please respond to this email.
My friend did so and received this official communique from the ministry with talking points about Operation Solid Lead which s/he was to use in her/his propaganda efforts. Here are the links s/he was asked to respond to:
If you visit any of those articles you will identify the hasbaraniks easily through the pseudo-polite style they adopt and the programed arguments they advance.
Remember when the defense department was paying public relations companies to insert articles praising the Iraq war in U.S. newspapers? There rightly was a media uproar about the manipulation. We'll see whether the same happens over this.
I just hope the foreign ministry doesn't get a pass on this one. They view this as maximizing their efforts to "explain" Israel's position in the world media. I view it as a cynical attempt to flood the web and news media with favorable flackery in a vain attempt to tilt the war effort favorably toward Israel. Not only does it do Israel a disservice, it stains every legitimate effort that the ministry might make to explain Israel to the world, since no one will believe a word it says knowing it engages in such outright propaganda efforts.
Because Republican ideals seem to suddenly be up in the air, Fox News has had some trouble figuring out how to package their propaganda. They finally admitted their confusion on their Website.
After the revealing New York Times front-page article surfaced, exposing the Pentagon's role in disseminating war-propaganda in the mainstream media, the Pentagon announced it was suspending the program. This occurrence brings to light two lessons:
1.) A little media exposure of the truth goes a long way
2.)We must continue to fight for our rights to access un-biased, fact-based information pertaining to our individual and national security.
As an Internet Organizer for Progressive Future, I've been busily spreading the otherwise buried reports of the atrocities and abuses committed by military contractors in Iraq. As outraged as they made me, I had to wonder why these stories failed to reach the mainstream American public. Now I know why.
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