Galloway - media slurs, as ever

George Galloway's amazing election victory in Bradford has been predictably trashed by the Westminster clique and its service media.

While talking party heads uttered automated excuses and dismissals - 'lessons learnt', 'must take notice', 'one-off win' etc - much of the liberal media derided Galloway's historic win as 'exploitation' of the Muslim community and an 'opportunist playing of the race card'.

The Guardian's Patrick Wintour was out early with a scurrilously-worded script full of cheap slurs on Galloway's 'Islamic-grounded' victory:

"It appeared that the seat's Muslim immigrant community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway's fundamentalist call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis."

The piece, replete with racist insinuations, was quickly amended (after being flagged-up on the Media Lens board). Thankfully, the excellent News Sniffer site was alert to the Guardian's cover-up, recording, for useful posterity, the hasty edit.

Meanwhile, the BBC's Nick Robinson could only see:

"An extraordinary result but surely a one-off political coup by a political one-off. George Galloway has proved that he has the charisma, the celebrity and the message to appeal to the young, the disillusioned and the angry particularly in the Muslim community."

Not, of course, an appeal to the rational, the peace-seeking and the wider Bradford community looking for credible alternatives to the austerity-imposing, warmongering parties.

The strong inference across most reportage was that Iraq, Afghanistan and other imperialist wars are now 'only a real issue in places like Bradford'. Nor, on Galloway's supposed 'race card' politics, was there much mention that it was Labour who had put up the Muslim candidate, Imran Hussein.

Later, in a perniciously-loaded interview, Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News tried to browbeat Galloway with grudging, pedantic questions on 'previous notable swings' and 'undue comparisons' with the Arab Spring, an effort, as with previous media hatchet jobs ('Paxman video' here) duly seen-off by Galloway.

All of which reveals the darker nature of such self-esteemed reporters.

In contrast to Galloway's patient demeanour, the immediate instinct of the reporting herd is to move into hostile mocking mode. People like Galloway bring an effervescence, a colour, a charisma that seems both to fascinate and threaten the 'professional journalist'.

The liberal commentariat, in particular, appear intimidated by Galloway's populist politics and anti-war positions, a highly-sensible, rather than 'controversial', set of readings that sit uncomfortably with their own safely media-honed 'correspondence.'

And so, Galloway, misrepresented as ''one of the most divisive figures in Westminster politics", has again become the subject of every tortuous cliche, from the Big Brother 'cat performance' to the 'indefatigability' quote.

On cue, Galloway was also traduced across the media as a 'friend of dictators'. Yet, never do we hear similar discussion of Cameron, Obama and their like being loyal friends of dictators in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Middle East regimes, not to mention the special protection reserved for Netanyahu, the region's most murderous villain.

If only our 'vanguard-liberal' media would speak with probing honesty about the real controversial politicians and war criminals in our midst.

John

Update: some more Guardian smears.

Blackening Assad, whitening Cameron and Obama

David Cameron flies into Washington to discuss the 'three crucial issues' of Afghanistan, Iran and Syria.

We hear pious words about 'getting the job finished', of 'blocking a nuclear threat' and of 'helping to prevent a slaughter'.

The 'special relationship' is dutifully reaffirmed as Dave and Barack eat burgers together at the basketball game, both good fellas' upholding America's and Britain's common 'humanitarian values'.

And, on cue, British state media duly 'report' the script. 

Do Nick Robinson, Mark Mardell and their BBC associates even deserve the basic entitlement 'journalists'? What they say and convey is so routinely, so obediently, pro-establishment, so removed from any semblance of analytical integrity, it might reasonably shame Pravda.

From illegal invasions to proxy coups, here are two countries directly responsible for the worst warmongering catastrophes on the planet, two super-imperialist entities with not the slightest right to claim 'moral intervention'.

But, why might the 'BBC's finest', flying on the PM's plane, drag up such awkward, core realities when there's so many more 'diplomatic' things to say on the 'cool chemistry' between the Camerons and Obamas?

Sometimes, watching the fawning panoply that passes for 'foreign correspondence', the truly sobering thought occurs: how do they actually manage to maintain this staggering deception?

And so it is with the actual 'coverage' of the wider Western war agenda. All 'journalistic' veneer, no critical substance.

On the issue of Syria, the mainstream media is awash with atrocities committed by Assad. All fair reporting of regime-directed killing, one might reasonably say, particularly given the accompanying appeals from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

Yet, they, along with the Western mainstream media, have amplified a convenient headline narrative, failing to report the complexities of the conflict, the multi-competing forces, the manoeuvring of favoured regimes like Saudi Arabia and, above all, the West's own pernicious agenda.

Where amongst all the damning columns on the Assad regime is the key story of Nato's dark 'interventionist' intent? As Wikileaks-released emails from the Pentagon-linked Stratfor agency confirm, US/Nato forces have been operating inside Syria all along seeking to destabilise Assad.

Which begs related questions of a media with so much nuanced information at its disposal. Why isn't the conflict reported as an effective civil war? Who is arming the opposition? Who, beyond the Free Syrian Army, are the opposition? Why are the media only citing selective opposition 'sources'? What responsibility does the FSA bear for the killing and casualties? Do the majority of Syrians, even those not supporting Assad, really want regime change?

Fair presentation of those questions would be in the public interest, but it wouldn't suit the Manichean, black-and-white view the West wants promoted.

Also, what's the true reason for vilifying Russia and China? For all their own vested interests, both are still rightly resisting any Security Council mandate that facilitates Western force.

Only rare, yet still marginal, voices within the liberal media like Jonathan Steele are helping to separate fact from stylised fiction.

Meanwhile, the Guardian, in its sanctimonious proselytising for the 'liberal West', is running a series of stories on the leaked Assad emails. If authentic, they cast Assad and his wife in no great light. But why, one wonders, is the Guardian making such a splash about such innocuous details? What kind of tabloid-type message is it sending with stories like The Assads at war: killing and shopping?

Imagine a similar headline on the PM and his wife in Washington: 'The Camerons at war: killing and entertaining'.

Only the Assads and other Western enemies, it seems, are capable of living lavishly, indifferent to their war crimes, while 'our' criminality, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine and elsewhere is treated as 'intervention' and 'conflict management', the state executives of those high crimes, from Blair to Cameron, deferred to as political celebrities.

All of which - as with the fatuous Kony 2012 production, drawing-in eager Congressmen and celebs - lends itself to a glossed-up, simplified line on 'Western-good-guys-needed-to-oust-bad-guy-despots'.

As Sharmine Narwani asks:

"“Hollywood” in Syria? Oh yes. Scene-setting the likes of which we have not yet seen outside of celluloid fiction. Delivering lines to a rapt audience that seems incapable of questioning the plot. Some of what transpires in Syria in the future will depend on this: Do people want to go behind the velvet curtain and see the strings – or are they content to be simply led by the entertainment." 

But that again would require proper media insight and courage, the depressing vacuousness of which is pressed home in Narwani's scathing letter Dear Western journalist.

Assad's repressions should be fairly reported and condemned, those personal indulgences noted. But his crimes and abuses are minuscule - and calculatingly exaggerated - compared with those committed by the US/UK.

Instead of sycophantic spin on the 'special relationship' and US/UK plans for 'ethical assistance', any serious reporting of Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and other sites of imperialist interest would relate, as standard truth, the reminder that Obama and Cameron are themselves proven warmongers, that their states are responsible for mass crimes against humanity and that the 'moral concerns' they gushingly express from the White House lawn should be treated by the media and public alike as warnings of further subterfuge, war and killing to come.            

John

The 'lone crazy' in Afghanistan

Emerging reports from Afghanistan are now contesting the official claim that a single 'rogue' US soldier carried out the massacre of over sixteen Afghan civilians in Kandahar.

Whatever evidence does eventually come to light, we can dispense with the easy notion that this and many other such atrocities can be put down to the actions of one errant individual, or that such killings are just 'highly-regrettable' incidents in an otherwise 'difficult-but-necessary' war.

As Seumas Milne so concisely puts it:

"Massacres are common in wars, but they flow from the very nature of foreign occupations. Brutalised soldiers, pumped up with racial and cultural superiority, sent on imperial missions to subdue people they don't understand, take revenge for resistance, real or imagined, with terror and savagery."

As established at Nuremberg, the highest guilt and complicity rests at the senior political and military levels. 

The real 'lone crazy' here is Nato.

John

Bombing Iran - the media's war calendar

On Channel 4 News (March 2), Matt Frei, reporting from Washington, and Jon Snow, back in the studio, exchanged almost jocular words on the likelihood of Israel or/and the US bombing Iran.

The tone was one of  'convivial chat', akin to neighbours speculating across the garden wall on whether or not we'll get a good summer.

This 'will-they-won't-they', wager-type narrative is typical media fare, treating Iran, Iranians, as something distantly abstract, an un-people, the discussion stripped of all immediate consideration for the carnage that may soon be visited on them and their society.

Imagine a similar kind of correspondents' exchange asking whether Iran will opt for a spring or autumn strike on Tel Aviv. 

The same fascinated gaze into the diplomacy game is evident in Jonathan Freedland's latest calendaresque assessment, pondering the 'best political opportunity' for a strike.

Here we get more of the same close dissection on the 'timing issue', set against the evident personal tensions between Obama and Netanyahu. 

And that, in itself, becomes 'the story', the ready 'context' for understanding the 'problem of how to deal with Iran'.

It's a reporting which also indulges David Cameron's facile claim of an impending nuclear threat to the UK.  

All of which diversionary spin helps play-down the actual illegality of any such strike. 

As Chris Hedges asks:

"Where is Israel’s U.N. resolution authorizing it to strike Iran? Why isn’t anyone demanding that Israel seek one? Why does the only discussion in the media and among political elites center around the questions of “Will Israel attack Iran?” “Can it successfully carry out an attack?” “What will happen if there is an attack?” The essential question is left unasked. Does Israel have the right to attack Iran? And here the answer is very, very clear. It does not. "

It's not just the blatant omission of Israel's and America's joint aggressions over Iran, it's the way in which the reader/viewer is drawn into the agenda-setting 'issue' of when and how rather than why and by what right.
John

To BBC's Jonathan Marcus

A letter to BBC correspondent Jonathan Marcus following the latest Media Lens Alert, Bombing Osirak, Burying Resolution 487, and Marcus's second assessment of the issues in How Iran might respond to Israeli attack.

Dear Jonathan

Allow me to comment on some of your exchanges with Media Lens, followed by some observations on your latest [updated]piece, How Iran might respond to Israeli attack.

You note in regard to the first article:

"Well that I suppose sounds an incisive point but when I am asked by my editors to write a military assessment of Israel's capacities to carry out such a mission, I speak to the air power experts and write the piece."

Might it occur that your own editorial-designated task of assessing Israel's military 'task' is informed by a similar kind of technically-absorbed mindset?

I wonder if you're able to see how the cold task you undertake here, in presenting Israel's capacities and consulting those "air power experts", helps sanitise the murderous task that may about to be undertaken?

You continue:

"Your implication is that the piece is in some sense "war-mongering" which I entirely disagree with - for all I know you may be a battle-scarred recipient of the VC - but I have in the past seen some fighting reasonably close-up. It is not pleasant. But I know what wars are about and - if I may speak personally for a moment - have no enthusiasm for them."

It's encouraging to see BBC journalists say openly what they really feel - the notion of journalistic 'objectivity' really is a false trope, don't you think? Moreover, a person's relative proximity to warfare doesn't necessarily bestow upon them any greater insight in such matters.

Again, I wonder if you're able to see how this kind of clinical assessment, largely detached from the actual human consequences, does, indeed, lend itself to a warmongering narrative?

So much is hidden in terms like "task" and "mission", with their ready connotations of 'challenging assignment' and the military 'doing their job'. Where in your substantive piece is there any serious, sympathetic calculation as to the human cost, the actual loss of life, resulting from such 'tasks'?

You conclude:

"You should be glorying in the fact that we have a BBC and especially the World Service - celebrating its 80th birthday this year), rather than always carping and complaining. But you are of course entitled to your opinion, as I am to provide my informed assessment."

"Glorying" that we have an institutionally state-serving media which, according to respected studies, has taken a leading role in excusing Britain's illegal wars, in consistently misreporting Israel-Palestine and is now playing a vital part in demonising Iran?

It's so very revealing that you describe ML's substantial work in challenging all that as "carping and complaining." Their words are merely "opinions" against your "informed assessments". Might those bald conclusions indicate some of your own institutional conditioning?

I've also just read your latest piece assessing Iran's military capabilities.

While this will likely be cited as evidence of 'balance' and 'redress', it still paints an overall picture of Iran as the 'problem to be contained'. There's nothing here about the menacing threat posed to Iran from the US-Nato/Israeli axis.

Why no mention of the mass proliferation of US bases surrounding Tehran? Why no discussion of the fear Iran harbours of another Iraq? Shouldn't this essential context be substantially noted?

Likewise, where is the central acknowledgement, confirmed by the Western intelligence field, that Iran poses no actual nuclear weapons threat?
http://johnhilley.blogspot.com/2012/02/israel-plans-iran-bombing-bbc-ponders.html

The section on international law does go some way to specifying the illegality of any such strike, but why wasn't it made clear in the preceding piece where it mattered just as much, if not more so, to the reader?

Across the two articles, there's no intimation whatsoever of Israel acting as a rogue state bent on imposing its own nuclear domination in the region. Nor, again, is the context of US blame for this situation, vis-à-vis its resilient backing of Israel, mentioned.

Media Lens have just provided a very timely reminder of the international outrage over Israel's illegal bombing of Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1981. I wonder why you didn't mention this in your second piece?

The article's paragraph on civilian casualties is also cursory - "it is hard to determine potential casualty figures" - lacking any serious consideration of the potential human disaster.

Trita Parsi's warnings of an Iranian rush to nuclear weaponry should they be bombed also confirms the obvious. As you put it:

"It all suggests a stark conclusion - even a militarily successful attack from Israel's point of view will only delay Iran's nuclear programme for a few years."

But where in your conclusion is the suggestion that Iran doesn't actually want a nuclear bomb - that, for both strategic and religious reasons - as recently stated by Ayatollah Khamenei - Iran, unlike Israel, rejects the nuclear weapons option? Or are the claims of Iranian leaders automatically viewed as more suspect than their US or Israeli counterparts?

I'd be interested in hearing your further thoughts on these points.

Kind regards
John Hilley

Media Lens uncover new evidence of offensive bias at propaganda-enriching sites

 Iran - Next in Line for Western 'Intervention'?

John

Israel plans Iran bombing, BBC ponders 'the task'

War propaganda doesn't just involve selective reportage and omission.  It includes journalists' fascinated appreciation of warfare, particularly warfare planned and executed by 'us' - the collective Western 'ours' that always includes Israel.

It's also a narrative that encourages 'problem appreciating' wherein we, as readers/viewers, 'share' in the technical and logistical difficulties of mounting an invasion, a bombing campaign and other forms of 'liberal intervention'.

Thus, does the BBC's Jonathan Marcus assess, dissect and speculate on how Israel might strike Iran.

Marcus's introductory words provide all the 'essential' context for the lengthy war-glaring detail to follow:

"For all the myriad challenges facing Israel over the past decade it is the potential threat from a nuclear-armed Iran that has preoccupied the country's military planners. 

It is this that in large part has guided the development of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) over recent years."

Amongst all those keynote terms - the "myriad challenges", the "potential threat", the "preoccup[ation]" that has "guided the [IAF's] development" - there's nothing about the IAF's main 'developmental' role in maintaining a sixty-odd year illegal occupation or any mention of the daily bombing/punishing of Gaza as an experimental holding camp; there's nothing, either, about Israel's vast arms economy and all the military research underpinning that development.

Rather, the sole focus is on the 'awkward obstacles' to Israel's war:  

An Israeli attempt to severely damage Iran's nuclear programme would have to cope with a variety of problems, including range, the multiplicity of targets, and the nature of those targets. Many of these problems are daunting in themselves, but when put together, they only compound the difficulties facing Israeli military planners.

Forget here the certainty of mass civilian deaths or the illegality of such actions against Iran.  That's all, correspondents like Marcus will likely insist, for 'political discussion'.

Instead, Marcus postures as the neutral journalist technocrat. While not openly endorsing such actions, we're invited to internalise the logistical 'problems' for Israel; to wonder, with him, with the planners, about the actual 'assignment', the 'favourable options', the best-case scenario for how Israel 'might pull this one off'.

The message is conveyed through weapon-speak and consultation of 'academic experts', lending a veneer of 'objectivity'. But the subtext is consistent: Iran is a 'menacing problem' and Israel is on a 'legitimate mission to sort the problem out'.

Complementing the bias, a set of accompanying graphics comparing Israeli and Iranian military capacities suggests that while the former has a "task", the latter poses a "threat".

In response, Media Lens Co-Editor David Cromwell asked Marcus this question, receiving the following reply from BBC Editor Tarik Kafala:

Dear Jonathan Marcus,

I hope you’re well and don’t mind responding to an email about your article, ‘How Israel might strike against Iran’, please:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17128991

Your illustrated table of military hardware gives a heading of ‘task’ for Israeli aircraft; but for Iranian defence systems, you provide the heading of ‘threat’.

Why the asymmetry? Why don’t Israeli aircraft provide any ‘threat’?

Best wishes
David Cromwell

Dear Mr Cromwell,

This is a fair point. The word "threat" is not quite right.

The articles aim to ask the question - should Israel decide on a military strike, how would it do it and can it do it? I think the word "task" is right, but I will change threat for "efficacy".

We will be following up with a piece on what the aftermath of such a strike might look like. That will consider the wisdom or otherwise of such a strike.

Regards and thanks,
Tarik Kafala

A concession of sorts from the BBC. But no seeming admission of the article's overall distortion. No suggestion either that Marcus or others might produce a similar in-depth piece on any Iranian "task" or 'mission difficulties' in bombing Israel.

Kafala's assurance that they "will consider the wisdom or otherwise of such a strike" is further sanitised BBC-speak. Why not "the illegality or otherwise" or "the catastrophic effect or otherwise" of such a strike? Even in its 'acceptance' of Marcus's 'error', the wording is carefully calibrated to suggest that Israel's intentions are either benign or benignly mistaken.

The most efficient war propaganda is not that which overtly supports or proselytises. It's that which normalises the abnormal, which 'matter-of-facts' state violence, with 'our' aims and 'problems' around the execution of that violence non-reflexively absorbed and accepted by the viewer as somehow natural.

The BBC's service to power here is even more remarkable - and, thus, intensified - given the confirmed Western intelligence consensus that Iran poses no actual nuclear weapons threat.

Testifying, this month, before the US Senate's Armed Services Committee, America’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, made the amazing admission that:

"Despite the hype surrounding Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, the country's leaders are not likely to develop weapons unless attacked... In addition the Iranians are unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict."

While the BBC and other serving media have emphasised International Atomic Energy Agency suggestions that Iran may still be enriching uranium, there's been no commensurate cover of the recently-appointed, Washington-favoured, IAEA head Yukiya Amano who has described himself in a Wikileaks-released diplomatic cable as "solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program."

As quoted by Media Lens, US approval of Amano's election is clearly evident in the leaked document:

 "This meeting [with US diplomats], Amano's first bilateral review since his election, illustrates the very high degree of convergence between his priorities and our own agenda at the IAEA." 

All of which makes 'low-lying' assessments like Marcus's vital to the West's war-promoting agenda. Stripped of all the bluster and confronting all the facts, the war parties are left with the inconvenient' truth that the 'mad mullahs' pose no actual, obvious threat, immediate or existential, to the West or Israel.

Yet, the public perception of threat, suspicion and fear remain. Through seductive weapon-gazing and loaded narrative, Britain's state media has, again, shown just how attendant it is to the dominant political mission of vilifying and attacking Iran.

The BBC's own crucial task here, its mission, is not one of conveying accurate information and context to the public. It's about normalising the case for Western-Israeli violence, all part of the process of getting us to think the unthinkable case for war.

Déjà vu?

John

--------------

I'd like to dedicate this piece, humbly, to the memory of Alan Pacetta.

A consistent advocate for Palestine and other oppressed peoples, Alan was a vibrant observer of propaganda and media bias, commenting, unearthing sources and providing powerful images, all in the true human spirit of radical dissent. His fine pictures and videos from the West Bank, Faslane and other protest sites, many brilliantly edited and scored, showed his instinctive talent for imparting a message and capturing a mood. Thankfully, his legacy of work remains with us, as do my pleasing personal memories of this engaging young man.

Love and solidarity to Margaret, John and all his family.

John