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Propaganda tools of Israel and American ZionistsBy Paul J. Balles* 7 December 2006 Paul J. Balles looks at the use by Israel and American Zionists of misinformation, faulty reasoning and warped perspectives in order to delude the intellectually-incompetent in the USA and elsewhere.
The sly and deceitful way that propagandists distort facts, events and history never ceases to amaze me. That kind of disingenuous propaganda came recently from both Israeli leaders and American Zionists. The latest was the attempt to gloss over criticism of the Israeli murder and destruction in Lebanon by claiming that the Hezbollah militia used civilians as human shields.(1) That's one way to attempt to divert attention from the thousands of bombs the Israelis dropped on hundreds of civilian targets all over Lebanon. A typical evasion, the Israeli claim has been coyly used to purge attention from the reality: Israel had no business invading Lebanon in the first place! On the other side of the world, in the USA, arch-Zionist Mortimer Zuckerman is using US News(2) to practice his journalistic chicanery. Only, in Zuckerman's case, the house of mirrors reflects distorted images of Iran. Israel and its American propagandists desperately want to garner support for unleashing pre-emptive strikes against Iran like the USA did in Iraq. Zuckerman actually had the gall to come out and say so. He concluded his article with the following: The West will have to decide what is more dangerous - to attack the infrastructure of the Iranians sooner rather than later or to deal with an Iranian nuclear capability after the fact. The choices are not between good and bad but between bad and worse - and the longer we delay, the more dire those bad and worse choices will become. The phrase "attack the infrastructure" can only mean "bomb the hell out of Iran". In Iraq, the US military called it "shock and awe". In Lebanon, the Israelis conveniently labelled the carnage "self-defence". Notice the deformed thinking in some of Zuckerman's claims: In his opening, Zuckerman referred to "Iran's emergence as the Middle East regional superpower". Is that reference supposed to overlook the fact that Israel has between 200 and 600 nuclear bombs, disqualifying it as a superpower? Zuckerman brazenly shifted the focus to Iran's efforts to create any nuclear power. Zuckerman called Iran "an oil-rich, fundamentalist, pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic regime that has not only nuclear ambitions, but the means to realize them". That's the kind of fabrication and twisted perspective that should have discredited Zuckerman as a journalist years ago. When writers refer to Middle Eastern countries as "oil rich", the reference is derogatory, as if there was something evil about having large oil reserves. The reality is that Iran has wanted to develop nuclear energy so that they could export more oil - their only major resource - to support their economy. Why does Zuckerman label Iran "fundamentalist"? Would he ever call America "Zionist" because its leadership is under the control of the Israeli lobbies and the evangelical Christian Zionists? He uses the buzz words "pro-terrorist" and "anti-Semitic" to describe the Iranian regime. The pro-terrorist canard comes from the support that Iran provides to the real Semites in the Middle East - the Palestinians and Hezbollah who have suffered from Israel's terrorism. Zuckerman, of all people, should know better than to refer to Iran as anti-Semitic. The Arabs are the real Semites. Only the Sephardic Israelis qualify. The majority of Israelis - Ashkenazi converts to Judaism - will never qualify as Semites. About as ironic as irony can get, Zuckerman complained that "the south of Iraq is now an Iranian quasi-protectorate, with police and local militias controlled by Tehran". You didn't hear that kind of complaint coming from the neo-conservative Zionists who pressured America into attacking, invading and occupying Iraq. Now that the Zionist-inspired mess has become unpopular, the Zionists are employing one of their favourite tactics: shift ground. Who leads these shifts? Journalists like Mortimer Zuckerman and the propaganda mill at the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). If they didn't renege on their positions, they would lose some of their power to maintain threatening control of the US Administration and Congress. I could go on, but won't. I estimated at least a dozen more aberrations of the truth, faulty reasoning, warped perspectives and ludicrous conclusions in Zuckerman's article. But that's the nature of the Zionist propaganda machine: fabricate and delude. In typical fashion, both Israel and its Zionist supporters in the USA continue to indulge in their delusions and translate those into fabrications for everyone else. Unfortunately, they find too many buyers for their scams. As William Mather Lewis wrote, "Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything, the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking." Notes 1. Greg Myre, "Offering Video, Israel Answers Critics on War," New York Times (5 December 2006) 2. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "The Mullah Menace," US News (3 December 2006) *Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 38 years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis. All rights reserved. |
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