Usually propaganda is a little more clever than this (Reuters, 4/20/10):
Israel, like the United States, European Union and others, suspects Iran is developing atomic weapons, a charge Tehran denies. Iran, whose president has said Israel should be wiped off the map, says its nuclear program is peaceful.
While we’re on the subject …
Demonizing Iran: US Media Continue Beating War Drums
by Dave Lindorff
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/22-7
Until the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated, I guess we can expect to continue to see journalism with an agenda. They are owned by and represent those (6 or so men) who reap great profit from the sacrifices of little Americans in their created wars. Until the media is at least honest enough (don’t hold your breath) to show Americans the blood and gore and dead civilians of the wars that afford us our big cars and resin chairs, we will continue on as lemmings patriotically sacrificing the futures of our families in the cause of a predatory culture and society.
I have one bumper sticker on my car (the only one I’ve ever had): “I DON’T TRUST THE CORPORATE MEDIA.”
Six men; sixty; not many more. but all the little ants keep falling for it: remember the maine! gulf of tonkin; pearl harbor; pulling the incubator plugs; weapons of mass destruction, over and over. woildn’t you have fun rolling over armies of ants especially when they are so stupid? especially if you could get obscenely rich doing it? and you had a managed press waiting to get on its knees and hollow out its cheeks?
“Nothing comes to a sleeper but a dream.”â┚¬”Ââ┚¬”Ââ┚¬”ÂFrank Smith in We are Attica, interviews with Prisoners from Attica, 1972
And your point is…What?
Doesn’t he want Israel to be wiped off the map? If he does, the accusation is accurate and we should be cautious about this guy and his nuclear program.
Mr. Blamethe1st says: “Doesn’t he [Iran’s president] want Israel to be wiped off the map?”
Answer: I don’t know what Iran wants since that quote about Israel has been messed with by the people who said Iraq had WMD. What I do know is that Israel and the U.S., its enabler, do want to wipe Iran off the map.
Propaganda is creating or reinforcing a mindset within the population. As propaganda this IS quite clever. A good number of the US citizens who happen to read the article will remember to President of Iran’s words, not what the article was about. They are unlikely to remember that Israel doesn’t confirm or deny it has nuclear weapons. Not likely to remember that the other countries in the region are expected to bend to Israel’s will, before the West will pressure Israel to do, what Israel should be doing anyway.
Agreed, Israel and the US both have unnecessarily large nuclear weapons, and want to deny the same world destroying capacity to anyone else. Why? So they can bully anyone they want without repercussions. ie, they want to be the only ones who can destroy civilization as we know it.
As for “terrorism”, there never has been anywhere, an organisation as terrorist as the CIA – which is even prepared to assassinate it’s own president (Kennedy) to satisfy it’s true masters – corporate america.
By the way, why do the major news organisations – Reuters, Canadian Press, etc withhold their email addresses?
Must be because they DON’T WANT OR CARE WHAT THEIR CUSTOMERS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THEIR BIASED REPORTING. So they can go on blithely believing they are agreed with.
The hate coming from Iran is not baseless. When I was a kid, I was told in Mormon Suday school that the church supported establishing the Jewish state of Israel. Non-Jews were killed and kicked from their land to rudely establish this state. The support of this military base by the U.S. and the further imposition on the land by Israel is making an attempt to bring peace to the world useless. // Jean Clelland-Morin
It’s Israel which keeps talking about attacking Iran, not vice versa. So the president of Iran doesn’t like Israel! Big deal. Tell Netanyahu to stop crying sucking his thumb. People like Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Lindsay Graham will do their utmost to see that the USA’s power and might is there for Israel’s asking. So what if a few Arabs including children are incinerated? That’s how the game is played, especially with a dishonest media. nd, yes, a lot of money to be made by those invested in armaments manufacturing, Let’s not forget that. Where are all the phoney Christians?
It’s amazing to watch this drumbeat for war against Iran, so like the drumbeat before the invasion of Iraq, go unchallenged by the mainstream media. The MSM — newspapers and television — cites the internet as one of the reasons for its declining influence. In fact, many people have gone to the internet for news because the MSM fails to be more than a mouthpiece for the status quo. The consolidation of news sources, given impetus by the Telecommunications Act under the Clinton administration, has reduced serious reporting in all areas of our lives: the economy, science, foreign affairs — you name it. Now a few mega-corporations (Comcast, at&t) want control over the internet. Tell the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to classify the internet as “telecommunications”, not just a “service”, so that it can establish rules for the benefit of all users of this public resource.
I think what Peter’s getting at is that you’d never see a corpress piece that stated, “Israel, whose president launched a strike on the Gaza Strip which killed hundreds of civilians … “, would you?
Of course, that would be an accurate statement. The implication of the Reuters quote is that Ahmadinejad is a bloodthirsty murderer just itching for the chance to blow Israel up real good.
He is, indeed, a murderer, as is just about every other head of state on this planet. If you read Lindorff’s piece, though, you’ll see why the supposed threat Iran poses to Israel is so much agitprop, and who the actual aggressors are.
See what you think.
What’s in a name? Istanbul was Constantinople…
The settlement of Israel is an outgrowth of European colonial energies, compounded by internecine warfare, there. The Israelis are only doing the same thing that was done dozens of other places… except that, instead of pushing out stone-age peoples they’re up against their ethnic cousins, a la N. Ireland.
The U.S. has expended so much capital- political & otherwise- to maintain Israel that it’s like a numb & rotting molar in the mouth of an aging homeless person… just another constant nag that begs only a denial of a better personal future to maintain. “Oh, right… Israel. Yeah… I guess we Have to support them. I mean, so many of them are originally from the Bronx, how can we say ‘No’?” ^..^
Well, he *has* said that about Israel on many occasions.
Israel as a current genocidal neo-colonial apartheid ethnocracy which is perpetrating the longest illegal military occupation in modern history should as this particular formation be “wiped off the map”/relegated to the dust bin of history. Does the world really think that its current racist genocidal apartheid is a viable and exceptable option? The irony is that the same logics of Nazi ethnic nationalism are at play in Israel’s current ethnocratic apartheid. The leaders of Iran know this and intelligent people should realize the sentiments are toward getting rid of Israel as this particular type of political formation not committing the obliteration of the people in that land.
I’m not sure if the statement in the article is propaganda. If it is, it’s pretty subtle. However, the rank and ugly anti-semitism of many of you is quite the opposite of subtle.
The “quote” from the Iran president has been shown to an example of the most gross mistranslation. It appears that what he really said was more to the effect that “the present regime” in Jerusalem should disappear from the sands of time or from history. The latter part is subject to particularly varied translation. His comments in no way referred tothe destruction of Israel.
Dominique gets it right, if you ever listen to any long interviews with the president of Iran he clarifies that the destruction of Israel is best brought about by free elections with all people currently in the borders of Israeli control – including Gaza and the West bank. If those elections were held and the palestinians got to vote, then the Israel we now know would be destroyed and a new type of Israel would be born. This calling for a vote of both oppressors and oppressed is a far cry from how it is presented in the media. What this means is that the government of Israel and the US really fears is WMD, Weapons of Mass Democracy.
This two-sentence statement is actually true in all respects. The two present an interesting dichotomy in in Iran’s current “personna.” Each sentence describes a single point about Iran. The two taken together appear contradictory, and the reader is presented with the dilemma of which to believe.
The piece by Reuters is not inherently biased or anti-Iran. It is a snack for thought.
Wow website. I really love reading these posts