THE U.S.
PROPAGANDA MACHINE
MER - WASHINGTON - 9/8:
A few weeks ago on 21 August, when the attacks on the U.S. Embassies
in East Africa were so much in the news,we received the following from Jonathan Petty at
the Center for Korean Studies in Berkeley.
"TERRORISM"
ACCORDING TO THE L.A. TIMES
Jonathan Christian Petty
To give a material example of the totality of the U.S. propaganda
machine, consider this single fact about mainstream media reportage of the current US
bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan.
In 1996 the Israelis shelled the UN base in Qana, Lebanon, killing
several score people including members of the UN peacekeeping force.Israel claimed an
"accident" but videorecordings of the massacre showed a hovering Israeli spy
plane circling the camp for the duration of the shelling -- of the type used to guide
gunners. This was widely decried by the UN as "terrorism."
The L.A. Times operates a home page with an archive search program.
Among the over two dozen pages covering current US attacks on "terrorists",
there appears "Islamic Groups Target U.S. with New Threats."
I am not concerned with the irony between the uses of the word
"target" for US targetting of the Sudanese capital vs. the "targeting"
of the US by "threats", so much as the flag at the bottom of the piece inviting
the public to "search the archives of the Los Angeles Times for similar stories
about: TERRORISTS, MUSLIMS, THREATS, TERRORISM -- UNITED STATES, INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC
FRONT FOR JIHAD AGAINST JEWS AND CRUSADERS, ISLAMIC ARMY FOR THE LIBERATION OF HOLY
PLACES, MOHAMMED SADIK HOWAIDA, OSAMA BIN LADEN, BOMBINGS -- KENYA, BOMBINGS-- TANZANIA,
UNITED STATES -- EMBASSIES, UNITED STATES -- MILITARY BASES." It requires exactly 40
words even to list the topics considered to be generally related by the LA Times owners.
Instead, I used the archive search function to search for QANA. I
found precisely this (the following is a complete citation):
"Article 1 of 1 found.
"U.N. Orders Israel to Pay Bomb Damages;
"Saturday, June 27, 1998
Home Edition
Section: PART A
ID 0980059730
Words: 79.
Byline; Reuters.
The U.N. General Assembly on Friday called on Israel to pay $2.4 million for damages from
its shelling of a U.N. base in southern Lebanon two years ago."
This is the only archival reference to "Qana" in the Los
Angeles Times. It is exactly 79 words long. In other words, it requires more than half
this number of words even to list the general topics of articles covering "Muslim
Terrorism" than it required for the L.A. Times to describe literally everything they
found to be relevant about the Qana Massacre.
