Yesterday I wrote of the US-Israeli war on Iran as “a matter too critical to power for Western corporate media to be reliable”. That was me being English. We do so love our understatement; a subset of the irony we’re also fond of. On such as this they will lie – ‘quality’ no less than ‘popular’ … financial no less than generalist … by commission no less than omission … on the progress of the war no less than its causes – through their back teeth.
Think Ukraine. Think – the similarities are ridiculously striking – Saddam’s WMDs. For reasons I and others have set out times many – here and here and here for instance – corporate media appetite for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but stands in inverse ratio to the importance to ruling class interests of whatever they claim to be covering.
Here’s the Economist today. I can’t give a precise link as it’s an email feed, wherein Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes introduces the week’s offerings. She begins with the unprovoked attack by a nuclear armed ethno-state which refuses to allow in weapons inspectors, is twenty months into a genocide, is led by a man with a warrant out for his arrest on multiple war crime counts, and was a surprise attack while its target sat negotiating with the criminal ethno-state’s criminal underwriter, over the bogus 1 (and staggeringly hypocritical) casus belli.
Them’s my words, not hers. Ms Minton Beddoes glides over such career terminating truths with the deftness of one to the manor born:
When I was in Israel two weeks ago, many of the foreign-policy experts I spoke to complained that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had left the country on the back foot geopolitically. They noted that President Donald Trump skipped Israel on his trip to the Middle East and worried that he would agree to a weak nuclear deal with Iran. With Mr Netanyahu locked in a forever war in Gaza, many argued, Israel was missing out on the reshaping of the region.
How wrong that was. Mr Netanyahu’s dramatic decision to attack Iran on June 13th has upended the Middle East and reaffirmed the Israeli prime minister as the region’s wiliest strategic player. Whether it was with incontrovertible intelligence or persuasive manipulation, he has convinced Mr Trump to do a near about-turn. America’s president has gone from wanting nothing to do with an Israeli strike to being one signature away from joining in.
As I write this newsletter, no order has been given. But the region—and the world—are on tenterhooks, waiting for what may well be the most momentous decision of Mr Trump’s presidency.
Our cover asks how the war will end. Will it make possible a positive realignment of the region focused on economic development? Will Israel achieve its ultimate aim of dismantling Iran’s nuclear capabilities? Or will the result be yet more war, miring the Middle East in years of chaos and violence?
We argue diplomacy is still the best path. We caution against further American involvement, but we note that Mr Trump faces a difficult trade-off. By doing more damage than Israel could alone, American bombs might increase the chances that the Iranian regime enters talks in earnest. But those gains are uncertain and must be weighed against the risk of a regional conflagration.
My expert colleagues have covered this conflict from every angle, and they will continue to do so.
I rest my case. As Upton Sinclair so rightly said, it’s hard to get someone to see a truth their salary depends on their not seeing. And as Chomsky famously told BBC interviewer Andrew Marr:
I don’t say that you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you would not be sitting in that chair.
Moving on, I said also that media lie “on the progress of the war no less than its causes”. An ethno-supremacist state more accustomed to trumpeting its invincibility, and celebrating the hell it rains on those who stand against it, now imposes news blackout and bans citizens from taking to social media with images and footage of the True Promise III damage – nay, from even capturing the same on their cell phones – Iranian missiles are wreaking on Tel Aviv, Haifa and the illegally settled West Bank.
Over to Kernow Damo (16:23) …
… and Danny Haiphong (26:01)
That’s it for now. I’m on holiday.
* * *
- See my exchange with sue in comments below the previous post.
I’m also on holiday in our van by a beautiful beach surrounded by deciduous trees, birds singing and peace and beauty in all directions but for one. We are on Loch Long opposite the Coulport nuclear depot for submarines. A guy walking by told us he worked at Faslane for 14 years. Even he described the black monster killing submarines machines as sinister. When I agreed he said – you don’t know the half of it. And we don’t. It occurred to me that all this fear around AI is a distraction. The real machine-like ruthless killing ‘intelligence’ is right now in the Pentagon, the White House and Natanyahu’s cabinet planning evil beyond our wildest imaginings. Meanwhile I hope you have a great holiday. We intend to – in a guerilla war on those anti-life forces by loving life to the full. Thanks again Phil for all your hard work here.
Let’s both of us make the most of our break, Anne. I recall my stepmother telling of a hike she’d taken in the peak district one gorgeously sunlit Sabbath. The date? September 3, 1939.
Damo’s report on what is at present a trickle of Israeli’s from Josep Borrell’s Garden joining those from Borrell’s jungle as boat people refugees raises some interesting questions.
Not least of which being that if this modern day Exodus of the chosen people fleeing the Promised Land and abandoning their almost eighty-year Lebensraum project increases in the same way as similar cases – Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan – and similarly washes up on European shores, what type of narrative we will see from rabid and racist right wing media (Gibberish News, Daily Heil et al) and the dog whistle Reform Corporation?
Will they be welcomed with opened arms, like the Ukrainian refugees have in Ireland and elsewhere across the EU? Or will they receive the same scapegoating treatment from these sources as those from Borrell’s ‘Jungle’?
Best order your supply of popcorn early in anticipation of the outbreak of cognitive dissonance that could well occur?
As victims of antisemitism. Why else could anyone possibly object to a colonial settler state of ethno-supremacists armed to the teeth as an imperial beachhead on stolen land in an oil rich geopolitically pivotal region?
Indeed.
Enjoy the break.
Here is some holiday reading to get the teeth into:
https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/why-iran-the-context-and-the-consequences