The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: The No-Truth Zone

Re: The No-Truth Zone
Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Tuesday, April 5 2011, 3:24:11 (UTC)
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Thank you!

I get chills each time I think about the millions murdered, which might have never happened, had public opinion not been swayed by the false Iraqi incubator story.

- Jeffrey

Tiglath wrote:
>My latest opinion piece titled 'The no-truth zone' has been published in the Foreign Policy Journal.
>
>The article lists the numerous and outrageous lies spread by proponents of the current Iraqi and Libyan wars.
>
>http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/04/05/the-no-truth-zone/

The No-Truth Zone
by David Chibo
April 5, 2011

During WWI the Western Allies deliberately spread the soon-to-become-a-classic lie of German soldiers systematically impaling babies in Belgium and France on their bayonets and cutting the unborn children out of pregnant women. The lie helped persuade the Western public to support World (Imperial) War I, in which millions of soldiers and civilians would soon perish.

Modern marketing companies would label this story a “hook.” According to journalists, every big media event ideally needs a “hook,” which becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. An ideal “hook” may turn public opinion from being opposed to the war to being supportive of the war.

An example of a “hook” that soon generated momentum for the US involvement in the first Gulf War’s, “Operation Desert Storm” was a fraudulent report of the murder of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers.

On October 10, 1990, the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on the subject of Iraqi human rights violations. The focus of which was the emotional testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name, Nayirah, who stated, “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

The massacre never occurred. Not only was the girl the daughter of a Kuwaiti emir, but she had also been coached by the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton to give persuasive false testimony.

Realizing that any half decent journalist could reveal their lies, and reveal their propaganda for what it was, the US appears to have relied increasingly on proxies to release its increasingly outrageous stories in future wars it was conducting.

On the eve of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, with the vast majority of the world’s population opposed to the US led invasion, press stories appeared in the US and UK of a plastic shredder into which Saddam and Qusay Hussein fed opponents of their Baathist rule. These stories attracted worldwide attention and boosted support for military action, in articles with headlines such as “See men shredded, then say you don’t back war“.

Two days later Australian Prime Minister John Howard made reference to the “human-shredding machine,” in getting the Australian public to support their role in the illegal invasion. Meanwhile, The Sun’s political editor Trevor Kavanagh wrote in February 2004 that “Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.”

This James Bond villain-inspired story was later revealed to be a fabrication with no evidence to support the existence of such a machine.

In the US, the lie was traced back the testimony of Reverend Ken Joseph Jr. Joseph suddenly appeared on the scene on the eve of the 2003 Iraqi invasion, complete with fabricated cover story of being a pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East and one of the anti-war human shields that had entered Iraq in 2003. He claims that while in Iraq he had suddenly had an epiphany and reversed his opposition to the Iraq invasion after hearing first-hand accounts of Saddam’s shredding machine: “Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”

The damage, however, had already been done. Enough people had believed the wild stories that the invasion continued unabated and led into years of unpopular occupation by the US, which was strongly resisted by the Iraqi population. From 2005 onwards, as that resistance escalated the US faced wavering support at home and needed to ensure that the occupation continued unabated.

In October 2006, the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) reported an alleged atrocity committed by Muslim terrorists. According to Adris Hanna, a priest who allegedly escaped persecution and fled to Sweden, “a couple of days ago a fourteen year old boy was crucified in the Christian neighborhood Albasra.” Susan Patto, an aide to Younadam Kanna, secretary general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement, and elected member of the National Assembly of Iraq, calls the story unsubstantiated. Nevertheless, the story spread like “wildfire” through Christian extremist sites and was republished repeatedly on forums.

Unperturbed, later that month AINA reported another similar story of 14 year old Ayad Tariq, who was decapitated because he was a “dirty Christian sinner.” According to (AINA), the unverified story, initially written in Arabic, was first released on the Chaldean Christian website, Ankawa.com’s forum. Susan Patto calls the story a lie disseminated from an anonymous source. The demonization of the Iraqi people and the support for the continued prosecution of the war could not be undone.

The preposterous lies got even more shocking. In 2007, stories emerged of a 2-month-old Christian infant kidnapped, beheaded, roasted, and returned to its parents on a bed of rice. The story was originally released by the Barnabas Fund, which is part of an entity called the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, founded by Patrick Sookhdeo, a Christian extremist group. It was later to be printed in AINA and distributed to other extremist Christian sites. Again Susan Patto dismisses this story as another lie. However the lies had managed to “sand-bag” domestic support buying more time for the US to put down the Iraqi resistance.

The current Libyan war is not without its “hooks.” On March 26, a brawl was sparked as a Libyan woman made a plea for help at a Tripoli hotel full of foreign journalists before being bundled away by government minders, after showing bruises and scars she alleged had been inflicted on her by Muammar Gaddafi’s militiamen.

The Libyan Government was caught unprepared, and although initially bungling the PR incident, they appeared to eventually have found their composure and announced that suspects had been arrested and would be brought to justice for the alleged crime.

While the gathered foreign journalists appear to have been taken in by what has all the hallmarks of another US initiated “hook,” there are questions that need to be answered, by any self-respecting journalist, especially in light of recent history.

How is it that the alleged victim knew that the world’s foreign journalists were gathered at the hotel at that particular time? With clear rebel ties, her story should be corroborated with factual evidence. So why did she refuse to take a medical examination as is standard practice for a criminal investigation into such a crime?

Like previous “hooks” used in the Iraq wars, the “hook” may help maintain domestic support for the illegal war, while masking the real intention of the US and its allies. As the Middle East began to move away from autocratic to democratic rule, the US “banker” and its G8 franchisees are using the democratic waves to further shore up their control of the Middle East and install compliant Western dependent rulers in place.

The US grand strategy is ultimately to continue to control the Middle Eastern oil producers and to maintain the petrodollar through the recycling of Middle Eastern oil surpluses into the US treasury and US banks. These funds through fractional reserve banking allow the debt-laden US to not only maintain its economic and military supremacy but to also control the world’s capital flows sharing them between the US “world banker” and its allies in the G8 “franchisees,” such as the UK and France.

David Chibo is an Australian-born Iraqi from the Assyrian-Christian community and a member of the Assyrian Church of the East. He spent six months prior to the Iraq invasion working in northern Iraq with local aid groups delivering humanitarian relief as well as providing technical training to the local population. He is also a Melbourne-based freelance journalist for the online Assyrian magazine Zinda and a frequent writer on Orientalism. He is currently working on a thesis - due to be published in an archaeological athletics journal called Nikephorus - titled Gilgamesh Games (See www.gilgameshgames.org) that seeks to trace back the origins of the ancient Greek Olympic Games back to their precursors in ancient Iraq. Read more articles by David Chibo.



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