Did you see mommy on dateline on NBC?

 

 

“Did you see mommy on dateline on NBC? first of all, they only broadcast a five minute segment of what was a three hour interview. You know how the media is. So they zone in on any potentially anti-American thing said.  The one guy who said all great things, a former “seeds of peace” student, was never shown at all.  And I bet you can guess what all these “negative” comments were framed with!  Egyptians burning flags and having anti-American demonstrations.  The words alone would have been ok…but with those negative images, they looked just plain evil the true terrorist is the media because they are the ones terrorising our image. Right?”  

Marium Amr, reporting from Cairo.

The above is an extract from an email I recieved from my niece.  She just got her first real up-close look at media manipulation and finds it hard to believe.  That is why she ponders whether she has it ‘Right’.  Sure, this High School kid has it all too right.

I read her message after I saw Andrea Mitchel on MSNBC talk of our “temporary allies” after a press conference by Colin Powell.  She made it sound like that was what Powell had said.  Nothing close came out of Colin’s mouth.  That was Andrea (“wife of  Alan Greenspan”) Mitchell doing her Zionist ‘spin’, trying to pitch in and break the coalition.  Its her way of demonstrating ethnic loyalty to her lord and master, Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Qibya and Sabra and Shatila.

Yes, Marium, these creeps are all over the networks. They own them. They operate them. And they do what comes naturally to them; use them to ram the Israeli Lobby’s agenda down America’s throat. I am as sorry as the next guy that these Israel Firsters have so much media control.  They don’t care if they distort America’s image in the rest of the world. Their assignment is to enhance Israel’s image and cover up their brutal occupation of native Palestinian lands.  When they can’t do that, their next option is to demonize Arabs and Muslims.  I personally believe that they will always attempt to distort the ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’  image and that representatives of Arab-American organizations should not even be talking to these degenerates, at least not without setting ground rules.  They don’t allow us a whole lot of air time and then they blatantly slice and dice it to fit nicely into their pro-Israeli pitch.

The Israeli Lobby is back in full swing these days.  Their Senatorial dogs were all over Colin Powell for his suggestion that Israel should withdraw from Bethlehem and surrounding villages, where the death toll is over forty and includes quite a few women and children.  Powell meekly testified that he ‘understood’ what Sharon was doing.  He also gave a brief accounting of the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict and made it sound like the Palestinians had just killed 40 Israelis in Tel Aviv. He did not have a single word of condolance for the Palestinian families that have lost so many family members to this most recent Israeli invasion.  As for the Senators, they made sure that they protected their favorite war criminal, Ariel Sharon.  After the carnage of 911, this ‘Israel First’ constituency in Congress still wastes no opportunity to profess their support for Israeli repression.  Until we have a Senate made up of real Americans, these clowns will continue to bow to the Israeli Lobby.

The craziest thing is that during the Senate Foreign Affairs committee meeting, Colin Powell expressed an interest in launching a campaign of ‘public diplomacy’ to convince the ‘ Arab Street’ that America means them no harm.  Pity the unfortunate bastard who is going to have to market the Powell/ Sharon love affair to an Arab audiance.  Maybe a nice little picture of  Powell on Sharon’s knees would meet the fancy of the ‘souq’.  Either Powell has been reading too many novels about Casablanca in the 1940s or he believes that Arabs are stupid.  Powell called Israel ‘our best friend’, even as Sharon’s goons where using Palestinians for target practice in the West Bank Village of Reema.  Besides,  I thought Tony Blair was our best friend.

As always, Colin Powell has the two mouth syndrome.  While publicly asking his ‘Dear’ Sharon to move out of Bethlehm, he is privately assuring the Israeli Firsters at the New York Times that this is just a public posture,  Sulzberger’s shadow government got a ‘wink’ from the State Department.

William Safire stated that “At the same time, columnists of my ilk are sent word that – Colin’s ostensible tilt towards Arafat to the contrary – the president’s hawkish heart is still in the right place.”  (Bush’s Mideast Charade, NYT, 10/25/2001).

So, how does this all fit into Powell’s public diplomacy campaign?  Maybe Colin Powell needs to have one narrative and stick to it.  Because right now, he is even confusing William Safire.

To top off a miserable rainy day, I went and attended a lecture at the Jackson School for International Studies at the University of Washington.  I walked out when the professor said that he didn’t think that the 911 atrocities had any link to American foreign policy.   This Phd thought it had something to do with gobalization and the clash of civilization.  He delivered his speech in the boring monotone voice of a High School student reading a pilfered term paper’.  People were walking out as he spoke and most left when the questions started. Are they too daft in academic circles to notice the Israeli Lobby and the brutality of the Israeli occupation? Not once, do they mention the presence of a large American garrison on Saudi soil, even on a day the FBI revealed that 14 of the 19 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia?

You never know what the problem is with these academic frauds.  Anyhow, the jerk pissed me off and I let him have it. He kept his mouth shut. I then challenged the chairman of the department to a real debate on American Foreign Policy in the Middle East. Mano a mano. But they only accept written questions.

So, you see, my dear Marium, It is not just your mommy that encounters these barriers to debate.  The pro-Israeli Yiddish supremacists can’t afford an open debate on this subject.  Not only would they lose the debate,  they would have to explain all the deception that they have been marketing to their customers.  They would have to admit that they tampered with the news.  The politicians would have to confess that they were unduly swayed by the generosity of the lobby.  Too much is at stake.  It is not just about Israel, anymore. It is about grown men, journalists, editors, publishers, professors and politicians who can’t bear to come clean with the truth.

Mr. Ahmed Amr is Editor of NileMedia.com in Seattle and a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN). Ms. Marium Amr is in Cairo, Egypt.