[melaniephillips.com] Melanie Phillips - The behavior of the Western media during the Iranian/Syrian/Hizballah war against Israel has constituted a major, world-wide scandal, and one which has the capacity to derail the efforts of the West to defend itself. Much of the most incendiary media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. Why? There is the reliance upon corrupted news and picture agencies which employ Arab propagandists as stringers and cameramen. There is the herd mentality of the media which decides collectively what the story is. There is the journalists' fear for their personal safety if they report the truth about terrorist outfits. There is the difficulty of discovering the truth from undemocratic regimes and terrorist organizations. There is the naive inability to acknowledge the depths of human evil and depravity. But the big answer is that the Western media transmit the lies of Hizballah because they want to believe them. And that's because the Big Lie these media tell - and have themselves been told - about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth. The plain fact is that Western journalists were sent to cover the war being waged against Israel from Lebanon as a war being waged by Israel against Lebanon. And that's because that's how editors think of the Middle East. Thus history is inverted, half a century of Jewish victimization is erased from public consciousness, victims are turned into aggressors, and genocidal mass murderers are turned into victims. Thousands of rockets were fired at northern Israel, hundreds every day, many times more than were daily fired at Britain during the Blitz - but this was barely reported in Britain because journalists were told to ignore it all since that wasn't the story their editors wanted. The impact of the lies and distortions transmitted by the mainstream media in inflaming the already pathological hatred of the West within the Arab and Muslim world is incalculable. The mainstream media's vilification, demonization, and delegitimization of Israel, based on outright fabrications and malevolent distortions, is imperiling the very existence of the country that is the front line of defense of the free world.
2006-09-01 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive