GUEST BLOG: Paul (the bloke The Standard banned for 3 years) – Terror attacks and war crimes

3 year old terrorist

Last week, two serious news events dominated our airwaves. The way these stories were disseminated tells us plenty about the way we, the New Zealand public, are fed propaganda.

First, on Tuesday we heard, through the work of two fine investigative journalists, Jon Stephenson and Nicky Hager, the terrible tale of ‘Hit and Run’. Having now read the whole book, if only part of the story is true, then the SAS is guilty of war crimes. Yet the mainstream corporate media used terms like ‘botched mission’ and ‘deadly SAS raid’ to depict the incident.

The language used to describe the events in Afghanistan could not be more different from the words we heard and read about on Thursday morning as the news broke from London. The killing of four civilians there was labelled a ‘terrorist attack’, part of a ‘wider conspiracy’ and not the act of a ‘lone wolf.’

For the pedestrians crossing Westminster Bridge on Wednesday afternoon, the weaving Hyundai driven at them was a terror attack.

For the villagers of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, woken up at 1 a.m. on 22nd August 2010 by cannon fire from Apache gunship helicopters crashing into their homes, this was also a terror attack.

Both were terror attacks.

So why do our media tell us one story is a terror attack and the other is a deadly raid?

Simple. The media intentionally give us stories without context. It does not want us to be able to join the dots.

There is a connection between the Afghani villages and London. People like Khalid Masood do not occur in a vacuum. As the authors of ‘Hit and Run’ wrote  “the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost over a million lives, helped to a massive refugee crisis and destabilised the Middle East, Europe and beyond.”

 

The propaganda about Afghanistan is by no means unique. In a similar fashion, we get deliberately misinformed about Syria and Iraq.

When Aleppo was hit by Russian airstrikes last year, it was a war crime. However, this week, when Mosul was hit by US airstrikes, it was ‘an unfortunate unintended incident.’

When is the New Zealand going to wake up?

For, as Edward Murrow stated, “ A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.”

 

Paul is a Political Blogger with a focus on the neo-liberal economy, climate change and the western media’s slavish support of the US neo-con narrative. He was banned from The Standard for 3 years for suggesting the Left, Liberals and Progressives should work together to change the National Government.