BBC & Obama: Pretense and Imposture, Fakery, Phoniness, Propaganda & PsyWar

UPDATINGs 2-17 & 2-20-2008 see at bottom

Molière's Don Juan asks his valet, Sganarelle:
DJ: What? Do you take what I have just said for
the genuine article, and do you believe that
my mouth is in agreement with my heart? . . .
DJ: . . . if I said that I wanted to correct my
behavior and enter into an exemplary way of
life, it was a design that I had formed as a purely
politic measure, a useful stratagem, a necessary
facial expression. . .
DJ: . . . There are so many others like me. . .
who use the same mask in order to deceive the world!
DJ: . . . hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all
fashionable vices are taken for virtues.
The character of a decent man is the best of all
roles that one can play today, and the profession
of hypocrite has marvelous advantages. It's an
art of which the imposture is always respected. . .
nobody dares say anything against it.
[Molière, Dom Juan, Acte V, Scène II]

Parlant à Sganarelle, Dom Juan demande:
Dom Juan: Quoi? tu prends pour de bon argent
ce que je viens de dire, et tu crois que ma bouche
étoit d'accord avec mon coeur? . . . .
Dom Juan: . . . . si j'ai dit que je voulois corriger
ma conduite et me jeter dans un train de vie
exemplaire, c'est un dessein que j'ai formé par
pure politique, un stratagème utile. une grimace nécessaire. . .
Dom Juan: . . . . Il y en a tant d'autres comme
moi . . . qui se servent du même masque pour abuser le monde!
Dom Juan: . . . l'hypocrisie est un vice à la
mode, et tous les vices à la mode passent pour
vertus. Le personnage d'homme de bien est le
meilleur de tous les personnages qu'on puisse
jouer aujourd'hui, et la profession d'hypocrite
a de merveilleux avantages. C'est un art de qui
l'imposture est toujours respectée; . . . on n'ose
rien dire contre elle. [Molière, Dom Juan, Acte V, Scène II]

US Senator Barack Obama is now ahead in the contest for the Democratic Party nomination for candidate for US president in 2008. His campaign shows how theater, pretense, and fakery can go very far in American politics, especially if the so-called "news" media cooperate. The BBC has been in the fake news business for many many years. Their coverage of the execution --or assassination, if you like-- of `Imad Mughniyyah, one of the world's most skillful terrorist saboteurs, demonstrates their skills and techniques, and reveals their chief enemy. First Obama.

Senator Obama claims over and over to be against "Washington," different from "Washington," to be representing something "new." He shamelessly takes this line as if he himself were not part of "Washington," as if Zbigniew Brzezinski, a diamond-hearted, cold-blooded war planner, a Washington veteran from way back, were not one of his --Obama's-- advisors.

Jimmy Carter, widely considered by Americans who lived through his disastrous four years in the White House to be the worst president ever, also campaigned against "Washington" in 1976. Zbig B, among other things a professor at Columbia University, was Carter's national security advisor [or national insecurity advisor?]. Besides the shameful personal behavior of Carter and his brother, Billy, while Carter was president, his Administration perpetrated several disasters having worldwide impact. Israel, one of Zbig's pet hates [Zbig spent much of his childhood in Nazi Germany], was induced to give up the Sinai desert with its oil resources in exchange for a piece of paper called a "peace treaty." The Sinai was surrendered to Egypt, where the majority then and now was/is imbued with Muslim fundamentalist ideology [in the Muslim Brotherhood --Ikhwan al-Muslimin-- version] and where the government leaders, such as Sadat himself, were Nazi sympathizers. Sadat in fact conspired with German Nazi agents to help Nazi Germany win World War 2. He later blamed the foiling of the plot on Egyptian Jews, going on to claim that Germany had lost the war because of them [see Sadat's book, Revolt on the Nile, in French Revolte sur le Nil].

An equally great triumph for Zbig was helping Khomeini take over Iran, taking rule there away from the Shah who was accused of "human rights" abuses, which of course pale in the face of the Khomeini regime's human rights abuses. This means that ahmadinejad --the spiritual child of Khomeini, a probable participant in the 1979 hostage-taking of US embassy personnel in Teheran-- is also the result of Zbig's destructive policies. Then there was Zbig's buildup and training of Muslim fanatics in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Hence, Zbig helped Osama bin Laden get started too.

On February 12, 2008, the day that Mughniyyah was removed from our suffering, Zbig B was supposed to be in Syria to "engage" with the bosses of the Syrian dictatorship. I don't know if the trip to Damascus came off after all, or if he had arrived before the execution of Mughniyyah, but left when the execution became known, since I haven't seen any press notices about it. Anyway, if Zbig did successfully "engage" with Damascus, perhaps he can consummate the engagement with a same sex marriage between himself and Bashar Assad.

Elliot Engel, a US congressman [Dem-NY], has been good enough to remember Zbig's role in Khomeini's rise:

Mr. Engel yesterday said he was not a particular admirer of Mr. Brzezinski's, though he praised his intelligence. He said the former Carter administration official addressed Democratic lawmakers last month at a retreat at Williamsburg, Va., on America's policy toward Iran. "I remember thinking, 'Why are we listening to him?' He was the national security adviser for Jimmy Carter 30 years ago. He proceeded to talk to us about Iran, and I said, 'Let me see, didn't the ayatollahs come to power, didn't we have this problem when you were in the White House?'" [New York Sun, 2-12-2008]

Another of Obama's advisors is Samantha Power. She's a prof at Harvard who specializes in "human rights." As we know "human rights" means excessive rights for some [for example Arabs in general and palestinian Arabs in particular], including the right to abuse the rights of others [such as Jews]. Samantha indicated a few years ago that she believed in the Jenin Massacre Myth propagated by arafat, sa'eb erikat, and the rest of the PLO, PA gang. I'm not sure that she still believes in that hoax but I'm sure that she still believes that Jews don't have rights, such as the right to life, especially if they are too Jewish [that is, Zionist]. As noted, "human rights" as a political tool and pretext was used by Zbig during the Carter administration against the Shah. So Barack Obama, far from representing something new, in fact represents something old, ugly, and grotesque, the misuse of humanitarian rhetoric for inhumane and immoral purposes.
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Now, how did the BBC, the world's premiere psywar propaganda purveyor, treat the execution of mass murderer `Imad Mughniyyah??? The BBC asserted that Jerusalem and Washington were happy over the execution, as if no else had reason to be happy about it --not France, not Argentina, not Lebanon. The BBC did not mention the slaughter of 58 French paratroopers in Beirut in 1983, in a bombing perpetrated by Hizbullah, at that time called The Party of God. The BBC did mention the bombings of the Israel embassy and a "Jewish center" in Buenos Aires. Apparently, the BBC did not want to properly call the AMIA a Jewish community and cultural center. Calling it a cultural center might get people to think that Jews have a culture or that they are a community or people. Though the bombings in Argentina were mentioned, the BBC did not show film of the bombed buildings or of victims, nor did the BBC give numbers of victims, as France24 did, for instance. Nor did the BBC mention the likelihood that Mughniyyah was involved in planning the truck bomb murder of Rafiq Hariri in Beirut on 14 February 2005, or any of the other murders of anti-Syrian politicians and journalists generally believed to have been perpetrated by Syria in Lebanon since the attempted murder of Marwan Hamadi in late 2004.

The stress of the story was on Mughniyyah's great talents as a terrorist saboteur --thus, trying to depict him as a hero-- and on alleged jubilation in Washington and Israel over the execution [yes, there was satisfaction in Israel over the killing]. The whole impression was that Mughniyyah was an enemy of Israel and US imperialism, that is, an "anti-imperialist," whereas no one else had a reason to celebrate [since his French and Lebanese victims were not mentioned]. To be sure, there were some facts in the BBC TV narrative. The BBC's main propaganda techniques here are that of the significant omission and the misplaced moral focus. Now, the BBC's imposture consists in the fact that it is an arm of the British Foreign Office, thus it itself is an imperialist agency [if we are permitted to call the UK imperialist]. The report can be considered a blend of truth and falsehood.

For the record, the AP report on execution of Mughniyyah follows the BBC line of falsification.

UPDATINGS 2-17-2008: Even a journalist protested the BBC's pro-terrorist editorializing. A journalist who had had a gun put to his head in Beirut by Hizbullah operatives in the 1980s, while his partner journalist was kidnapped, objected to the BBC's calling both Mughniyyah and Rafiq Hariri "great national heroes" in the same sentence.-- 2-20-2008 more on Zbig & Obama.
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Coming: Peace follies, propaganda, psywar, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, the rest of the Land of Israel, etc.