How the West Whitewashes the Media
Whitewashing the pain and suffering caused by foreign interventions.
If you knew nothing about the wars that have raged and ravaged the Middle East, you certainly wouldn’t be able to obtain accurate media reporting from the mainstream media in the West. However, if your only source of obtaining information surrounding world politics and actions was that which was aired on American cable news networks alone, then maybe you could be forgiven for believing three decades’ worth of reporting via Western mainstream media detailing American military campaigns, occupations, and coups as “honest reporting”.
And that is a big IF.
Recently a colleague asked me about the Highway of Death. I had to defer to him and ask what he was referring to. I’m not exactly on the young end of the spectrum having spent over half a century on the planet, yet I honestly had no idea of what he was talking about. He then told me to look it up and then he would discuss it with me afterwards. I was horrified.
If the name alone doesn’t shock you, then the subsequent array of available images most assuredly will. The images have come to symbolize the era of the Gulf War in which the fallout from US foreign policy and wartime decisions was something that was easily hidden from the American public and the world as a whole.
It was supposed to be the cessation of the war, the US would pull out and leave peacefully. George H.W. Bush was president at the time, in the United States he was considered a “statesman”, and an “American hero”.
After he promised the Iraqis safe passage out of Kuwait, he then double-crossed them and ordered their massacre after the ceasefire in 1991.
The “statesman” and “American hero” was in truth a mass murderer and war criminal. He was directly involved in the death of thousands of Iraqis via the “Highway of Death”. He was the anti-hero to Big Oil and Wall Street, the financial juggernaut of the time, however. Of course. The war machine doesn’t come cheap. As we have seen with the recent events unfold in real-time via social media with the Israel-Gaza war, and the unmasking of the Israel Lobby complete with the financial tide of money that flows between the US to Israel via AIPAC and the like, “Jewish” charities out of New York, Zionist PACs, and Evangelical “charities” such as that run and operated by John Hagee, the financial morass has become a sort of Pandora’s Box of vile connections at the elite level of the likes we have never witnessed up until now simply due to the platforms such as Telegram, TikTok, X in which users can disseminate information peer to peer, user to user, bypassing mainstream media entirely to the extent they have become an embarrassment and are frequently called to the carpet when they are found to have been extensively and often engaging in journalistic malpractice to an alarming level.
Yet back to the Highway of Death. On February 26 & 27, 1991, US planes trapped at each end, book-ended the entrance and exit, of two Kuwaiti roadways, otherwise known as Highway 80. They then proceeded to strafe the stalled vehicles via bombardment from the air, mainly using cluster bombs designed to achieve the maximum amount of destruction over a vast area. The result was countless Iraqi deaths and the complete obliteration of thousands of vehicles, about 2,000 mangled vehicles along with the charred remains and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers as well as civilians. The Iraqis were simply withdrawing from Kuwait in compliance with recent UN resolutions.
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot.
“Even in Vietnam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer.
For 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, windshields shattered or melted and tanks burned, every truck riddled with shell fragments. To date, there are few known survivors. The destruction was so intense, that the cabs of trucks were pushed into the ground making it impossible to see if drivers remained. The enormous tanks were reduced to metal shrapnel.
Make no mistake, this was one-sided carnage. This was a textbook systematic mass murder of Arab people by an elected racist US President which happened after the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, made the promise that the US and its allies would NOT attack Iraqi forces as they departed Kuwait. This will be remembered in history as one of the most heinous of war crimes.
And yet…..it never went prosecuted despite the fact international law existed to prosecute it.
The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violated the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. The Bush administration claimed Iraqi troops were retreating to reconvene and resume fighting. A bald-faced lie, yet such a claim was necessary for the massacre to happen, for it to be considered legal under international law.
However, the Iraqi troops were withdrawing. They were removing themselves from a combat setting under direct orders from Baghdad. They had been informed the war was over, that Iraq had quit, and that they would comply with the agreed-upon UN resolutions. To attack soldiers departing for home under these circumstances is a war crime.
Iraq had accepted UN Resolution 660 reached through Soviet mediation on February 21, 1991, which meant their complete withdrawal from Kuwait. In fact, George Bush made the statement on February 27, 1991, that “no quarter would be given to remaining Iraqi soldiers who violate even the U.S. Field Manual of 1956”.
In addition, the 1907 Hague Convention governing land warfare makes it illegal to declare that no quarter will be given to withdrawing soldiers.
The President wasn’t good for his word. And neither was the US commandment.
U.S. field commanders provided the media with an inaccurate picture of the events of the day. The goal was to portray Iraq’s withdrawal as a retreat that necessitated military action. Bush was fully invested in the deception. Bush’s statement televised from Saudi Arabia explained that Iraqi forces were not withdrawing thus requiring military intervention.
This orchestrated and planned deliberate campaign of disinformation to obscure the war crime was a purposeful manipulation of the media. Press briefings were held to deceive the public and keep the massacre from the world’s view. It wasn’t until many years later, in 2018 and some lesser-known internet articles, were the atrocities revealed to the public in depth for the first time.
Afghanistan
Then came September 11, 2001. 9/11. The War on Terror. The subsequent 20-year war in Afghanistan rife with propaganda, and manipulation disguised as coverage is yet another retelling of the proverbial all-American action movie complete with American marines locked in combat against the clock to save the Afghan people from the specter of the villainous enemy. Think American Sniper and Lone Survivor.
It matters not which cable channel you turn on - CNN, Fox News, MSNBC - on each one, you will see them competing for who can produce the most captivating footage of some American soldiers handing out water, giving candy to a child, playing soccer with a group of village boys or kissing and holding Afghan babies. Only in America! Only America can condense 20 years of abject suffering bloodshed and violence into some noble humanitarian mission based in a random foreign country and repackaged to be consumed by the masses as some type of recruitment film.
The dehumanization of, this time around the Afghans, is numbing in its fine-tuned Hollywood-style scripted film noir. I half expect Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall to make a cameo appearance at some point. Rather than saving the Afghan people from the obscure terrorists, this time around it is the US military bearing the responsibility for the massive number of civilian casualties and heinous war crimes over 20 years. As illustrated in a 2020 UN report, it was documented the US accounted for 52% of the 1,400 civilian deaths and 2,400 injuries spanning the first 6 months of 2019. The Taliban in comparison was responsible for 39%. So exactly who is the white horse and who is the nefarious villain?
Between 2016-2020 (inclusive) there have, in Afghanistan, been:
3,977 total civilian casualties from airstrikes: 2,122 civilians killed, 1,855 civilians injured
1,598 total child casualties from airstrikes: 785 children killed, 813 children injured
40% of all civilian airstrike casualties were children (1,598 of 3,977)
37% of those civilians killed by airstrikes were children (785 of 2,122)
44% of those civilians injured by airstrikes were children (813 children of 1,855 total)
The majority (62% – 1,309 of 2,122) of civilian deaths from airstrikes were caused by international forces.
The majority (50% – 2,000 of 3,977) of overall civilian casualties (deaths and injuries) were also caused by international forces.
Overall casualties from international airstrikes more than tripled between 2017 and 2019, from 247 to 757
It is attributed that the higher-than-normal civilian death toll was due to US and Afghan forces utilizing heavy airstrikes. Almost all the airstrikes and subsequent casualties occurred in the rural regions of Afghanistan where 75% of the population lived, which was also well away from the reach of American television cameras.
“In these areas, I’ve met newborns who will never have a memory of their mother or father. Boys who saw their grandparents’ bodies pulled from the rubble,” says the author of Precision Strikes, Azmat Khan. In her book, Azmat documented the methods by which the Pentagon underreported civilian casualties in such a grossly lacking manner. She writes: “The true scale of civilian deaths from the war in Afghanistan is still unknown. So many have gone uncounted.”
The known war crimes that went unnoticed for the simple fact they were purposefully withheld from the public include some of the more horrific events ever enacted by US Military Personnel.
In 2011, Lt. Col. David Flynn confessed to the moment he carried out an order to obliterate 3 Afghan villages, completely, in his own words, “wipe them from the face of the earth.” Included was Tarok Kolache, which was “flattened” with 49,200 pounds of artillery. No survivors remained.
75% of the Afghan population that sustained the brunt of civilian casualties is predominately the rural population of the country. These citizens were not employees of the US government; nor were they members of the corrupt puppet regime installed in Kabul by the US. What they truly endured was being mercilessly and relentlessly bombed by both the puppet regime AND the United States. Their families - mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins….virtually everyone - are now buried in the hills of the Afghan countryside, forever forgotten as entire lines have been eliminated.
Western media instead focused on the evacuation of the asylum seekers from Kabul effectively whitewashing the fact the US military operations IN Afghanistan were the ones responsible for creating more than 6 million refugees in the first place. The majority of the refugees found shelter in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, they left Afghanistan entirely. But Western media never reported this circumstance.
Furthermore, in a 2020 report by the UN, they detailed that almost half of all Afghan refugee children were faced with extreme malnutrition, they had limited access to just basic healthcare and medicine, yet they weren’t evacuated as those in extreme peril. They were discarded as unworthy, and never reported on.
This was America’s longest continuously running war, 20 years, and the horrific incidents went largely unreported, the media in the West shielded these events from their viewers, leaving them completely in the dark. The Western media kept a vice-like grip over the coverage while simultaneously hyperventilating in their moral panic as they considered how to report the Taliban without upsetting their viewers.
In the end, most Americans know very little about Afghanistan, a country occupied and methodically bombed for two decades by the United States with an enormous number of military personnel sent back home with PTSD, severe injuries, and worse. And true to form, any subsequent media coverage of the evacuation won’t include any further information to leave the American public not knowing any more than they knew before.
Iraq
As preposterous as it would seem, if you ask any federal politician about the Iraq War, you would hear responses like “It was worth it.”, or, “Was it a good thing? A bad thing? It is hard to say.”, or even, “A lot of good has come out of that war..” Now put that into the current perspective if someone asked you about how the war in Gaza War is going and you received that response, you would probably want to push them off a cliff. Yet, these were all real responses to the Iraq war after it was over. Apologists are alive and well as much then as they are now. It’s selective memory or revisionist history, pick your poison.
For instance, take the statements in Commentary magazine by Eli Lake. He was very insistent that the war “wasn’t the disaster everyone now says it was,” and that “Iraq is better off today than it was twenty years ago.” He tries to bolster his premise by pointing to a larger national Iraq GDP and the number of Iraqis who now possess cell phone subscriptions. He then argues what happened to Iraqi society post Saddam Hussein, the hundreds of thousands killed, the 9 million displaced, a significant number of illnesses, consistent and pervasive violence, electricity outages, high percentages of birth defects largely due in part to military contamination and pollution…..all of this was in reality a “bonus”, after all, you got rid of a maniacal dictator, so you should be grateful! Yay!
Ask any American and they won’t answer Iraq is the country of thousands of years of history, thousands of years of culture, of societal progress and achievement. It is ingrained in the American psyche as the land of a dictator, the Axis of Evil, the country of terrorists. It is the hotbed of corrupt politicians, corrupt oil sheiks, the evil core of Islam, the jihadists, and the oppressed.
The Western media frequently glosses over Iraq’s most important asset - Iraqi children. Where and when are the children ever mentioned? More often than not it is a figure, a percentage of the never-ending stream of some statistical analysis, progress, or defeat. It becomes emotionally detached and dehumanized as most war statistics become. Victims of conflict oven lost their identity and become a number, a casualty, once the war is over they are forgotten for eternity. Children are also often used for propaganda. They are used in academic papers designed to absolve the guilt of the West. The annihilation of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis, generations erased, Iraqis eliminated during a historical period that can only be termed as what it truly became: the Iraqi Holocaust.
What the Western media has become highly efficient at is cherry-picking facts to construct a narrative that is pleasing to the viewers. They are adept at sugarcoating and mollifying their viewership. I suppose it isn’t exactly “positive news” when you report that half a million children perished as a direct result of US-imposed sanctions, then add that this figure was higher than the number of Japanese children that were killed when the US dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Imagine the reaction to that news. It is almost as if they don’t trust the American public’s ability to process catastrophic information, as if to think our country couldn’t possibly process such an atrocity on innocent children. Imagine if the media then disclosed Madeleine Albright’s response to this fact, “We think the price was worth it.”
This methodology leaves one with the impression that no one cares. Yet how are we allowed to NOT care if we aren’t provided the information to decide if we do or not? But heck, as long as the Western conscience is absolved of any guilt, that the victims of these war crimes, and humanitarian catastrophes are not American children, what’s in a number? Numbers are merely used to debate rather than to despair over.
The public has a right to know, and we really should know, yet the media and the government continue to collude to leave us swimming in the abyss blissfully.
Gaza…..
Patrick Gathara of Al Jazeera wrote an incredible opinion piece in October 2023 titled “Western media failures say more about the West than Gaza” The remarkable bias in Western media coverage of the war reflects the cultural perception that Palestinian and Israeli lives are not equal.
This is the first conflict in history that has quite literally played out before our very eyes daily from TikTok to X to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Hindustan Times, and on and on. It has been polarizing to the extent that there are two definitive sides and depending on whom you ask, each side will claim they are on the right side of history.
In addition, the type of reporting has been very heavily influenced by the Israel Hasbara juggernaut. There is a significant and distinctive difference in the type of reporting based on where the media originates. In the initial 3 months of the conflict, you would watch SkyNews, France24 and you would see the leaning towards more of a pro-Israel stance. Piers Morgan attempted to offer both sides of the story, failing miserably by engaging in an antagonistic attack type of interviewing by talking over guests, interrupting them, and asking the nauseating question repeatedly: “Do you condemn Hamas?” Ultimately he lost more of his viewers than he retained with his subtly disguised Islamophobic tone. On the other side of the coin, some of the more unknown figures before 10/7 now have exploded in notoriety such as Bassem Yousef, and have become favorites of the Pro Palestinian crowd.
In the early days, Western media outlets continued to focus on the brutality leveled on the Israelis stemming from the 10/7 attack by Hamas while touching very little if at all on the suffering and systematic mass slaughter of the Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, women, and children. Then social media took hold and more and more people began to turn away from the MSM and obtained their news from online outlets such as The Young Turks, Breaking Points, The Rising, and Democracy Now. Viewers also turned to X, TikTok, and Instagram to watch the visceral and tragic images pour in on an hourly basis of the incessant and unrelenting carpet bombings and collective punishment being levied upon Gaza by the IDF, watching the horrific images of dead children, family members buried in the rubble, family members picking up pieces of their loved ones, seeing the suffering unfold on a monstrous scale.
X users would tweet and retweet stories of entire families being completely wiped out, as in no longer in existence on the Gaza Health Registry. Erased forever. The Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, would be interviewed and the first question he would inevitably be asked is “Do you condemn Hamas?” Never mind that the man had lost almost 10 members of his own family. There was no quarter for his personal suffering, just an instant and critical condemnation of his character if he refused to answer the question and instead wanted to divert the focus to the actual killers of his family: Israel.
The events of 10/7 in one way woke people up from a historical coma. You would before 10/7 ask someone, “What is the root of this conflict?”, meaning, why does Israel hate the Palestinians with such veracity? I found myself constantly iterating early on that this did not occur out of a bubble, or a vacuum. This has been decades in the making and the building and the root causes of the core of the emotion behind this goes back to the 19th century. Most people began to ask the question: Why? So in an ironic twist of destiny, the Palestinians had for the first time in their plight a massive audience of a global population looking at them for the first time for who they really are: the last settler colonial endeavor. As Husam Zomlot once said during an interview a few years ago at Oxford when asked what the best thing that has ever happened to his people was: he held up his cell phone and said “This!”. Social media exploded the Palestinian plight onto the world stage and opened a Pandora’s box of angst, frustration, and anger yet it also made people realize that if anything, Palestinians are true survivors.
However, there is true censorship. The Israeli regime fights with a vengeance to prevent as much as possible from being reported even to the extreme that they have purposefully targeted and killed journalists. As of this writing, it is now 122 have been killed. There is a drive to dehumanize the Palestinians, to never deviate from the official narrative, to always offer unconditional support for Israel, the constant mantra of “Israel has a right to defend itself”.
There have been several attempts at denouncing protests on US college campuses as “antisemitic”, the students are in “fear of their safety” and so on. Expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians were threatened with arrests, laws were enacted such as Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism, people were threatened for simply flying the Palestinian flag or wearing a keffiyeh, Zionists would harass, stalking, doxxing, and suppressing content on social media via shadow bans became more and more frequent.
The type of reporting on Israel and Gaza actually reveals more about the journalists themselves, and the culture they are surrounded by than about the events they are reporting on.
Anti-Semitism has been covered extensively in the West and Europe. Jews were once shunned in much the same manner as Muslims are today. The stereotype all Muslims are terrorists hasn’t abated, over the years it’s only increased in the minds of many. Anti-Semitism was once widely denounced as unacceptable and abhorrent, now it has lost the ability to have any impact because of the way the word has been weaponized and abused.
In contrast, anti-Arab and Islamophobic feelings were never denounced. Rather it was encouraged. Israel has indoctrinated their population with the mindset the Arab’s sole existence is the elimination of the Jews. “The River to the Sea” has become banned when at once it was a call for freedom, not the elimination of another. However, whether or not you want to ascribe to that ideology, the truth is the population that is being slowly genocided is not the Israelis.
Israel’s insistence on the “right” to defend itself despite its enacting atrocities that date back to before its establishment as a state confirms the Western mindset Arab deaths are considered the price for Israeli security. Western media displays with alacrity the one-sided requirement of condemnation, Israeli tragedy in contrast to Palestinian tragedy - Israeli is always more acceptable and embraced as tragic whereas Palestinian is seen as the “cost of war”. Israelis are murdered or slaughtered, and Palestinians just die.
Hamas is the terrorist as designated and confirmed by Western governments; the Middle East and Muslim majority countries view them as resistance. Human rights groups and activists haven’t been so kind in their assessment of Israel often referring to them as an apartheid regime, a police state, the “New Nazis”
Attempts at criticism of Israel result in an automatic blowback, an attempt to label you as antisemitic, “Jew Hater”, “Nazi Lover”, or “Terrorist Sympathizer”. Pro-Israel groups have taken it to extremes such as doxxing, public shaming, contacting schools or employers even potential employers where some recent college graduates had employment offers rescinded; and organizations such as Canary Mission, StopAntisemitism, and the ADL will publicly call people out as the “Antisemite of the Week”.
This being said, the current culture is attempting to make the concept of being outside the lines unacceptable and it should not be inshrined in our minds that being different IS unacceptable. Free speech isn’t only what you want to hear. Differences in political opinions don’t automatically slap a label onto your forehead, it simply means you don’t agree on one premise or maybe several. You have the freedom to turn it off, don’t read it, don’t listen, delete the app, whatever you so choose.
Those in the position of being able to control the media need to be aware of the facts and report them as the facts. Journalistic malpractice is the epitome of irresponsibility. Ethics, professionalism, and integrity are practices that have been lost in the construct of attempting to control the narrative in such a manner that is reminiscent of an Orwellian book. Those days when journalism was an admired profession, one in which young people aspired to and sought, are gone. Recently it has become a profession of whomever is in charge, you report their political ideology and not what has taken place. The “news” is no longer new.
Due to the advent of the internet and the speed at which information becomes available, information is heavily scrutinized, disseminated, picked apart, and transcribed in seconds. Unethical stories and unethical reporting are easily identified and denounced. Just look at the recent NYT and WSJ articles over the UNRWA scandal or the propaganda earlier on in the war of the beheaded babies and the ongoing focus on the non-existent rape witnesses……it all requires thorough examination because, at the end of the day, this is the narrative that will sit with us and be instrumental in how we interpret and process the information we are provided in the future. It all demands we have self-awareness which unfortunately seems to have fallen by the wayside.