All media sell sets of values, they control perceptions by controlling the stream of images, by manipulating the ideas that are received through their organs. Control the organs of information and control the stream of images and the received ideas of the culture–anyone in control of the Media can control information and manipulate public opinion, thus public voting behavior, thus be able to determine elections. Manipulation of opinion is key; selling audiences to sponsors paramount for profit, integral to control by the elite.
Controlling images disseminated through the media and ideas joined to these images, is to control what the truth is, to control how Truth is defined. Most post-structuralist critique of Truth is rooted in how much the media control our reception and perception of the truths of our world. They themselves confusing the facts of the media for a kind of nature that determines. The People always at a loss; elites always in the gain.
We wonder about media production of images because we are convinced that news as propaganda can only exist in a place like the former Soviet Union or a place like Nazis Germany, or certainly Al Jazeera. You were not likely to see anything in the mainstream media concerning Police Officers bullying protesters during any Occupy Wall Street demonstration. You might never see the atrocities of the Israeli Military against Palestinian or Lebanese women and children, hospitals and schools. Israel’s use of White Phosphorous against the Palestinian People has gone unreported. Our media is therefore complicit in the atrocities of Israel at the behest of, or the condoning from the United States Government. Nothing in the media about Israeli crimes against humanity will be disseminated, but every Arab Muslim Terrorist Organization’s retaliation or crimes will get the fullest treatment in all organs of America’s media. I am simply pointing to how we manage the images, not supporting the spread of Muslim Theocratic ideology or ideals. The latter would be absurd. The former here is necessary in understanding the political ping pong middle eastern reactionaries play; the latter is necessary to understanding just what a threat the reactionary politics of Islam are to our freedom. And Islam began as a fanatical reactionary movement, never a liberal one. It is very easy for a conservative Muslim, or even a mainstream Muslim, to verge into support for reactionary means or methods in politics or social interaction or in response to democratic freedom. We have seen our own versions of conservative politics played out violently. We see how Christian Fundamentalists sometimes react to others in America, and this is without proclamations in the Gospels to kill infidels.I can only imagine what would have happened had the Gospels said Death to all infidels.
But from our media we only get, Arab Muslim, bad; Israelis, good. I wish we were not put in a position to have to choose which reactionary movement we preferred. The Jewish State is lauded as a model of and for the future of democracy in contrast with Arab Muslims who are presented as horribly degraded, endemically anti-American, hopelessly brutal and stupid. The horror of the image mongering is that Jews are presented as virtual Uber menschen while Arab Muslims are shown skirting the border between human and subhuman. How much has Jewish self-image-making been learned from the Nazis that placed Jews in a position similar to the one Arab Muslims are placed in today by Reactionary Zionists.
The only possible conclusion one can draw from the premises as they are arranged in the media is this: Arab Muslims are to Jews what Jews were to Nazis; Palestinians are the people who, in the State sponsored propaganda of Israel, have created a state within the state of Israel. It is in Israeli propaganda that Palestinians are a virus in the body politic of Israel. It’s almost as if the Palestinians are perceived as having always lived as a foreign body inside a Jewish State–this land in the common Zionist rhetoric is something that by inference has always been Jewish and not Palestinian or Arab Muslim and Christian.
The Jewish State is not only for Jews, as Germany in 1933 was certainly only for Germans, although it can seem the unofficial slogan of the State of Israel. But then Sharia Law enforces a Muslim Theocratic Society only for Muslims. Maybe I am wrong when I say that most fanatics who kill or commit acts of gross and heinous aggression against the west do not read Holy Qu’ran. Perhaps they do; there is no religious document anywhere with more commands or rewards for killing infidels than has Holy Qu’ran. The only other religious document with as many commands for believers to kill non-believers or apostates is Leviticus in Torah, which amounts to a Misogynist’s Handbook on how to torture women. In fact, the Inquisition learned a great many of its lessons in the torture and kiling of women from Leviticus. The Christian Bible Canonizes Torah and keeps it in continuum with the Gospels–we must not forget, as well, that the Inquisition was begun, and persisted at its greatest, in the only western Christian country to have come under Islamic domination, and for more than seven hundred years, Spain.
I am tired of a mentality that makes us choose between two devils–Israel needs to be made to heel, and the spread of Muslim Theocratic Ideology must be prevented from imposing itself in the west through our own ignorance and semi-literacy. We cannot equivocate, nor can we suffer from a naive understanding of our place in the world, one that disallows us from assessing our political responsibilities appropriately. Removing ourselves from Iraq was too quickly accomplished irrespective of how many years we were already there. If anything brought instability to the region, it was what came from our inability to see that without Saddam Hussein in Iraq, our presence was mandated for a much longer time than we seemed willing to endure.
Now with respect for contemporary Zionist politics, it is certainly true that not all Jews are with Reactionary Zionist agendas, even among Jews who might call themselves Zionists; nor do all Jewish people believe in the absolute rightness and trueness of contemporary Zionism, or the State of Israel’s policies with regards to the Palestinian people. Historically Zionism has transformed from its dominant agenda toward creating a bi-partite state in the1940s to what we have today, which is almost always reactionary. The latter politics are achieved where no opposition is mounted. By omission, reactionary zionism has achieved many of its goals, has reached hegemony among American Zionists, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim. We have to look more carefully, read more deeply, think more clearly, feel more rationally and less hysterically.
I am not so sure how many Muslims do not support, or would not support the imposition of Sharia Law in the United States. I watched on Youtube Muslim protests aginst terrorism, yet virtually everyone in the picture was a man–where were the Muslim women.Is it that the protesters thought women wearing veils and Hijabs would not set well as an image intended to show the world that not all Muslims support terrorism against the west? Could it be that although Muslims may not support terrorist acts of violence, they do support Sharia Law where a woman is fractionalized by the law when set against men. Stay home woman, this is man’s work?
Perhaps coming here to America is a sign that some Muslims wish to side-step their traditional reactionary politics, but I am again not so sure. I see too many veils and niqabs worn where I live–I do not really care, personally, what people wear except where the garb is a sign of oppression, and if not oppression, repression, and try not to tell me it is not. It is a truth I hold to be self-evident; Sharia Law is an affront to democracy, freedom and universalizing human rights.There is too often something inordinately barbaric about even general muslim responses to any critiques of their religion. Fear, repression and submission seem the only things capable from among the faithful–another stereotype? Let me hear otherwise; let me see otherwise than the riots and the burnings and the mass killings of Christians because they are Christians, or worse, are converts. And there is enough of this in Africa that Obama seems intent on ignoring.
No one intelligent can say that women wearing the Hijab in America is not a contradiction of, or an affront to, freedom. Anyone who seeks to impose Sharia Law or Muslim Theocratic Ideology anywhere in the United States is an enemy of the Constitution, an enemy of Freedom and an enemy of People of the United States.Democracy too has its infidels–you cannot oppose democracy and freedom in the name of democracy and freedom. We cannot shake hands with the Political Devils of our Democracy to prove we believe in and support democratic principles.
The Falling Leaf Review 