Israel Blames Iran for Drone Attack, Threatens Retaliation
The media's role in opinion management and thought control
[Image: a suicide drone explodes.]
Published: 2023-02-10
Update 2023-02-12: Barcelona cancels its sister-city status with Tel-Aviv.
Disclaimer
This newsletter rarely covers the Palestine/Apartheid-Israel conflict as others far more knowledgeable on the topic provide excellent coverage. I particularly like Jonathan Cook, though there are many, many others. The Electronic-Intifada deserves mention. This three quarter century old slow genocide and dispossession is referred to below, hence this disclaimer.
Various Israeli and particularly Zionist groups equate criticism of the policies of the government of Israel with anti-semitism. This manipulative definition is a vehicle for smear campaigns and propaganda. It makes no sense whatsoever. Jewish people live all over this beautiful planet. The Israeli government contains both followers of Judaism and followers of other religions. The religion and the government are distinct. Indeed, separation of powers is hallmark of the European Enlightenment.
Criticism of Israeli government policy is not a criticism of followers of Judaism, just as criticism USA policy is not a criticism of USA Christian Evangelical churches, and vice versa.
A Drone Attack
Let us consider a fictitious attack on an Israeli weapons production facility or workshop.
There are groups who may be motivated to commit such an attack. Among them are Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas. They have regional allies like Hezbollah and the support of regional governments, such as Syria and Iran. For our fictitious attack let us assume that Iran is assigned responsibility for the attack and that it was facilitated by members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The fictitious attack consists of three suicide drones carrying explosives. Israeli air defenses destroy one of the three drones. The other two near their target, are detonated, and do little major damage. No lives are lost.
Reporting
How would "western" media report such an attack? What level of coverage would it receive?
The narratives would include terrorism, an attack on a sovereign country, Iran as a rogue regime and no doubt mention that the peoples of Israel live under constant threat of violence. The level of coverage would likely be broad with all major media running leading articles, with follow up articles for a few days. Outrage would be generated, statements would be made before the UN General Assembly and perhaps Security Council, with sound bites by whoever is the political leader of Israel at the time, and equivalents from the USA President and other western leaders. The Mighty Wurlitzer would be awoken.
Curiously, this attack did happen, with the munitions and consequences as described in the fictitious attack. We merely need to change the actors. Israel with “on the ground” support from one or more resistance groups, possibly the Kurds or MEK, lauched exactly this attack on Iran with the results described.
Media coverage of the actual attack was minimal and brief in the "west". The vast majority of coverage regurgitated an article by the British wire service, Reuters (see Sources).
This real attack by Israel is by no means an isolated act of aggression against regional neighbors. Israel has been delivering jet launched missile attacks against Syria on a nearly weekly schedule for years. Israel claims a right to deliver these attacks within the borders of a sovereign nation because the attacks are against organisations that Israel has declared terrorists. Quite unsurprisingly these targeted groups include Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), either directly or against groups receiving their support.
Disparity between the expected coverage of the fictional attack and the actual coverage of the real attack is not limited to state sanctioned violence. Recently, a young Kurdish Iranian woman died in custody while being detained for not wearing traditional Islamic garb in public. The small event, a tragedy for her family, become a news headline for weeks as protests against this lack of freedom on what women may wear in public were hijacked.
The peaceful protests turned violent. Police officers were deliberately targeted by persons probably only loosely aligned with the protest movement. Over 20 police officers were murdered by these paramilitary "protesters". We have seen this hijacking of civil protest so often that even the most close-minded will recognize it as foreign (CIA/MI-6/Mossad) facilitated activity.
The government in Tehran does place limits on some aspects of social life, however, they do not seem to be committing a decades long systematic genocide against a major part of their population. This is what Israel is doing to Palestinians. They have been doing this since the Nakba in 1948.
This is not an isolated incident. It is permanent Israeli government policy.
Israel is allowed to attack Syria with weapons and to assassinate Iranian scientists or political leaders. The USA assassination of General Qassim Suleimani is another example of permitted extra-judicial murder, in this case of a military leader and diplomat. This murder was committed by the USA rather than Israel.
[Image: Mustafa al-Hallaj, Palestine, “The Battle of Al-Karameh,” 1969. More work by al-Hallaj.]
Playing the Heart Strings
Western legacy media manage public outrage. They are culpable in manipulating justice. They lead and mislead the court of public opinion. The drone attack did happen, and you probably didn't hear about it. This is as intended.
If you did hear about the Israeli attack on Iran, the last part of the headline is what you are meant to remember, the "Iran vows revenge". This whole process of skewing outrage has been described by Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges amongst others. The concept is "worthy versus unworthy victims". For worthy victims of attack or natural disaster, responses of outrage or sympathy are generated, respectively. Sympathetic news headlines tend to be shorter lived, while outrage based ones live longer for they "sell more copy" and contribute to desired geopolitical and geoeconomic outcomes.
Unworthy victims of attacks or natural disasters receive little and short lived attention. For natural disasters some sympathy is to be created. For attacks, we see the handling in the recent dominant headline; you are to be fearful of retaliation not compassionate for the loss of innocent lives or the destruction of homes or government property.
We have a four square with axes of military attack or natural disaster and worthy or unworthy victims and correspondent media coverage
[Image: the four-square of western legacy media responses, by the author.]
The "court of public opinion" is a very interesting term. The media constructs judgments to be assigned to those who perpetrate the suffering of "worthy victims". The controls of a court, the hearing of evidence from both sides, the threat of punishment for deliberately misleading the "court" are absent. The media create this slanderous machine of recrimination. Justice does not get a look in.
Exposing the Harpist
Patrick Lawrence provided an overview of a recent publication by Jeff Gerth in the Columbia Journalism Review. Gerth's article is a deep dive into the knowing lies perpetrated by the USA's leading legacy media over the RussiaGate fabrication. Patrick focuses more on what the damning exposé means for the total demolition of credibility for these old media. Gerth provides the extended details.
Two days prior to the Lawrence review, Caitlin Johnstone published an article on the same topic, concluding that the whole process is just one part of an extensive effort to subjugate dissent.
A methodology for controlling public attitudes was trialed in the USA early during WWI to encourage the USA citizenry to support its entry into that war, with the sinking of the Lusitania as the hallmark event. It was just after the war in the early twenties that Edward Bernays described the perfected art in "Propaganda", then not a negative term. This lead to "public relations". The advertising industry also began to use emotional manipulation. Both of these branches of emotional manipulation are based on scholarly psychological works by Freud and others. This process of controlling public opinion goes back way before the lies about weapons of mass destruction as a justification for the next attack on Iraq in 2003, or the Church Committee's investigations into the CIA infiltration and control of the USA's media in the 1970’s. We are now a century beyond Bernays' signature publication.
There is a little hope on the horizon. Sections of the middle aged demographics in the west are waking up to this emotional manipulation, and the next generation have almost no interest in these legacy purveyors of opinion rooted in outdated political rhetoric. CNN recently received its worst “engagement” statistics in 9 years.
While the King of Propaganda is Dead he can live long in these atrophied appendages of failing control. A counter to this optimism are the surveillance and information wars occurring in social media spaces. At least some of the new generation are also aware of the poisoning of this well.
Follow Up
A study of the western media's response to the earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria will be used to test the assertion above regarding the four boxes of media responses to natural disasters or military attacks affecting worthy or unworthy victims.
Sources
"Iran blames Israel for drone attack, threatens retaliation" is the headline from ABC News about the attack. Many, many other outlets used a similar headline. The source article for all is from Reuters.
Iran blames Israel for Isfahan drone attack, vows revenge -ISNA, (no by-line), Reuters, 2023-02-02
To get a flavour of the rubbish, I used a duckduckgo.com for search using the following query:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iran+drone+strike+isfahan&df=m&ia=news
(Note that there is a "last month" time restriction which will age poorly.)
More accurate headlines were available, and not repeated:
Israel appears to have been behind drone strike on Iran factory, U.S. official says, Parisa Hafezi and Phil Stewart, Reuters, 2023-01-29
Israel Launched Drone Attack on Iranian Facility, Officials Say, Ronen Bergman, David E. Sanger and Farnaz Fassihi, NY Times, 2023-01-29
Report: Israel Was Behind Drone Attack on Iranian Military Facility, Dave DeCamp, Antiwar, 2023-01-29
Other Sources
The West sees Iran in a new way, M. K. Bhadrakumar, Indianpunchline, 2023-02-02
Worthy & Unworthy Victims, Chris Hedges, Consortium News, 2022-03-09
Zionism’s ‘Three State Solution’, Vijay Prashad, Consortium News, 2023-02-03
The Press Reckoning on Russiagate, Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 2023-02-07
Looking back on the coverage of Trump, Jeff Gerth, Columbia Journalism Review, 2023-01-30
They're Not Worried About "Russian Influence", They're Worried About Dissent, Caitlin Johnstone, her newsletter, 2023-02-05
Propaganda By Edward L. Bernays, Internet Archive, 2015-07-29 (the date on which the text was made available)
See bottom right of page for download options, including PDF.
Barcelona Mayor Cuts City’s Ties with Israel, Julia Conley, Consortium News (originally published at Common Dreams), 2023-02-10
Drone strike. Containing Iran, containing Russia, Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, The Duran, 2023-02-01
Culture
Across the Lines, Tracey Chapman (from her debut self-titled album), published 1988, uploaded to youtube by Jewel Tune 2009-12-15
Notification
Subscription is optional. Subscribers can expect notifications for most articles. Better is to use RSS, or bookmark the Archive page and visit at leisure. If you use Twitter, following @YesXorNo1 is also an effective notifications strategy.
Copyright and Licensing
This work is copyright to the blog's author with CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing. Have fun, reuse, remix etc. but give credit and place no further restrictions. Let’s build culture.