scaramouche

...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

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Irreverent, contrarian, delighted to be out of synch with the zeitgeist, I depend on my sense of humour (such as it is) to keep me sane in this wacky world.

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Friday, 02 January 2009


  Elmo, man of myth-tery: In a talk he gave to a group of anti-Zionist Jews late last
  year, the outgoing (in both senses of the word) head of the Canadian Islamic Congress
  discussed five prevailing “myths”:
…In the 2006 book "Media, Terrorism, and Theory (edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Todd Fraley), Dr. Daya Kishan Thussu, professor of international communications at the University of Westminster (London) lists five myths propagated by the Western media in their campaign against Islam and Muslims.

1. The Myth of "Islamic" Terrorism:

While it is rare to find a Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, or Buddhist brand of terrorism, it has been common both before and after 9/11 for the media to use the term "Islamic" terrorism. Additionally, while the use of other terminologies (e.g. Islamic fundamentalist/fundamentalism, Islamic militancy, Islamists, political Islam, etc.) is familiar, all of them point in one direction - to the label of "Islamic" terrorism. This already dark distinction is compounded by bracketing Islam with the heinous Nazi legacy through an increasing usage of "Islamofascism."

2. The Myth of Madness:

Prof. Thussu notes that the media effectively frame conflicts involving opposing Muslims within a binary context where Muslims are "projected as irrational and fanatical, pitted against a firm, rational, and reasonable" Western political leadership. "The demonizing of supposedly bigoted leaders can be effective tool for propaganda," Thussu continues, "as it helps to personalize an invasion by reducing the entire country and its population to one person." In more recent developments, the American administration under George Bush Jr. did that with Saddam Hussein prior to invading Iraq and then treated Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad similarly in making threats against his country.

3. The Myth of Nuclear Threat:

The threat that a Muslim country - whether Iraq, Syria, or Iran -- will soon develop nuclear weapons and use them to attack the West or Israel, is very popular with imperialists and Zionists. We now know that "The argument that Iraq was in possession of nuclear weapons and had the capacity to deploy them within 45 minutes notice" was a lie, yet it was disseminated by global media without proof and given out as a compelling reason for invading that country.

4. The Myth of Atrocities:

Double standards define the media's presentation of "atrocities committed in the name of the war on terrorism, with terrorist groups receiving maximum opprobrium and the state-sponsored terrorism (and torture) often being ignored."

5. The Myth of Morality:

The most important myth used by the media, according to Prof. Thussu, is "about the U.S. crusade to spread democracy, freedom, and human rights in the world. It has been proposed that force may be needed to democratize the international community. However, the undermining of democracy in the United States and Britain was evident during and leading up to the Iraqi invasion. An historically unprecedented number of ordinary citizens -- as many as eight million -- marched on the streets of five continents on February 15, 2003, demonstrating against the U.S.-British plan to invade Iraq, and yet the democratically elected governments chose to ignore popular sentiment."

Amid the fervor of America’s open-ended "war on terror," Western media and governments are advancing a heightened level of Islamophobia in the interests of a shared neo-imperialist and Zionist agenda to dominate, exploit, torture and kill Muslims. It’s the same Islamophobic cycle returning once again, worse than ever.
  Some myths which, for obvious reasons, Elmo failed to mention: the myth of 
  “Islamophobia” (there’s no such beast; there is, however, a completely rational 
   need to criticize the m.o. of some Muslims as well as certain, shall we say, problematic
  aspects of their faith); the myth of the Jewish drive for global control as set out in
  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tract cobbled together from other sources by
  Czarist police and purveyed as genuine in much of the Judenhass-suffused Islamic
  world; and  perhaps most crucially, the myth of Islamic tolerance, as documented
  by Islam expert and “Islamophobe” Robert Spencer in his book of that name.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:55 | link | comments

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