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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Thursday, April 10, 2003
12:54 - What is it with these people?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,83791,00.html

(top) link
Information Minister Al-Sahhaf is alive and well, and working in Iraqi embassies all around the world under assumed names.

After TV showed Saddam's statue come tumbling down in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats in Brazil carried box after box of papers out of their embassy -- and set them on fire. Then they denied police reports that documents were being destroyed.

"It's all lies," said Brazilian embassy official Abdu Saif. "We are only burning debris and recently cut tree branches."

In Tokyo, Iraqi diplomats hauled garbage bags stuffed with shredded documents out of the embassy. Neighbors whispered that the amount of trash was three times the usual level.

I swear I've never heard the words "it's all lies" so frequently as over the past three weeks, unless it was over the past six months from Arab ambassadors in the UN. Everything's always lies. Hollywood lies. Zionist lies. Crusader lies. Liars-- they'reall liars!


Would it be gauche of me to suggest that it takes one to know one-- or more appropriately, to see one where none exists?

Some of these guys must be so steeped in lying as a part of their professional lives that they honestly believe that the rest of the world is lying. I heard a story on the radio some time ago about a woman who as a professional hobby would attempt to defraud department stores into giving her refunds for clothes that she didn't actually buy there. She would do this at dozens, even hundreds of department stores; and whenever the store saw through her lies and refused to pay up, she grew furious and indignant-- after she left. "They wouldn't even believe me! How dare they? The eye-dacity!"

I'm beginning to think that the real threat to the US stems not even so much from state-supported Islamism (which has failed to follow through on its threats of devastating attacks to coincide with the start of our war in Iraq), as from the deeply ingrained mechanism of institutional lying that is de rigeur throughout the Middle East. Iraqis were prevented from seeing newspapers from outside the country until a few days ago; only now are they starting to see what the rest of the world really thinks about this war. (Remember that before we invaded, Iraqis routinely thought that the "human shields" were there because they'd been paid by Saddam. From the Iraqi viewpoint, what other explanation could there be? Think about it.) And in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the Arab Street is turning out not to be made up of throngs of young and willing suicide bombers-- but rather of average men and women who are suddenly finding out, to their shock and horror, that all the sources of information that they've been listening to all their lives have been lying all along.

They never even knew they were being lied to; the first indication that anything at all was amiss from the party line was when Al-Jazeera was forced to about-face from "Saddam's forces are slaughtering the invaders" to "There was practically no resistance, and the Iraqis are smothering the Americans and British with kisses and flowers" in the space of a day. Until that happened, they had no idea that what they were being told wasn't the truth. Suddenly their whole lives are thrown into chaos. So they're reacting with everything from disbelief to horror to throwing things at their TV sets to going home and crying. They've just had their minds punched in the gut by cold hard reality. That'll fuck you up.

But what does it tell us? That there's an infrastructure of media-based mind control in place in the Middle East, and that it's very closely tied in with the various state apparatuses; it's this system of manufactured truth that is the real enemy in this war, because it's what is preventing the Arab world from seeing the US as liberators rather than as oppressors. It's what turns even the less-than-devout against us on religious terms. It's what prevents people from learning from history, from understanding the world in which they live, from knowing what kinds of ways of life there are besides their own. It's what tells the people in these Middle Eastern countries that their way of life is the only pure and good one, and that America and Israel are the great evil powers in the world which threaten all that is good and just, for their own selfish ends.

We worry about violence on TV corrupting our children. Well, we might instead want to worry about propaganda on TV corrupting a whole region. Yeah, the media is to blame for the ills of today's world-- but not in the way Michael Moore thinks.

Which means that our current plan for reform in the Middle East is right on track. Liberating Iraq has been a twofold blow: on the one hand, it freed the people of Iraq, which is all to their own benefit as well as to ours, in removing Saddam from the equation; 26 million Iraqis now have a better future, and we have a more secure one. But on the other hand, the Arab media machine has been dealt a serious wound; Al-Jazeera has been severely demoralized and had its credibility shattered among millions of its critical viewership. Now that they know that what Al-Jazeera broadcasts is lies, or at least it was revealed to be such here and now in Iraq, the Arab viewers know that they can no longer trust it. And if they can't trust Al-Jazeera, who else might have been lying to them all this time?

Could it be, maybe, just possibly-- that all the people who have been using the words "It's all lies" are the ones most likely to be lying themselves?


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© Brian Tiemann