The blasphemous US-produced movie, while denounced by US officials, is still defended on the basis of free speech. History, however, shows that publishing racist, anti-religious tracts has been punished. Julius Streicher, publisher of a racist, anti-Jewish tabloid, Sturmer, was hanged after a military trial at Nuremberg accused of aiding and abetting the slaughter of Jews. He was not a member of the Nazi party nor was he in Hitler’s military.
Fake historian distorts history to attack Islam in the most scandalous way and Britain’s channel 4 provides him air time. Islamophobia is now official policy in much of the western world.
American politics is a game of blatant lies and distortions. It makes little difference to the life of Americans whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.
Muslims need to develop greater sophistication in determining the validity of alternate media, especially outlets like Al Jazeera.
With the gory newsfeed of the Houla massacre, the war in Syria seems to be morphing into the horror movie storyline from a DVD watched too many times on Friday rec-nights.
Two competing narratives continue to dominate discussion about events in Syria. The first and most-often repeated narrative, eagerly projected by the Western corporate media as well as al-Jazeera, is that the people of Syria have risen up for their rights and will settle for nothing less than the ouster of President Bashar al-Asad.
On October 29, Muslim researchers, journalists and editors gathered in Tehran to inaugurate the establishment of the Press Union of the Islamic World. The first general assembly session of the press union attracted Muslim media professionals from 38 countries representing different media outlets including Crescent International.
1The real oligarchic nature of democratic polities and societies, and the fact that “freedom” is actually a cover for the untrammelled exercise of power by the strong in society, are subjects that I have written about before in this column and elsewhere.
Most people with even limited understanding of how media outlets spin news can see through the lies dished out by the likes of Fox News and CNN. But how does one explain the lies habitually repeated by such supposedly venerable institutions as the BBC, the New York Times or the Washington Post? All of them in their own right are considered paragons of wisdom and their word is considered sacrosanct.
Peter King’s recent attempt to assert cultural legitimacy, through his June 2011 Congressional witch hunt on Islam’s presence in the prison industrial system, has unfortunately fizzled.
In Libya, al-Jazeera is on the side of the Libyan rebels. Their cause is championed even if Western planes are bombing Libyan positions including the April 26 assassination attempt on Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
In the Republican Party’s latest homage to fascism, conservative politicians and media networks are spreading hysteria about the “invasion of Shari‘ah” in the United States. As Glenn Beck, the Tea Party’s weepy evangelist described it on his Fox News show, Shari‘ah is a form of “stealth jihad” that is “working to destroy America from within.”
1While the world and indeed much of the Muslim world’s attention is diverted to the uprisings sweeping the Islamic East, Zionist Israel is using the regional political turmoil as a cover to do what it has always done best: kill innocent Palestinians in Gaza with its weapons of mass destruction and disinformation.
The New Year is traditionally a time when people reflect on their situations in life, as well as contemplating the possibilities of the year to come. This New Year in the Gregorian calendar coincides (more or less) with a new year, 1432, in the Hijri calendar; Muharram 1 fell on December 7, 2010.
Journalists, it is said, write the first draft of history. Given the manner in which the once honourable profession of journalism has been subverted into a propaganda tool of the Western corporate elite, it is a totally undeserved compliment.
Some Canadian media outlets have become conduits for Israeli propaganda. The latest in this series were “leaked” United Nations documents about the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s 2005 assassination in Beirut.
By Tahir Mahmoud On July 20, 1988 when Iran accepted a ceasefire in the Iraqi-imposed war that was backed and financed by the US and Arab regimes, most people assumed that the war had ended. The shooting may have stopped but the war against
During the last years of the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev was President (mid- to late nineteen eighties), a group of Soviet journalists was invited to see how a “free press” in the US worked. This was intended to teach the By Tahir Mustafa
Wars are fought on several fronts of which the one in the media is just as important as the shooting war. While the outcome of a shooting war cannot be predicted with certainty despite careful planning and use of the most sophisticated weapons, the media war is often better controlled and managed, especially if the crimes are perpetrated by the US and its surrogate Israel.
Five years after the US invasion of Iraq, it is now widely accepted that the war was based on a web of lies deliberately spun by the Bush administration to justify a war that they were determined to execute come what might. A number of other groups have also been criticised for their roles in the deception, including the US intelligence community and the British government.