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Please distribute far and wide...
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Wanted: Dissenting news reports on Iraq
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This can be found on the webpage
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/iraqbomb.html
The US and British news coverage of the last Gulf War was marked by
extreme propaganda. For example, after the war the
British press was outraged that the British government had "covered up
the truth" about the deaths of 9 British servicemen in the
gulf due to "friendy fire". Correct me if I'm wrong, but little, if any,
mention has ever been made of the "Up to a quarter of a
million men, women and children were killed or died as a direct result of
the US-lead attack on Iraq", according to the
Medical Educational Trust in London, and corroborated by US and French
intelligence estimates of "in excess of 200,000
civilian deaths". [sources at the end] It is no exaggeration at all to
say that the coverage was racist and incited racism. And
although the process goes to an extreme in wartime, the process of
dehumanising Iraqis, and, in general, people who don't live
in the US, Europe, Japan, or Australasia, continues all the time. Just
think about it - if France [which possesses WMD] was
being bombed by the US now, the reaction would be very different. I think
that shows how racist we [and here I am addressing
the population of Britain and the US] really are underneath it all -
myself included.
The coverage of this latest attack will no doubt follow the same pattern.
However, there may be little chinks of light that show,
just for a second, the reality of the carnage and suffering. As in the
extract below about Basra Road. If you encounter any
such reports - please email them to me ASAP at r.d.green@lancaster.ac.uk
Your contribution may be vital, since
dissenting reports are unlikely to be frequent or well-noticed, and may
be censored or denied a short while after they are
published - it is important that we gather together all sorts of
dissenting facts and voices in order to most effectively condemn
the bombing. We can't, of course, trust the mainstream media. I will
forward the reports to certain journalists and newsrooms
(much good that it will do), to excellent writers such as Noam Chomsky
and John Pilger, and put them on a public web page
for anyone to read (subject to copyright restrictions). So, please, if
you notice a dissenting report or even just a revealing
comment, please do the following:
1.If it is long, to avoid typing it in, search for it on the Internet
first. Then copy and paste it into an email, if you can, and
send me the internet address of the page(s) as well (preferable to
sending me just the address, since it may have been
censored by the time I read that email) This does not breach
copyright under "fair use" guidelines in many countries.
2.Also, let me know the email addresses of anybody who would
definitely like to receive the reports. I will not send them
many messages - just one or two with a summary of reports and the
address of my webpage.
Thank you very much. Please also consider what you could do to protest -
call your MP or congressional rep, or the White
House; organise a protest in your locality, just hand out some leaflets,
anything to put a dent in the biased, nationalistic coverage
we are already seeing. There will be protests in front of Downing Street
today (Thu 17 Dec 1998) at 6:00pm, and, I suspect, in
Times Square and other national centres. Try searching the internet or
contacting local left-wing/peace groups to find local
contacts. A good place to start on the Internet is
http://directory.mozilla.org/Society/Issues/Economic_Sanctions/on_Iraq
which has links to several protest groups.
Extract from "Hidden Agendas" by John Pilger, Vintage, 1998, p.49
To be completed in a few minutes... Come back to
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/greenrd/iraqbomb.html in a few
minutes to read this extract.
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