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A sort of a Christmas message for people to reflect just how extreme is the media manipulation and hatemongering that Iraq is being subjected too. I have looked at almost every photo relating to mass graves in Iraq, not one is of a child. I have read most of the journalist first hand accounts as well. To me this represents the lowest ebb of propaganda - to claim that Iraqi soldiers would systematically murder children. Yet this is exactly has happen at least twice. In the first case a Kurdish opposition paper published a report the gist of which is... "A MASS grave containing the remains of 200 Kurdish children has been discovered in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, the Kurdish newspaper Taakhi reported today. "Citizens discovered on May 30 a communal grave close to Debs, in Kirkuk. But this is different from other mass graves discovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein's terrorist regime because it contains the remains of 200 child victims of the repression of the Kurdish uprising" in 1991, the paper said. "Even dolls were buried with the children," it said." Note the emotive and implausible use of children's dolls in the description. Consider what effect this rumourmongering has on the chances for a peaceful united Iraq. Needless to say there has been no followup by Western media, no investigation official or otherwise. For the simple reason it is propaganda pure and simple, and of a most hateful kind. Yet it recieves not one word of condemnation. The 2nd example concerns that of a US federal judge Don Walters, http://globalspecops.com/view.html. He makes the claim of a mass grave of 1200 children (however no dolls). "When we left mid June, 57 mass graves had been found, one with the bodies of 1200 children. There have been credible reports of murder, brutality and torture of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi citizens. There is poverty on a monumental scale and fear on a larger one. That fear is still palpable. " This claim shows every sign of entering the popular mythology on Iraq. Needless to say there is also no news report, no first hand account of it, no official investigation, simply an off the cuff remark. Again, the probability of this grave existing is about zero. However, the claim in itself is interesting. It shows that an atrocity claim no matter how implausible, no matter how little based on reality will go completely unchallenged. It suggests that Don Walters has not seen even one mass grave, as I suspect that the experience would be traumatic enough that he would neither need or wish to invent mass graves of 1200 children. It is both surreal, farcical and appalling. What sort of person invents a mass grave of 1200 children? And we honour these people as "humanitarians", how sick have we become? What sort of a society have we become? How much further can the lies and hatemongering descent? Merry Christmas Tom Young ____________________________________________________________ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005 _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk