-- begin forwarded message: -- Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 08:20:21 +0900 From: Hendrik To: Multiple recipients of NETSOURCE-L <netsource-l@mail.think.service> Subject: [NS] The Orlando Sentinel exposes some of the US propaganda A quoted article with editorial introduction, sent by <MER@middleeast.org> on May 13, 1999 -- LIES, DECEIPT, AND PUBLIC OPINION MANIPULATION IN WASHINGTON MER - WASHINGTON - 5/11/99: Remember 1990 during the debate in the U.S. Congress whether to "authorize" the war with Iraq? Remember the young woman who so powerfully testified about how she eye-witnessed such terrible atrocities by the Iraqis in Kuwait, testimony that galvanized the Foreign Relations Committee and captivated TV viewers throughout the country? And remember as well that we learned the next year this young woman had not seen what she described, indeed she was not even in Kuwait at the time in question? As it turned out, this young woman was a kind of temporary TV star created by a big public relations firm, one headed at the time by the former White House Press Secretary for the previous Administration. She even conveniently forgot to tell the rather gullible Senators, not to mention the American public, that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington! Moral of the story? What you can't do these days with a few spare millions and TV! As you read this thoughtful and provocative column by Charley Reese from The Orlando Sentinel on 25 April please keep this backdrop from 1990 and the Iraq/Kuwait War in mind: SERBS ARE ALSO VICTIMS -- OF A MASSIVE PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN By Charley Reese The Orlando Sentinel The Serbs, as Slobodan Milosevic said on American television, are not angels, but neither are they devils. They are also the victims of a massive anti-Serbian propaganda campaign. Starting with the civil wars, Serbs have been blamed for things they never did while atrocities committed by Croats and Muslims were ignored. What the Serbs were and are up against are powerful American public- relations firms, Western intelligence agencies and biased or incompetent Western reporters. Maybe you recall a famous picture of an emaciated man standing behind a barbed-wire fence. This was reported as a Muslim being starved in a Serb concentration camp. In fact, the man was a Serb who had been arrested by the Serbs for looting, and he was emaciated not from lack of food but from suffering with advanced tuberculosis. Yohanan Ramati, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense, wrote of the campaign against the Serbs, "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concern. It recalls Adolf Hitler's propaganda against the Allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and, when inconvenient, disregarded. The selectivity in reporting and comment is far too blatant to be accidental." Ramati quotes from an interview given on French Two television by James Harff of Finn & Rudder, the public-relations firm representing the Muslims. He boasts that their greatest achievement was to get American Jews on the side of Muslims by peddling the concentration-camp story published by a New York newspaper. This business of death camps, by the way, was later proven to be a hoax. But here is a good lesson in how the real world works behind the scenes. Rudder Finn didn't commit the hoax. It simply took the published story to three major Jewish organizations with a suggestion that they run ads condemning it. The PR guy says that once the Jewish organizations came in on the side of the Muslims, it was easy to equate the Serbs with the Nazis. Some of the hoaxes perpetrated on Americans include the so-called bread- line massacre, the alleged destruction of Dubrovnik, a funeral shown on television of a girl said to be a Muslim victim who was instead a Serb child killed by the Muslims and, of course, the mass-rape hoax, which has cropped up again in Kosovo. Original allegations in the past of 60,000 rapes boiled down, after a United Nations investigation, to 126 alleged victims. Certainly in civil wars women will get raped, but the mass, organized rape story was a pure hoax. This kind of stuff is still going on because the North Atlantic Treaty Organization campaign against Yugoslavia rests on a foundation of lies. I've seen assertions by Western journalists that "thousands of refugees have all told the same story." Use common sense. Do you really think that the handful of Western journalists over there have questioned thousands of people? If so, why do they keep using the same video of the same people so often? And how many of these Western journalists speak Albanian or Serbo- Croatian? My guess is none. That means that they have to rely on translators who are probably being furnished by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The refugee can be saying one thing and the translator another, and the reporter will be none the wiser. That happened in Vietnam, where translators sometimes turned out to be Viet Cong intelligence agents. Just remember: NATO is breaking international law, and the United States has no business being involved in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia. One day we may elect a government that won't lie to us so much. -- Reference: MID-EAST REALITIES Fax: 202 362-6965 / Phone: 202 362-5266 Web: <http://www.MiddleEast.Org > E-Mail: <MER@MiddleEast.Org> -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription information, appended by the listserver: * if you want to leave this list please send an empty message to <leave-netsource-list@hiz.bc.ca> * if you know someone who wants to join this list, please tell them to send an empty message to <join-netsource-list@hiz.bc.ca> ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- end forwarded message --