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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

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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>

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