You Tube Expands 9/11 Truth Purge

You Tube Expands 9/11 Truth Purge
Deletes user account which featured BBC WTC 7 videos that had over 1 million views

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Friday, January 23, 2009

You Tube has permanently suspended another major 9/11 truth account in a continuation of the purge that began following efforts by the establishment to smear the 9/11 truth movement as terrorist propaganda.

You Tube has previously been caught blocking 9/11 truth videos from entering into top ranking charts for both views and comments despite their enduring popularity.

It also has a record of wanton censorship in deleting videos that are artistically crafted compilations and the furthest possible thing from copyright violation, such as the "Question Your Reality" video.

You Tube has now completely deleted the "OneDeadDJ" user account, which was used to display videos on Prison Planet.com, and in particular video clips relating to the BBC reporting the collapse of Building 7 over 20 minutes in advance.

Upon attempting to login to the account, one is met with the message, "Your account has been permanently disabled". No explanation as to why is given.

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One of the videos deleted by You Tube, which features in the article "BBC Reported Building 7 Collapse 20 Minutes Before It Fell," had over 1 million views and nearly 45,000 comments before it was pulled this week.

The same clip can still be found on You Tube by using the search function, but the deletion of the original means that the video will now be dead on thousands of websites and blogs that picked it up when the story first broke.

When one attempts to play the clip, the message "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation" is displayed. No doubt that the BBC has demanded You Tube remove the video in an attempt to hide its embarrasment at the WTC 7 fiasco, which it clumsily attempted to resolve by producing two seperate hit piece documentaries against 9/11 truth.

The fact that the video is brief, is implicitly newsworthy, and has been used for the purposes of an article which is inherantly in the wider public interest, precludes any notion of copyright violation. This is blatantly an example of "fair use".

You Tube users started noticing an increase in account suspensions and videos being removed following a demand from Senator Joe Lieberman that You Tube remove all content deemed "terrorist propaganda".

As we saw at a House Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on "Terrorism and the Internet" in November 2007, questioning the official 9/11 story behind 9/11 is now being classified as aiding terrorist propaganda by some sectors of the establishment.

During the hearing, representatives formerly of the RAND Corporation and the Simon Wiesenthal Center showed images of WTC 7 and a screenshot from the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth site in an attempt to link 9/11 truth with violent jihadists.

Please take a moment to complain to You Tube about the deletion of the "OneDeadDJ" user account and demand it be reinstated. To make a complaint call +1 650-253-0000 (please be polite).

Watch a clip about previous examples of You Tube censorship below.

 

IMPORTANT:Jim Rogers: Abolish The IMF & World Bank

Jim Rogers: Abolish The IMF & World Bank
Veteran investor says Obama stimulus package only making economic crisis worse

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Monday, February 16, 2009

In an interview with Sir David Frost on Al Jazeera television, veteran investor Jim Rogers pinned the blame for the economic crisis squarely at the feet of the Federal Reserve, and said that the World Bank and the IMF should be abolished, not given more power, if a recovery is to be made.

Rogers strongly slammed Obama's stimulus package, pointing out that more good money was being thrown after bad, and that the bailouts were only making things worse. The veteran investor said that the U.S. was following the same disastrous policies as Japan in propping up companies that should be allowed to fail, and that the same consequences would be reaped as much as 20 years into the future.

"The way the system is supposed to work, when times like this come, the solid people, the competent people, take over the assets from the incompetent people and then you start over again from a sound base, this is what South Korea did, this is what Russia did, and they did fine. What they're doing this time is they're taking the assets away from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying now you compete with the competent people with their assets and their money - it's terrible economics and it's not going to work, it hasn't worked before and it's not going to work this time," said Rogers.

Rogers said that price had to be paid for 15 years of excess, but that the crisis could have been overcome in two or three years had zombie companies and banks been allowed to go to the wall.

"The central bank in the United States, the Federal Reserve, would not let people fail," said Rogers, pointing out that had former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan let Long Term Capital Management fail in 1998, both Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Lehman Brothers would still be in business, "because people would have taken such a hit, and so many people would have been fired, these bozos that were doing this sort of thing, that you would not have had these problems."

"The way the system is supposed to work is when you make a mistake you go broke, he refused to let people go broke, he saved his friends and now we're all having to pay for them," added Rogers.

Asked if he had any respect for the World Bank and the IMF, Rogers responded, "Zero....the best thing that would happen would be if we could abolish the World Bank and the IMF, they were set up in 1945 and '46 with very sound goals and very sound aspirations - they have far far far left behind those aspirations and goals, they're now run by people who do little more than take care of themselves....look at their projects and you would be mortified."

In response to a question about what if any sectors would be profitable amidst the crash, Rogers advised people invested in stocks to "get yourself a tractor and learn how to farm".

Watch the clip below.

 

Bizarre and Offensive Online Gallery Fearmongers For Terror Attacks in London, NYC

Bizarre and Offensive Online Gallery Fearmongers For Terror Attacks in London, NYC
UK Telegraph carries vulgar propaganda in arts and culture section

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Friday, January 16, 2009

A bizarre, anonymous and offensive picture gallery currently appearing on the website of the London Telegraph newspaper that tells the story of a terrorist nuke attack on London has left many asking questions about its origin and meaning.

The slide show features on a section dedicated to art, culture, film and music but seemingly holds no artistic credence whatsoever, comprising merely of a series of crude pictures designed to instill fear into the viewer. The only purpose of the gallery is presumably just a continuation of the incessant drone of fearmongering propaganda from the establishment media and authorities about the imminent inevitability of a mass casualty terror attack.

Entitled "Blackjack," the gallery begins with a date, June 20 at 2pm, followed by an MI5 logo and the text "MI5 report warns government of imminent terrorist attack". This certainly makes sense because MI5 and MI6 have proven themselves adept at controlling terrorist groups and carrying out attacks in the past, including paying Al-Qaeda $100,000 in the mid-80's in a failed attempt to assassinate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

After we learn that the attack will be the work of "home grown extremists, Islamists and Christian doomsday cultists," the date switches to June 21 at 12pm as a nuclear bomb is loaded onto a white van in London. As Cryptogon.com notes, the ‘fictitious’ attack occurs during the Summer solstice, the name on the side of the van is New Dawn Presentations and the logo is the Sun. The white van also harks back to the Kingstar (controlled demolition company) van that was pictured near the exploded bus after the 7/7 London bombings.

After citizens panic buy groceries and flee London in droves, on June 22 at 8:03am, the nuke explodes in central London. The images then show the devastation in the aftermath of the attack as the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Big Ben lay in ruins.

This is only the end of part one and in part two we are promised similar devastation with an image of millions fleeing New York City.

This disgusting and pointless "gallery" cannot be classed as culture, art or anything of the sort - it is nothing more than gratuitous and macabre pornography for those in establishment, and believe me there are many, that yearn for another 9/11 or worse in order to unravel their contemptuous political agenda.

What kind of sick mind created this and why was it allowed to feature so prominently on a major UK newspaper website? This is vile, vulgar propaganda and downright offensive, especially to the millions of people who live in London and New York City and have already suffered terrorist attacks, both of which were carried out with the complete complicity of the British and U.S. governments, within the past decade.

We need answers as to who created this, what its implausible artistic merit is, and why the London Telegraph allowed it to appear on their website.

We encourage people to make their complaints via this online form. Don't give them your real address, just make up a fake one.

Newly Uncovered WTC 7 Video Betrays More Foreknowledge Of Collapse

Newly Uncovered WTC 7 Video Betrays More Foreknowledge Of Collapse
Despite event being unprecedented in history

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Another video from 9/11 has been uncovered which proves that the collapse of WTC 7 was anticipated beforehand, despite that fact that the event was unprecedented - no steel framed building had completely collapsed from fire damage alone in previous history.

A widely publicized aspect of the collapse of Building 7 is the fact that news organizations received foreknowledge that it was coming down well in advance of its eventual collapse. Indeed, both BBC and CNN reported that the structure had collapsed nearly 30 minutes before it actually fell.

In the following clip, Fox News correspondent David Lee Miller states, "We are told by one firefighter source that a building identified as trade center number 7 is in danger of collapse, we are told that engineers have gotten as close as they can to the building and that this building is on fire and there is a chance that this building could give way and we are told that if it does they expect that it would collapse in a southerly direction."

Watch the video.

 

The notion that WTC 7, a structurally reinforced 47-story office building, would completely collapse from fire damage alone could not possibly have been anticipated on 9/11. Such an occurrence had never happened before in history. The sheer improbability of such a scenario unfolding was underscored in February 2005 when the Windsor building in Madrid burned like an inferno for over 24 hours and did not collapse, while WTC 7 suffered limited fires across a comparatively miniscule area and collapsed within 7 seconds on 9/11.

The fact that official sources told Fox News that the building would fall in a southerly direction is also highly suspect if one were to accept that notion that the collapse was accidental and not engineered with the aid of explosives. How would they know which way it would fall if the event was unprecedented?

This level of foreknowledge about an unprecedented event also arouses suspicious when one considers the fact that former New York City chief emergency manager Jerome Hauer, whose office was on the 23d floor of WTC 7, was also a building collapse specialist. Hauer has attracted suspicion from the 9/11 truth movement because of his zeal to push the official story in the hours after the attack when details were still sketchy.

Hauer was also Managing Director of Kroll Associates - the company that provided security for the WTC complex on 9/11 - and he also betrayed advance knowledge of the anthrax attacks a week before they happened by taking cipro, the anthrax-fighting antibiotic, well before the first anthrax letters were received.

Of course, this website has exhaustively documented eyewitness accounts of the preparation for a deliberate demolition of Building 7 and establishment media organizations have responded by embarking on an almost obsessive debunking campaign in an attempt to stymie growing interest in the subject.

People like former Air Force Special Operations for Search and Rescue expert Kevin McPadden are on record as having personally witnessed the countdown that preceded the collapse of Building 7 and others, like former NYPD officer Craig Bartmer, described hearing bombs tear down the building as he fled the collapse.

These people have been ignored in the midst of an organized effort to sweep the controversy under the carpet characterized most recently by a bizarre and completely unscientific NIST report which concluded that a "new phenomenon," and one that contradicts the very laws of physics, was responsible for the collapse of WTC 7.

Fire Consumes WTC 7-Size Skyscraper, Building Does Not Collapse

Fire Consumes WTC 7-Size Skyscraper, Building Does Not Collapse
Giant flames engulf every floor of 44-story building and it remains standing, yet limited fires across just 8 floors of WTC 7 brought down building within 7 seconds on 9/11. How can NIST's "new phenomenon" explain this one?

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Monday, February 9, 2009

A fierce fire consumed all 44 floors of a skyscraper in Beijing today, shooting 30 foot flames into the air, but unlike the similarly-sized 47-story WTC 7, which suffered limited fires across just eight floors, the building in China did not collapse.

"The fire was burning from the ground floor to the top floor of the large building, the flames reflecting in the glass facade of the main CCTV tower next to the hotel and cultural center," reports the New York Times.

"The 241-room Mandarin Oriental hotel in the building was due to open this year. Flames were spotted around 7:45 p.m. and within 20 minutes the fire had spread throughout the building, dominating that part of the city."

"Hundreds of firefighting vehicles and police blocked off all approaches to the building - which was also set to house a luxury hotel due to be opened in 2009 - with flames appearing to leap 20 to 30 feet into the air," adds The London Times.

Compare images of WTC 7 with those of the skyscraper fire in Beijing. Note that the Beijing skyscraper appears to be leaning due to the unorthodox design of the building - it did not suffer any kind of collapse.

Beijing skyscraper.

WTC 7

Beijing skyscraper.

WTC 7

Beijing skyscraper.

WTC 7

To any sane and rational observer, which of these buildings would have been the most likely to collapse? And yet it was WTC 7 which collapsed within 7 seconds into its own footprint on 9/11. The Beijing skyscraper, though gutted by fire damage, remains standing.

How do the debunkers explain away this one? How come NIST's newly invented "phenomenon" of "thermal expansion" didn't put paid to the skyscraper in Beijing? Does fire have different properties in China compared to the U.S.? Does it behave in different ways depending on what country it's in?

Remember that WTC 7 was structurally reinforced and suffered limited fires across just 8 floors.

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The core of NIST’s explanation, that an “extraordinary event” called “thermal expansion” was to blame for the sudden total collapse of WTC 7 is of course on the face of it a fraud when one considers the innumerable number of buildings that have suffered roaring fires across the majority of their floors and remained standing, whereas WTC 7 suffered limited fire damage across a handful of floors.

The Beijing skyscraper fire provides yet more comparable evidence to illustrate the monolithic hoax that fire damage alone can cause buildings to collapse implosion style, adding more weight to the argument that both WTC 7 and the twin towers were destroyed by explosives that were seen and heard by dozens of eyewitnesses who were at ground zero.

Take another example - the Windsor building in Madrid, a 32 story skyscraper which was a raging inferno for no less than 24 hours before fire crews were able to put out the flames. Despite the building being constructed of columns a fraction as thick as those used in the WTC twin towers, as well as a total lack of fireproofing, the building's top section only partially collapsed while the integrity of the whole structure remained firmly intact.

Compare these images of the Windsor building fire to those of WTC 7 and the twin towers.

The skyscraper fire in Beijing offers another stark and bold reminder that when one eliminates the dodgy, agenda-driven, and incomprehensible delusions of NIST, one fact remains abundantly clear;

Office fires - even the flame shooting towering inferno variety - cannot cause modern buildings to implode in on themselves and collapse. Only deliberately placed explosives can achieve this end. The Windsor fire, the Beijing skyscraper fire and many more yet to come painfully underscore the awful truth that the only way WTC 7 and the twin towers could have collapsed in the manner that they did was by means of controlled demolition.

Still Standing: The Building That Proves WTC 7 Was Imploded

Still Standing: The Building That Proves WTC 7 Was Imploded
New videos highlight vivid contrast of Mandarin Oriental Hotel fire to fires in WTC 7 before its free fall collapse

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Tuesday, February 10, 2009

New videos of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel fire in Beijing highlight the vivid contrast between the damage it suffered as it was completely consumed by roaring flames, yet remained standing, and the comparative sporadic fires across just 8 floors that led to the complete free fall collapse of WTC 7.

9/11 truth debunkers are in a bind as to how to respond to the Beijing skyscraper fire because of the building's similarity in size to Building 7 and the gargantuan fire damage it suffered in comparison with the limited "office fires" witnessed in WTC 7. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel is over 500 feet tall, just 100 feet short of the height of WTC 7.

The fires that consumed the Beijing building were on a completely different scale to those witnessed on 9/11, with the flames so violent and widespread that they masked almost the entire view of the building.

The best debunkers have come up with seems to be the false notion that the fires caused a partial collapse by making the building "lean". This is of course complete baloney because the facade of the building was designed to appear as if it was leaning in the first place, as the image below highlights, with shots before and after the fire.

Since the Beijing building was still under construction, sprinkler systems had not been installed, providing another similarity to WTC 7, in which sprinkler systems malfunctioned before its collapse. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel was also a steel-framed building with a concrete core and may even have included steel salvaged from the debris of the twin towers and WTC 7 that was hastily shipped off to China shortly after 9/11.

Just take a look at the intensity of the fire that consumed the building but failed to bring it down in the following You Tube clip.

Now compare that with the fires that preceded the collapse of WTC 7.

How can any rational thinking person watch those two videos and lend any credence whatsoever to NIST's claim that "thermal expansion" could have brought down WTC 7 into its own footprint, whereas the dramatic inferno that totally consumed the Beijing building had little structural effect whatsoever?

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Apparently forgetting NIST's newly invented "thermal expansion" theory, a scientific discovery that presumably has replaced the laws of physics, this Chinese news correspondent stands perilously close to the building completely unaware that since 9/11, all buildings that suffer minor fires, never mind towering infernos such as this, must collapse within 7 seconds into their own footprint.

 

Here are another two clips for comparison.

The dramatic flames engulfing the Beijing building, compared to the restricted "office fires" in WTC 7.

 

Here are four more images of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel ablaze and the aftermath.

Who could have guessed the resulting damage of the two fires? In Beijing....

And on 9/11....

 

9/11 truth debunking websites have so far been silent on the Mandarin Oriental Hotel fire and are likely to remain so. Yesterday's fire serves to reinforce facts and not the fairy tales that the official 9/11 story is based around - namely that fire cannot weaken or melt steel to the point where a building collapses at free fall speed into its own footprint, without the aid of explosives.

Beijing Skyscraper Fire: The Silence Is Deafening

Beijing Skyscraper Fire: The Silence Is Deafening
Debunkers' only response is to claim that no comparison to WTC 7 can be made, yet they feverishly compared completely dissimilar bridge collapses to twin towers in 2007

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Thursday, February 12, 2009

Three days after a towering inferno engulfed a 500 foot skyscraper in Beijing, debunkers have failed to come up with any answers as to why the building remained standing in comparison with WTC 7, which suffered a uniform 7 second implosion as a result of limited fires spread across just 8 floors on 9/11.

Beijing's Mandarin Oriental hotel defied all known physics on Monday when it was consumed by fires but did not collapse, a modern day miracle in light of the commonly accepted premise that since 9/11, all steel buildings that suffer even limited fire damage implode in on their own footprint within seconds.

All joking aside, any credibility that remained behind NIST's "thermal expansion" theory, which was apparently only evident on one day in history and not in the case of hundreds of other high rise buildings that have caught fire and remained standing, metaphorically went up in the flames that consumed - but did not collapse - one of Beijing's most prominent buildings.

The silence of debunkers with regard to the hotel fire is both deafening and highly hypocritical. Proponents of the government's version of events are usually feverish to seize upon anything, no matter how inane and off tangent, in order to try and prop up the official fairy tale.

The best retort we have seen since the fire is the claim that buildings are constructed differently and therefore no comparison can possibly be made between the Mandarin Oriental hotel and Building 7.

Really? That argument didn't stop debunkers from comparing the collapse of two bridges to the collapse of the twin towers following freeway collapses in San Francisco and Minnesota in 2007.

The frenzy was particularly evident at Fark.com following the San Francisco bridge collapse, with posters reveling in the notion that the freeway accident had made "WTC conspiracy theories collapse as quickly as that highway did."

In that instance, the freeway section was made of highly flammable asphalt and took the brunt of a gigantic gasoline explosion with open air fires shooting 200 feet in the air. In comparison, the twin towers were impacted by aluminum planes filled with significantly less flammable kerosene and suffered limited fires that were oxygen-starved and almost out before the collapses occurred.

"You can't even begin to compare 5 inch thick steel plate core columns, approximately 2 foot by 5 foot rectangle 5 inch thick boxes to quarter inch and 3 quarter inch dowels that connect the steel to the support members," a steel welding expert told us.

"The logical deduction is that the rebar steel was exposed horizontally, that whole bridge surface and it was exposed intention, not like the fires that were lapping up fire-proofed 5 inch thick plate columns in the World Trade Center - these little bars had no heat sink and after two hours with all that weight on them they fell."

But logic didn't stop the debunkers from comparing the collapse of a weakened and cracked freeway with the uniform implosion of skyscrapers that were designed to absorb multiple airliner impacts without collapsing. Neither did it stop them from using the absurd comparison to try and explain away the collapse of WTC 7 - which wasn't even hit by a plane.

So when debunkers attempt to evade difficult questions about the Beijing skyscraper fire by claiming that no comparison can even be made to WTC 7, it's pertinent to remind them that they considered it perfectly legitimate to compare towering skyscrapers with run-down creaking bridges in order to push their agenda.

The state-controlled communist media in China have all but censored coverage of the Beijing skyscraper fire to avoid public embarrassment, but the silence has been just as deafening in the U.S., where corporate media networks have largely ignored the story, ostensibly to prevent people make the obvious comparison to World Trade Center 7.

Thankfully, an army of truth activists have been busy on You Tube compiling video comparisons of the fires in the two buildings and the resulting damage. The best videos are featured below.

 

9/11 Cover-Up Connection: Black Boxes Found 15 Hours After Buffalo Crash

9/11 Cover-Up Connection: Black Boxes Found 15 Hours After Buffalo Crash
Yet FBI claimed that indestructible black boxes were never discovered following WTC attack

Paul Joseph Watson Propaganda Matrix Friday, February 13, 2009

One of a plethora of cover-ups surrounding 9/11 is the FBI's contention that the black boxes onboard the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center were never found, a claim that has been further discredited following the news that the black box onboard flight Q400 that crashed last night in New York was found within 15 hours.

The FBI told the 9/11 Commission that the black boxes from Flight 11 and Flight 175, despite being built to withstand direct full speed crashes and temperatures of 1800-degrees, were never discovered in the wreckage at ground zero. They also claimed that the voice recorder from Flight 77 and the flight data box from Flight 93 were damaged beyond recovery.

It is incredibly rare that black boxes remain undiscovered after a plane crash, and considering that the WTC site was meticulously cleaned up to the point where tiny bone fragments were recovered, it is inconceivable that the black boxes could have been completely lost, even if they were damaged beyond repair.

In 2004, New York firefighters Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi went public to say they had found the black boxes at the World Trade Center, but were told to keep their mouths shut by FBI agents. Nicholas DeMasi said that he escorted federal agents on an all-terrain vehicle in October 2001 and helped them locate the devices, a story backed up by rescue volunteer Mike Bellone.

As the Philadelphia Daily News reported at the time, "Their story raises the question of whether there was a some type of cover-up at Ground Zero."

“At one point, I was asked to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes,” he wrote. “We were getting ready to go out. My ATV was parked at the top of the stairs at the Brooks Brothers entrance area. We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV," said DeMasi.

"At one point, Bellone said he observed the team with a box that appeared charred but was redish-orange with two white stripes. Pictures of the flight recorders on the NTSB and other Web sites show devices that are orange, with two white stripes," reported the newspaper.

“There was the one that I saw, and two others were recovered in different locations - but I wasn’t there for the other two,” Bellone said. He said the FBI agents left with the boxes."

In addition, a source at the National Transportation Safety Board later told Counterpunch, "Off the record, we had the boxes....You'd have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here."

Suspicions surrounding the so-called failure to locate the black boxes at the World Trade Center can only be heightened by the news that the black box from last night's tragic plane crash in Buffalo was discovered within a mere 15 hours.

Furthermore, both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder were in perfect condition, as you can see from the image below.

"The black box of a commercial airliner that nose-dived into a Buffalo house in New York has been retrieved, about 15 hours after the incident," reports Press TV.

The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder "have been found and they are on their way back here," said Ted Lopatkiewicz a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), AFP reported on Friday.

The motivation behind lying about the recovery of the black boxes on 9/11 is obvious - any aspect of the recordings of the onboard conversations between the pilots or the movements of their plane that didn't coalesce with the official story would have destroyed the fairy tale that was being constructed around the attacks in the very minutes and hours after they started to unfold.

Questions about how a handful of men with box cutters could have overpowered burly ex-military pilots and scores of passengers with apparent ease would not have gone unanswered.

The circumstances surrounding the Buffalo crash and the Beijing skyscraper fire are two events that happened in the same week which offer stark contradictions and only place the credibility of the official 9/11 story further in doubt.

IMPORTANT:Fighting talk: The new propaganda

Fighting talk: The new propaganda

Robert Fisk -- Independent June 21, 2010

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House  most of the time  and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. Remember the "bunker buster" and the "Scud buster" and the "target-rich environment" in the Gulf War (Part One)? Forget about "weapons of mass destruction". Too obviously silly. But "WMD" in the Gulf War (Part Two) had a power of its own, a secret code  genetic, perhaps, like DNA  for something that would reap terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. "45 Minutes to Terror".

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and State Department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, between America and Israel.

In the Western context, power and the media is about words  and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history, and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power. Is this because we no longer care about linguistics or semantics? Is this because laptops "correct" our spelling, "trim" our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

For two decades now, the US and British  and Israeli and Palestinian  leaderships have used the words "peace process" to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonourable agreement that allowed the US and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people. I first queried this expression, and its provenance, at the time of Oslo  although how easily we forget that the secret surrenders at Oslo were themselves a conspiracy without any legal basis.

Poor old Oslo, I always think. What did Oslo ever do to deserve this? It was the White House agreement that sealed this preposterous and dubious treaty  in which refugees, borders, Israeli colonies, even timetables  were to be delayed until they could no longer be negotiated.

And how easily we forget the White House lawn  though, yes, we remember the images  upon which it was Clinton who quoted from the Koran, and Arafat who chose to say: "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr President." And what did we call this nonsense afterwards? Yes, it was "a moment of history"! Was it? Was it so?

Do you remember what Arafat called it? "The peace of the brave". But I don't remember any of us pointing out that "the peace of the brave" was used by General de Gaulle about the end of the Algerian war. The French lost the war in Algeria. We did not spot this extraordinary irony.

Same again today. We Western journalists  used yet again by our masters  have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan, as saying their war can only be won with a "hearts and minds" campaign. No one asked them the obvious question: Wasn't this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam War? And didn't we  didn't the West  lose the war in Vietnam? Yet now we Western journalists are using  about Afghanistan  the phrase "hearts and minds" in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition, rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades.

Just look at the individual words we have recently co-opted from the US military. When we Westerners find that "our" enemies  al-Qa'ida, for example, or the Taliban  have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it "a spike in violence".

Ah yes, a "spike"! A "spike" is a word first used in this context, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase, our journalistic invention. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up then sharply downwards. A "spike in violence" therefore avoids the ominous use of the words "increase in violence"  for an increase, of course, might not go down again afterwards.

Now again, when US generals refer to a sudden increase in their forces for an assault on Fallujah or central Baghdad or Kandahar  a mass movement of soldiers brought into Muslim countries by the tens of thousands  they call this a "surge". And a surge, like a tsunami, or any other natural phenomena, can be devastating in its effects. What these "surges" really are  to use the real words of serious journalism  are reinforcements. And reinforcements are sent to conflicts when armies are losing those wars. But our television and newspaper boys and girls are still talking about "surges" without any attribution at all. The Pentagon wins again.

Meanwhile the "peace process" collapsed. Therefore our leaders  or "key players" as we like to call them  tried to make it work again. The process had to be put "back on track". It was a train, you see. The carriages had come off the line. The Clinton administration first used this phrase, then the Israelis, then the BBC. But there was a problem when the "peace process" had repeatedly been put "back on track"  but still came off the line. So we produced a "road map"  run by a Quartet and led by our old Friend of God, Tony Blair, who  in an obscenity of history  we now refer to as a "peace envoy". But the "road map" isn't working. And now, I notice, the old "peace process" is back in our newspapers and on our television screens. And earlier this month, on CNN, one of those boring old fogies whom the TV boys and girls call "experts" told us again that the "peace process" was being put "back on track" because of the opening of "indirect talks" between Israelis and Palestinians. This isn't just about clichs  this is preposterous journalism. There is no battle between the media and power; through language, we, the media, have become them.

Here's another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after 34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East. We are told, in many analysis features, that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are "competing narratives". How very cosy. There's no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. "Competing narratives" now regularly pop up in the British press.

The phrase, from the false language of anthropology, deletes the possibility that one group of people  in the Middle East, for example  is occupied, while another is doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly "competing narratives", a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are  are they not?  "in competition". And two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

So an "occupation" becomes a "dispute". Thus a "wall" becomes a "fence" or "security barrier". Thus Israeli acts of colonisation of Arab land, contrary to all international law, become "settlements" or "outposts" or "Jewish neighbourhoods". It was Colin Powell, in his starring, powerless appearance as Secretary of State to George W Bush, who told US diplomats to refer to occupied Palestinian land as "disputed land"  and that was good enough for most of the US media. There are no "competing narratives", of course, between the US military and the Taliban. When there are, you'll know the West has lost.

But I'll give you an example of how "competing narratives" come undone. In April, I gave a lecture in Toronto to mark the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the deliberate mass murder of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish army and militia. Before my talk, I was interviewed on Canadian Television, CTV, which also owns Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper. And from the start, I could see that the interviewer had a problem. Canada has a large Armenian community. But Toronto also has a large Turkish community. And the Turks, as the Globe and Mail always tell us, "hotly dispute" that this was a genocide.

So the interviewer called the genocide "deadly massacres". Of course, I spotted her specific problem straight away. She couldn't call the massacres a "genocide", because the Turkish community would be outraged. But she sensed that "massacres" on its own  especially with the gruesome studio background photographs of dead Armenians  was not quite up to defining a million and a half murdered human beings. Hence the "deadly massacres". How odd! If there are "deadly" massacres, are there some massacres which are not "deadly", from which the victims walk away alive? It was a ludicrous tautology.

Yet the use of the language of power  of its beacon words and its beacon phrases  goes on among us still. How many times have I heard Western reporters talking about "foreign fighters" in Afghanistan? They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them "foreign fighters". Immediately, we Western reporters did the same. Calling them "foreign fighters" meant they were an invading force. But not once  ever  have I heard a mainstream Western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 "foreign fighters" in Afghanistan, and that all of them happen to be wearing American, British and other NATO uniforms. It is "we" who are the real "foreign fighters".

Similarly, the pernicious phrase "Af-Pak"  as racist as it is politically dishonest  is now used by reporters, although it was originally a creation of the US State Department on the day Richard Holbrooke was appointed special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the phrase avoids the use of the word "India"  whose influence in Afghanistan and whose presence in Afghanistan, is a vital part of the story. Furthermore, "Af-Pak"  by deleting India  effectively deleted the whole Kashmir crisis from the conflict in south-east Asia. It thus deprived Pakistan of any say in US local policy on Kashmir  after all, Holbrooke was made the "Af-Pak" envoy, specifically forbidden from discussing Kashmir. Thus the phrase "Af-Pak", which completely avoids the tragedy of Kashmir  too many "competing narratives", perhaps?  means that when we journalists use the same phrase, "Af-Pak", which was surely created for us journalists, we are doing the State Department's work.

Now let's look at history. Our leaders love history. Most of all, they love the Second World War. In 2003, George W Bush thought he was Churchill. True, Bush had spent the Vietnam War protecting the skies of Texas from the Vietcong. But now, in 2003, he was standing up to the "appeasers" who did not want a war with Saddam who was, of course, "the Hitler of the Tigris". The appeasers were the British who didn't want to fight Nazi Germany in 1938. Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill's waistcoat and jacket for size. No "appeaser" he. America was Britain's oldest ally, he proclaimed  and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

But none of this was true. Britain's oldest ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during the Second World War, which flew its national flags at half-mast when Hitler died (even the Irish didn't do that).

Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the Luftwaffe blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality, and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Similarly, back in 1956, Eden called Nasser the "Mussolini of the Nile". A bad mistake. Nasser was loved by the Arabs, not hated as Mussolini was by the majority of Africans, especially the Arab Libyans. The Mussolini parallel was not challenged or questioned by the British press. And we all know what happened at Suez in 1956. When it comes to history, we journalists let the presidents and prime ministers take us for a ride.

Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power  though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered  is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases  I fear  better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language.

Over the past two weeks, as foreigners  humanitarians or "activist terrorists"  tried to take food and medicines by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should have been reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel  our own servicemen dying as they did so  to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal army which wished to starve the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The wall was to come later. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them. Now look at Gaza today: which Western journalist  since we love historical parallels  has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?

Instead, what did we get? "Activists" who turned into "armed activists" the moment they opposed the Israeli army's boarding parties. How dare these men upset the lexicon? Their punishment was obvious. They became "terrorists". And the Israeli raids  in which "activists" were killed (another proof of their "terrorism")  then became "deadly" raids. In this case, "deadly" was more excusable than it had been on CTV  nine dead men of Turkish origin being slightly fewer than a million and a half murdered Armenians in 1915. But it was interesting that the Israelis  who for their own political reasons had hitherto shamefully gone along with the Turkish denial  now suddenly wanted to inform the world of the 1915 Armenian genocide. This provoked an understandable frisson among many of our colleagues. Journalists who have regularly ducked all mention of the 20th century's first Holocaust  unless they could also refer to the way in which the Turks "hotly dispute" the genocide label (ergo the Toronto Globe and Mail)  could suddenly refer to it. Israel's new-found historical interest made the subject legitimate, though almost all reports managed to avoid any explanation of what actually happened in 1915.

And what did the Israeli seaborne raid become? It became a "botched" raid. Botched is a lovely word. It began as a German-origin Middle English word, "bocchen", which meant to "repair badly". And we more or less kept to that definition until our journalistic lexicon advisors changed its meaning. Schoolchildren "botch" an exam. We could "botch" a piece of sewing, an attempt to repair a piece of material. We could even botch an attempt to persuade our boss to give us a raise. But now we "botch" a military operation. It wasn't a disaster. It wasn't a catastrophe. It just killed some Turks.

So, given the bad publicity, the Israelis just "botched" the raid. Weirdly, the last time reporters and governments utilised this particular word followed Israel's attempt to kill the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, in the streets of Amman. In this case, Israel's professional assassins were caught after trying to poison Meshaal, and King Hussain forced the then Israeli prime minister (a certain B Netanyahu) to provide the antidote (and to let a lot of Hamas "terrorists" out of jail). Meshaal's life was saved.

But for Israel and its obedient Western journalists this became a "botched attempt" on Meshaal's life. Not because he wasn't meant to die, but because Israel failed to kill him. You can thus "botch" an operation by killing Turks  or you can "botch" an operation by not killing a Palestinian.

How do we break with the language of power? It is certainly killing us. That, I suspect, is one reason why readers have turned away from the "mainstream" press to the internet. Not because the net is free, but because readers know they have been lied to and conned; they know that what they watch and what they read in newspapers is an extension of what they hear from the Pentagon or the Israeli government, that our words have become synonymous with the language of a government-approved, careful middle ground, which obscures the truth as surely as it makes us political  and military  allies of all major Western governments.

Many of my colleagues on various Western newspapers would ultimately risk their jobs if they were constantly to challenge the false reality of news journalism, the nexus of media-government power. How many news organisations thought to run footage, at the time of the Gaza disaster, of the airlift to break the blockade of Berlin? Did the BBC?

The hell they did! We prefer "competing narratives". Politicians didn't want  I told the Doha meeting on 11 May  the Gaza voyage to reach its destination, "be its end successful, farcical or tragic". We believe in the "peace process", the "road map". Keep the "fence" around the Palestinians. Let the "key players" sort it out. And remember what this is all about: "Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/fighting-talk-the-new-propaganda-2006001.html

Last updated 25/06/2010