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Iraqis Protest Terrorism
and No One Reports It
Media/Frank
Salvato, Managing Editor |
March 4, 2005
- No matter how much the "new media” exposes the elite
media for its agenda – its biased, slanted framing of stories and the
non-reporting of important events – it just keeps at it as if "we the
people” are too stupid to notice. It boggles the mind. As the old guard’s
credibility plummets, not unlike a dot.com stock in early 2000, the
mainstream media continues to adhere to its elitist agenda of skewing
the information offered to the American people regardless of the realities
of any given situation.
An incredibly huge event took place recently in Hillah, Iraq. Just one day
after terrorists detonated a massive car bomb killing at least 125 Iraqis,
who were lined up to take physicals in an effort to gain employment with the
local police force, thousands of Hillah residents took to the streets in
protest. They weren’t protesting against the "American occupation” and they
weren’t protesting against the "aggression of the West.” They weren’t
protesting the treatment of terrorists being detained at Abu Ghraib. They
were protesting against those who committed murder against their people.
They were protesting against terrorism, Baathism and Wahhabism.
Think about it, if these 2000-plus people would have taken to the streets in
protest of inhumane treatment and indiscriminate terrorism prior to March of
2003 "Chemical Ali” would have been dispatched to recreate his gassing of
the Kurds. The fact that this number of people chose to exercise their new
freedom of speech, and to do it in protest of Islamo-Fascism with chants of,
"No to terrorism! No to Baathism! No to Wahhabism!” is an incredible story
which those in other oppressively ruled Arab countries would embrace.
Undoubtedly, the people of Lebanon would applaud their Arab brothers and
sisters in their quest for freedom.
Yet there was but a whisper of this monumental event in the mainstream
media. There was nothing printed about it in the New York Times. There was
nothing printed about it in Reuters. The story was absent from the online
pages of CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, CBS and even FOX News. No television station
– network or otherwise – covered the protest. The
only mainstream outlet to
cover the story – a story that faded quicker than William Hung’s singing
career – was the Associated Press (AP). To be fair, ABC, a few mid-tier
newspapers and Salon.com picked up the AP story but in order to read it in
its entirety on Salon.com you had to be a premium member. How paradoxically
capitalistic for a left-wing publication.
Unsurprisingly, the AP story, "2,000 Demonstrate at Iraqi Bombing Site,”
penned by Rawya Rageh, had less to do with the actual protest of terrorism
than it did with a sub-story about Florence Aubenas, the French journalist
taken hostage two months ago. Of the 1,016 words in the article only 358
were about the protest and even then only 95 words actually reflected the
outrage at terrorists and their actions. Rageh, however, did manage to find
Hussein Hassoun, one of the only protesters who chose to blame the Hillah
police for the carnage. He blamed the police for having the applicants
line-up outside the building where the terrorist struck rather than the
cretin who actually committed the murders. There’s one in every crowd.
It is indisputable that the bravery of the Iraqi protesters and the
monolithic event itself was ignored by the mainstream media. It’s hard to
imagine that the media elite would simply overlook such a pivotal story,
especially when it was offered up by the AP. No, a mainstream media outlet
that missed this fantastic story wouldn’t be worthy of publishing a junior
high school newspaper. It is more likely that they chose to pro-actively
ignore it.
But why on earth would the media elite gloss over a story that highlights
such a good, brave and revolutionary event? The answer is simple; if they
had reported on the turn of events in Hillah they would have had to
celebrate something the Bush Administration foretold for the Iraqi people.
As has been demonstrated since George W. Bush’s election in 2000, the media
elites won’t acknowledge, report or celebrate anything that proves the Bush
Administration correct. The president and the whole of his administration
said that given the chance, the Iraqi people would take to the streets to
embrace freedom and democracy. Yet, every step of the way the old guard
media and the liberal left have insisted the president and his people were
wrong. They insisted we were embedded in a quagmire and that we were
creating terrorists not freedom loving peoples. They were and are so
incredibly wrong. They were wrong about Afghanistan, Iraq and, by proxy,
Libya and they are proving to be wrong about Lebanon. In fact, regarding
freedom and democracy in the Middle East, when have the mainstream media and
the liberal left ever been correct?
An historical event took place in Hillah, Iraq on March 1st 2005. The newly
found voice of freedom in Iraq reigned supreme over the threats of
terrorists. Conversely, our free speech standard bearers continued their
disingenuous and politically partisan assault on the American people, this
time by turning a blind eye to an extraordinary event. It’s a good thing the
protesters in Hillah – the freedom fighters of Iraq – weren’t counting on
the mainstream media of the West to cover this event. The old guard would
have failed them miserably. Oh, wait, they did.
Related Reading:
2,000 Demonstrate at Iraqi Bombing Site
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050301/D88IBT884.html
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