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The World Loves Us–It’s Just That The Media Doesn’t Tell Us

Turn on the television and the reporting is all hate:  a Middle Eastern Muslim is blowing up someone in Israel, shooting a rocket from Gaza, chanting death to America in Beirut, stoning an adulterer in Tehran, losing a hand for thievery in Saudi Arabia, threatening to take back Spain, gassing someone in Iraq, or promising […]

Turn on the television and the reporting is all hate:  a Middle Eastern Muslim is blowing up someone in Israel, shooting a rocket from Gaza, chanting death to America in Beirut, stoning an adulterer in Tehran, losing a hand for thievery in Saudi Arabia, threatening to take back Spain, gassing someone in Iraq, or promising to wipe out Israel. An unhinged, secular Khadafi rants; a decrepit Saudi royal lectures; a wild-eyed Lebanese cleric threatens — whatever the country, whatever the political ideology, the American television viewer draws the same conclusion:  we are always blamed for their own self-inflicted misery. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has here reached some new plane of neocon propaganda that almost defies description.  Having been among those who insisted that “the swamp” of anti-Americanism was one of the reasons that we had to go into Iraq–to build the transformative model Arab democracy that would inspire a thousand ballot initiatives or some such nonsense–and having painted this virulent and widespread anti-Americanism as a product of the foreign policy that privileged stability over reform, and having rung the alarm bell about about the crazy Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese et al. who want us and our families dead, we are now being told, basically, that the media is not reporting all of the good news from the entire region about how much Muslims like us deep down.  Americans would understand just how grateful and appreciative the Iraqis are if only those lousy journalists would report the real news! 

Naturally, if the media tried to portray Near Eastern societies as complex and changing structures in which admiration for America coexists with hatred for American policy, they would then immediately be hit by some other propagandist for “hiding the truth” about rabid anti-Americanism, “blaming America first” (by pinning blame for anti-Americanism on the bad policies that Hanson et al. advance) and for their egregious liberal and multiculti biases that cause them to regard people in the Near East as human.  This is really stunning to see: someone who has spent the last several years whipping up chauvinism and contempt for many of the people in the Near East now wants to tell us that the people over there aren’t all that bad.  More pitiful is the running theme of the entire column, which seems to be a complaint that life isn’t fair. 

Then consider this part:

And various other polls reveal that only about 20% of Americans are in sympathy with the Palestinians. Egypt alone of the major Arab countries rates a favorable impression; most others — Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia — evoke high levels of American negativity.

Why might that be?  It couldn’t have anything to do with the propagandists who daily churn out anti-Syrian and anti-Palestinian rhetoric!

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