MURDOCH PROPAGANDA PRESS IN AUSTRALIA ATTEMPTS CHINA FEARMONGERING.

What is it about the extreme right-wing in the Western world that it has to continually raise fears about enemies that simply don’t exist any more and probably never did?

This last week or two, the Australian right-wing has regurgitated anti-China tensions for no other reason, so it seems, than it is politically expedient for them to do so. The right-wing have seized on the opportunity of making political capital out of some petty circumstantial relationship between Australia’s Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, and Chinese businesswoman Helen Liu. All that happened was that Liu paid for a trip or two for Fitzgibbon to visit China while Fitzgibbon was in opposition.

It turns out that Liu has connections with the Chinese military which the right-wing is saying is a ‘security risk’ despite there being no reason to believe ‘secrets’ were passed on to her or, indeed, if she actually was after any ‘secrets’.

Australia and China for some years have been enjoying a great business relationship to the extent that both countries have become enriched as a result. Much of that business was conducted during the Howard years, a period, apparently, when there were no such concerns about China being a potential enemy. But now Australia has a Labor government it has become expedient for the right-wing to resurrect the old ‘yellow peril’ and ‘red under the bed’ fearmongering animosities of the last century.

And, of course, Murdoch’s shills can’t help themselves from jumping on the fearmongering bandwagon. Andrew Bolt, always quick to seize on an opportunity to either demonise other peoples because of their race, religion or culture, or alternatively, entire nations because their political systems aren’t like America’s, must think all his propaganda birthday’s have come at once with the opportunity to bash China, a nation that is both racially and culturally, as well as politically, different from Australia. Bolt has grabbed at this opportunity with both hands demanding that Australia’s Defence Minister resign because, as Bolt ridiculously accuses, “Fitzgibbon was groomed by Helen Liu” saying that, “In fact, it’s precisely because China’s rising influence here is a security threat that Joel Fitzgibbon should now resign.”

One has to ask: How come China’s ‘rising influence’ is a security threat now and wasn’t when John Howard was Prime Minister?

Warmongering and fearmongering lunatics like Bolt and his fellow propagandists should pull their heads out of the sand-pit of the twentieth century and move in to the twenty-first century where most people have moved on from the mind-numbing stupidity of the Cold War and non-existent threats.

ANDREW BOLT: BOYCOTT ISRAEL, BAD; BOYCOTT IRAN, GOOD.

Andrew Bolt, resident propagandist at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’, once again displays his appalling hypocrisy and racial bias. He decries a petition that supports the boycotting and sanctioning of Israel on the grounds that all Israelis will suffer as a result ‘regardless of their personal views or merits’ as he puts it, yet he is quite happy to support exactly the same kind of boycotting and sanctioning against the Iranian people – presumably ‘regardless of their views or merits’ as well.

The call to boycott Israel will highlight the practices of the most racist nation on the planet. Just as boycotts and sanctions worked against the apartheid state of South Africa, so it will work against the apartheid state of Israel.

The quicker the Zionist notion of a racist Jews-only Israeli state is destroyed the better for all Jews and Arabs that live in what is now Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank who can then get on with their lives in peace and harmony in a secular bi-national state where all are equal.

AUSSIE MURDOCH PROPAGANDIST ANDREW BOLT ATTEMPTS TO STRIP DISGRACED JUSTICE EINFELD OF HIS JEWISHNESS.

Andrew Bolt, Murdoch propagandist at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper, has today attempted to distance the convicted ex-Justice Marcus Einfeld from his Jewishness by reporting that the Synagogue Einfeld attended was upset that film of him worshipping there was shown on the TV during an interview with him.

Bolt writes: “How utterly selfish is Marcus Einfeld? Selfish enough to associate fellow Jews with his lying, using a Jewish choir as a prop to show his goodness.”

How utterly transparent is Bolt’s nonsense? Einfeld was simply doing what his faith, regardless of his dishonesty, demanded he do. Just as people of any religion who have ‘sinned’ might go to their church to ask their deity for forgiveness, so Einfeld attended his synagogue. Catholics do it all the time.

All Bolt is trying to do here is disassociate Einfeld from the Australian Jewish community lest all Australian Jews be tarnished with the same brush – just as Bolt usually attempts to do when criticising Islamic misdeeds.

ANDREW BOLT INFERS THAT RUDD IS TO BLAME FOR AUSSIE DEATHS AND OTHER CASUALTIES IN AFGHANISTAN.

Andrew Bolt needs to be reminded that it was his warmongering hero John Howard that sent Australians into Afghanistan. Telling Australians that Afghanistan is quickly turning into a problem as though it’s all Rudd’s fault is typical of Bolt’s deceitful style of propaganda – especially as Bolt is one of those that advocates staying on there.

FUMING OVER OBAMA SAYING NICE STUFF TO IRANIANS, CHIEF NEOCON LETS SLIP IT’S ABOUT REGIME CHANGE.

It didn’t take too long for Murdoch’s chief neocon propagandist, William Kristol of the neocon comic ‘The Weekly Standard’, to pen his response to President Obama’s televised offering of a tentative hand of peace.

According to Kristol, Obama didn’t offer the Iranian people ‘liberty’ nor ‘freedom’ nor ‘democracy’ nor ‘human rights’. The reason for that is because Obama doesn’t have it to offer. Every where else the neocons have talked about giving people these things has turned to utter disaster. Why would Obama offer more of the same to Iran?

And does Kristol really expect the Iranian people to welcome the US and their allies after having seen what they have done to Afghanistan and Iraq?

Liberty? Freedom? Democracy? Human Rights? Kristol has no idea what the words even mean. Kristol goes on:

Indeed, "the United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations." Note: "the Islamic Republic of Iran." Does Obama routinely refer to Pakistan as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, its formal name? Of course not. But Obama goes out of his way to mention (twice) "the Islamic Republic of Iran." He's kowtowing to a regime that is anything but republican, implicitly forswearing any plan--any hope--of regime change to free the Iranian people.

Regime change? What regime change? Wasn’t it all about Iran’s so-called nuclear weapons program?

Of course it’s about regime change. It has, for the Israelis and their neocon supporters, never ever been about anything else. Regime change in Iran means the Israelis get to have their Greater Israel sooner. Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas disappears and resistance by the Palestinians and the Lebanese to Israeli aggression all but disappears as well.

Kristol exposes the neocon and Israeli fraud – it’s not about Iran’s nuclear weapons program at all; it’s all about regime change.

AUSTRALIAN ISLAMOPHOBE TIM BLAIR DEMONSTRATES THE PROPAGANDISTS ART.

There is a classic example of the propagandist’s art in yesterdays Sydney ‘Daily Telegraph’ of how the well-trained propagandist plies his craft.

Tim Blair, a well known Australian Islamophobe and a resident propagandist with Murdoch’s Sydney, Australia, rag, wasted no time at all in picking up on a story about the maverick Lakemba Imam, Taj-Din al-Hilali, who again was in the news because of some totally un-newsworthy incident; an incident that would not have made the news had it not been for the fact that he is an outspoken Muslim.

For Blair the incident was heaven sent. It provided him with yet another golden opportunity to demonise Muslims. By criticising and ridiculing the sometimes outrageous Imam, Blair paints the picture of the Imams actions being representative of what all Muslims get up to. Of course, he doesn’t say this directly but then he doesn’t need to; mostly, he’s already preaching to the converted and he’s now simply reinforcing the notion.

Read in isolation Blairs words would mean little but when one reads his constant almost daily barrage of anti-Islamic nonsense one soon begins to understand how this hate merchant works.

It is part of the propagandists craft to go about noting your enemy’s weaknesses and then casually dropping in their religion or beliefs as an aside in order to associate one with the other with the intent of casting all those with the same religion or beliefs as having the same weaknesses.

I won’t mention that a certain ex President of a certain Middle Eastern country has been indicted for a certain obnoxious crime and you can bet your boots that Tim Blair won’t either.

Bugger!! Too late!! I went and mentioned it.

See how it works?

COMRADE BOLT: LORD HAW-HAW TO THE NEOCONS

Andrew Bolt, never one able to resist a dig at the North Koreans while, at the same time, belittling anyone that comes anywhere near saying something nice about them, has demonstrated again how the complex network of neocons and Murdoch propagandists gets to spin and weave their rhetoric in order to peddle their hate and loathing of anything anti-West.

British neocon Oliver Kamm, founder member of the neocon Henry Jackson Society in the UK, wrote that Britain’s ambassador to North Korea, Peter Hughes, was unfit for the position on account of him apparently writing nice things about everyday life in North Korea. Kamm, forever the opportunistic neocon and quick to seize on this opportunity to have a bash at both North Korea and a Labour government ambassador but clearly a bit slow about understanding the diplomatic role of any ambassador, displays his hypocrisy by claiming North Korea does despicable things to its people. Ignored, of course, is any notion that any nation that does despicable things to its people is worthy of criticism. His air is one that suggests that the West would never do anything despicable to anyone.

Bolt goes along with this rubbish.

MURDOCH’S AUSTRALIAN PROPAGANDISTS SUPPORTS AUSTRALIAN ISRAELI LOBBY’S ‘ANTI-ZIONISM IS ANTI-SEMITISM’ RHETORIC.

I wrote the other day about Nick Dyrenfurth’s article in ‘The Australian’ pushing the argument that ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’. Needless to say Murdoch’s pro-Zionist propagandists and apologists have jumped on Dyrenfurth’s bandwagon. It seems the Sydney ‘Daily Telegraph’s’ resident propagandist/blogger Tim Blair has drawn the short straw to follow up on Dyrenfurth’s nonsense. Considering Blair’s own dislike of Dyrenfurth one can only assume that the master of the Murdoch stable of propagandists had ordered Blair to do the job.

Blair, quite predictably, agrees entirely with Dyrenfurth’s nonsense.

AUSTRALIA’S ISRAEL LOBBY CONTINUES ITS RELENTLESS PROPAGANDA OF ‘ANTI-ZIONISM IS ANTI-SEMITISM’.

The other day Murdoch’s flagship Australian propaganda newspaper, ‘The Australian’, published another piece from the Australian Israeli Lobby shoving the ‘anti-Israel is anti-Semitism’ meme in support of the Australian Israel Lobby’s push to get Australia to withdraw from the Durban Review conference on racism.

In this case the article is aimed at the least well informed of Australian society and, appropriately enough, was written by an academic. Nick Dyrenfurth, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sydney writes:

As I entered the grounds of the University of Sydney during Orientation Week, plastered across virtually every pole leading up to the university's entrance was a poster signed off by the far-left group Socialist Alternative.

Headlined "War: Why capitalism is to blame", the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine were presented as exhibits A, B and C. In the poster's foreground, a ubiquitous Uncle Sam figure loomed, his all-powerful hand resting on, you guessed it, his menacing pet bulldog, Israel.

The message was clear. Israel, the US's proxy in the Middle East, is to blame for all the problems of the Middle East, if not the woes of the world. Get rid of Israel and we'll all live happily ever after, presumably on a strict diet of lentils and tofu. The more serious and indeed frightening symbolism at play was the clearly racist, anti-Semitic linkage of Israel, and by association Jews, with the machinations of "evil" capitalism.

Here Dyrenfurth is attempting to be clever with his propaganda. He attempts to kill several birds with one stone linking, for example, Jews ‘by association’ with Israel. Well, of course, Israel is Jewish but that’s not to say that all Jews are Israeli which is what Dyrenfurth attempts to imply. There is also a not-so-subtle allusion to the ‘Far-left being anti-Semitic’. Dyrenfurth reinforces this notion with this which attempts to align the far-Left with the far-Right:

None of this of course is new. The far Left and, more often, the thugs of the far Right have long peddled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which an all-powerful Zionist cabal controls the world's financial levers, a "fact" hidden, of course, by its control of Western media outlets and compliant governments.

Of course the far-Right have peddled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; that’s what they do. They are Jew-haters and have always been around. But to attempt to align the Left who are anti-Zionist with neo-Nazis and Jew-haters is just plain transparent and blatant Zionist propaganda and to suggest that the Left have peddled ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’ is a deliberate lie.

The reality is this: Jew-hating Nazis have absolutely nothing in common with the anti-Zionism of the Left. Anti-Zionism is political, not racial, and is reviled by the Left for exactly the same reasons as the Left revile the politics of Nazism.

Dyrenfurth, far from being clever with his attempt to malign the Left at his university in order to promote lies and propaganda to support calls for Australia to boycott the Curban Review conference, merely exposes himself to be nothing more than just another Israeli Lobby propagandist who uses lies and deceit to push his pro-Zionist nonsense on Australians who don’t know any better.

Thankfully the world is beginning to wake up to this ‘anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism’ nonsense. Hopefully the world’s leaders will too.


This article is also posted at Murdoch’s Propagandists.

EXPOSING AKERMAN’S ABORIGINAL MYTHS.

An Australian Murdoch propagandist, Piers Akerman, writing on his blog at Sydney’s ‘Daily Telegraph’, has again exposed his racist tendencies toward Australia’s Aboriginal people by denying that Aboriginal children were taken from their parents as part of Australian Federal and States policies saying that the stories of the ‘Stolen Generations’ are a myth.

Denial of the ‘Stolen Generations’ stories is something of a feature among Murdoch’s propagandists in Australia. Andrew Bolt, another of Murdoch’s propagandists over at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper is another ‘Stolen Generations’ denier.

Akerman’ assertion that the ‘Stolen Generations’ are a myth are based on the admission of an Aboriginal leader that she wasn’t actually stolen despite having previously said she was. Akerman works on the crazy logic that if the Aboriginal leader wasn’t stolen than nor were any other Aborigines. In true racist form, he casts all Aboriginal people in the same mould. Like Bolt, Akerman ignores entirely the massive volumes of evidence which show very clearly the tales of woe that most Australians would prefer to ignore hoping, like Akerman and Bolt, that it’ll all just go away and that white Australian’s can continue to abuse them and their lands and their rights.

NEOCON WARMONGERS ARE AT IT AGAIN – ‘YES WE CAN!!’ THEY SHOUT, ‘LET’S SURGE THE TALIBAN!!’

The neocon warmongers that believed the ‘surge’ in Iraq actually worked now think that, seven and a half years after invading Afghanistan, they are fighting a war they can win, despite all the evidence that suggests otherwise – if only, so they suggest, they could get say another couple of hundred thousand allied soldiers in to the place.

Writing in one of Murdoch’s most notorious propaganda comics, ‘The Weekly Standard’, Kimberly Kagan, husband Frederick Kagan and Max Boot exert ten pages of effort into trying to convince readers that a surge against the Taliban in Afghanistan will work. (A much shortened version of the same nonsense appeared recently in ‘The New York Times’.) After wading through the long version in ‘The Weekly Standard’ one has to wonder if the likes of Kimberly Kagan, husband Frederick Kagan and Max Boot really have any idea of what they are talking about.

One would have thought that at least the war-obsessed Kimberly Kagan would have some idea; she is, after all, the president of the rather grand and typically neocon-sounding Institute for the Study of War. A keen first year history student could have quickly told her that a ‘surge’ in Afghanistan against the Taliban is doomed to failure before the first lift of soldiers gets off the ground.

Now, these people know all the reasons why others over the centuries have failed to subdue the fiercely independent people of Afghanistan yet still they insist that they can succeed where all these others have failed based solely on the belief that the Afghan people actually want the Americans and their allies to win. This, in turn, is based on their assumption that the Afghan people don’t’ want the Taliban as their government. It hasn’t occurred to Messrs Kagan, Kagan and Boot that after seven and half years of war instigated by the Americans and their allies, all the Afghan people want is for the US and their allies to leave their country so that they can sort their own problems out. Kagan, Kagan and Boot don’t realise that those that are joining the so-called Taliban in their droves today are just ordinary Afghanis that are simply fed up with the Westerners being on their dirt. Most are not the ideologues of the type that made up the Taliban ranks in the late 1990s and early 2000s; today they come from all over Afghanistan and are affiliated with many groups that collectively are fighting the US and their allies in a genuinely popular insurgency that has now permeated into what the West calls north west Pakistan.

Kagan, Kagan and Boot, in both the ‘Weekly Standard’ and the NYT versions of their fantasy, rely on a BBC-ABC News poll released last month but taken in the period December 2008-January 2009, that showed only 4% of Afghans wanted Taliban rule. For Kagan, Kagan and Boot this translates as ‘the other 96% must want the US and their allies to destroy the Taliban and their allies and keep the puppet government in power’.

When one takes a look at the poll, however, we find that this is nowhere near the case. Indeed, only some 40% of those polled (and remember those polled were in areas that were safe for pollsters to travel in and, therefore, in areas under allied control) believed that “…their country was headed in the right direction”.

There might well be just 4% that would like to see the return of Taliban rule but that’s not why the Afghan insurgents are joining the fight against the US and their allies; they are joining because they simply do not want them there anymore. They’ve had a taste of so-called ‘democracy’ but have now discovered that it’s actually only a pseudonym for an opportunity for Afghan elitists and warlords to indulge in corruption and nepotism.

There is no al Qaeda anymore and the Taliban per se barely exists as Kagan, Kagan and Boot actually concede, with the label ‘Taliban’ now simply being a catch-all name for those fighting the US and their allies in much the same way as the name ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ was a catch-all name for those that resisted invasion and occupation in Iraq rather than actually having anything to do with al Qaeda.

Despite all this and Afghanistan’s history of repelling invaders, Kagan, Kagan and Boot now advocate that the current force of some 58,000 US and allied forces in Afghanistan be ‘surged’ to a staggering 250,000, a force that they reckon can beat the insurgency.

Of course, this isn’t going to happen, especially in the present economic climate and with Obama as President, but it does goes to show how desperately ridiculous the neoconservatives have always been in their warmongering ways. And in a post-George W. Bush world such continuing fantasies serve only to highlight just how gullible the world was back in 2001 when it listened to these people in the first place when they were demanding the West invades Afghanistan and Iraq because, so they told us, they were responsible for 9/11.

The self-righteous and war obsessed neocons know only violence. It hasn’t worked. It was doomed never to work. After years of neocon dominance in Bush foreign policy all the world has ended up with is death and misery for millions throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

Time to try something else – like talking!

ANDREW BOLT'S 'VIOLENCE' HYPOCRISY

Andrew Bolt, writing on his blog at Melbourne’s ‘Herald Sun’ newspaper has the temerity to ask:
“What is it with the Left and violence?”

What the rest of the world asks is: ‘What is it about the right-wing of the West and violence? Why not condemn right-wing violence as well?'

The kind of violence that Bolt is referring to is the kind one might find at a left-wing rally or protest which gets out of hand and which generally is provoked by either the police who like to take a confrontational stance against the left, or agents provocateurs imbedded with otherwise peaceful demonstrators.

Of course, violence should not be condoned from any quarter, left or right, but Bolt has abused his position as a journalist to create bias against a left-wing group whose violence is but a school yard bundle compared to the sick violence right-wing governments and their armies inflict when they invade lands that don’t belong to them and kill their inhabitants, many of whom are innocent civilians including women and children. Why does not Bolt condemn this violence?

He won’t condemn it because he actually condones it. He thinks that Australian troops are ‘heroes’ because they are being used by our government to kill people, people that he has never met and who live thousands of kilometres away, using some of the most sophisticated and deadliest weapons known devised by man and all on the say so of some other foreign government that pretends to be Australia’s ally.

Just another piece of Chutzpah and hypocrisy from Andrew Bolt, but it’s all just part of another day’s work for him.

What is it with the Right and violence?

SOME OF MURDOCH’S AUSTRALIAN LIARS AND PROPAGANDISTS.

In Australia, the country where it all began for Rupert Murdoch, the propaganda machine he owns and runs reaches into every corner of Australian life. In the print media Murdoch has reach into every part of Australia via ‘The Australian’ newspaper, published nationally, and then, via his many state-based newspapers, he is able to target specific audiences for specific purposes to suit for the state.

Attached to all of these newspapers is an army of right-wing writers with the most extreme of them running blogs in Australia’s two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, in which readers are invited to comment. By the use of extensive censorship these blogs attract a large audience of fellow travellers ranging from the reasonably articulate moderately right-wing who occasionally will dispute the editor’s view, through to the most outrageously racist and Islamophobic warmongers and all-round right-wing extremists there are in Australia who seem to be attracted to these blogs like moths to a light.

There are three extreme right-wing bloggers working for the Murdoch empire in Australia that deserve particular mention since they seem to be the most prolific writers attracting the most extremist of views and who, most importantly, censor their blogs in order to make it seem as though the views expressed there are representative of the average Australian – which, of course, is the always the ultimate aim of the professional propagandist.

In Melbourne, writing for the ‘Herald-Sun’, is the right-wing extremist Andrew Bolt who holds neoconservative views about Zionism and Islam. He is also an ultra-nationalist and is a denier of the rights of the indigenous peoples of Australia. He even denies that Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their parents as a matter of policy saying that “…the stolen generations was a dangerous myth that would only feed the anger and race hate we saw in the Redfern riots”, despite the abundant evidence that shows the stolen generations to be one of the sadder realities of Australian history.

Over in Sydney there are two extreme right-wing propagandists, both of whom write for Murdoch’s Sydney newspaper, ‘The Daily Telegraph’. They are Piers Akerman and Tim Blair.

Piers Akerman has had a chequered career as a journalist with accusations of sexual assault against fellow workers being levelled at him when he ran Melbourne’s ‘Sunday Herald Sun’ newspaper, as well as threatening assault against a member of his staff when he earlier ran Murdoch’s Adelaide, South Australia, newspaper, ‘The Advertiser’, in the late 1980s. More recently Akerman blatantly and cynically used the tragedy of the Victorian bushfires to push his Islamophobic views via his blog at the Sydney ‘Daily Telegraph’.

The other Sydney ‘Daily Telegraph’ Murdoch propagandist is Tim Blair. Blair is renowned for his use of lies and liars when blogging.

As well as highlighting these and other Murdoch propagandists past inglorious lies this blog will keep tabs on their activities as time goes forward.

Readers are invited to contribute stories by sending them to me in the first instance via email at lataan@adam.com.au

EXPOSING MURDOCH'S LIES AND PROPAGANDA EMPIRE

This blog has been specifically created to expose Rupert Murdoch’s propagandists, describe how they operate and to counter their propaganda and rhetoric with the geo-political realities and the truth of what is really happening behind the scenes that Murdoch and his propagandists would prefer you knew nothing about.

Murdoch has a massive news and media organisation that is able to reach into every living room throughout the entire Western world – and beyond. Much of its so-called ‘news’ content is carefully designed to induce a particular bias toward a view that would be favourable to the view represented by the Murdoch propagandists.

Murdoch has a long history of championing Israeli Zionists and their neoconservative supporters around the world providing them with a platform from which to present their propaganda.

The vast majority of Murdoch’s editorial staff are hard right pro-Zionist individuals who ensure that very little gets through to their audience that is not favourable to their cause.

This blog will expose who these people are, how they operate and what deliberately calculated lies and innuendo they tell in order to push their extreme right-wing views.

Particular attention will be paid to those that pass themselves off as ‘political and social commentators’. These are the propagandists that are at the core of Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide propaganda empire. These are the liars and warmongers that have been at the heart of the last decades attempt by neoconservatives, Zionists, big business, Islamophobic and Christian extremists to create the New American Century.