TSUNAMI OF LIES - THE UNREPORTED NEWS

The upcoming Canadian election and debates as well as pronouncements by world leaders at the UN have brought the issues of ISIS, Ukraine, Iran's nuclear deal, and others to the forefront of the news.The rhetoric and news coverage focusses on the standard viewpoints of Western governments: ISIS is evil, the n-bomb that Iran may build is a threat to world peace and to Israel's existence, Russian President Putin is responsible for the Ukraine crisis, and so on. Views questioning this narrative are hard to find. No one mentions that ISIS was created by the American destruction of Iraq, aided and abetted by its pit-bull allies in the UK and Australia, and others 'bribed and bullied'; much as the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s rose from the ashes of genocidal bombing of Cambodia by the US. ISIS's crimes are dastardly, but do they compare to what the West did in Iraq? Hundreds of thousands killed, millions turned into refugees.... Not too many people want to connect the dots. On Iran, the hysteria continues on the bomb it may build. Not a word about the hundreds of nuclear bombs already in the Mideast - in Israel's possession. The Iranian President's speech at the UN mentioning resolutions asking for a nuclear-free zone in the region received the usual derisory contempt. As for the US Republican party's reaction to the deal negotiated with Iran, it is not new. Republicans have made jokes about bombing Iran for years. With the deal, jokes have become open threats. Dr. Chomsky pointed out recently that the main difference between 2 GOP candidates who led the race until recently (Jeb Bush and another) was that one promised to bomb Iran immediately on taking office, and the other - to wait until the first Cabinet meeting. No one asks: what did Iran do to the US, and what have the US and its allies done to Iran? The toppling of democracy in Iran in 1953 and the installation of the Shah who ruled as terrrorist/dictator until 1979, and after his ouster the supply of arms to Saddam Hussein to prosecute an 8-year war which killed hundreds of thousands on either side are among the major crimes against Iran. While the 'King of Kings' (Pahlavi) was in charge however, Kissinger was happy not only to make him the US's largest buyer of weapons, but to pressure US universities like MIT to accept Iranian students into nuclear engineering studies - they have been running the.Iranian nuclear program. But all this is unreported in the major news media. Salon.com has just published a superlative article on the history of Kissinger's crimes in the Middle East and Western Asia including Afghanistan and South Asia including the unreserved backing of West Pakistan's genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). But try to find that information in the New York Times or the Washington Post. On Ukraine, the hysteria is equally misleading. John Pilger - an Australian born award-winning journalist living in Britain who became a pariah after exposing the West's complicity in the East Timorean genocide - reports on his website that the entire crisis has been 'inverted'. It is US-driven NATO that has aggressively expanded all the way to Ukraine, renewing a century-old theme of 'encirclement' of Russia by the West, and mocking Reagan's (false) promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand 'an inch to the East'. President Putin moved to take over the Crimean port only to prevent NATO from establishing its own naval base there, and Eastern Ukraine is the last remaining 'buffer' between Russia and NATO. In short, he was (and is) acting defensively. Russia's economy is roughly one-eighth the size of the US's. At the height of the Cold War, the USSR's economy was a quarter of the US's. It had lost some 30 million people in WW2, versus less than 1 million by the US. But these facts were not generally reported, as they contradicted the narrative of the 'Red Menace', needed to justify the 'permanent war-economy'. People like Thomas Friedman of the NY Times, who called Putin a 'thug' are the same ones who advocated the invasion of Iraq as a 'threat' to the US, then effortlessly changed the pretext to 'installing democracy' when no WMD were found. To call them 'slugs' would be to insult slugs. They are today's 'Julius Streicher(s)', inciters of war-crimes. Russia of course is no Iraq, being a major nuclear power. But the rot runs deeper. It was Oxford-educated Niall Ferguson who propagated the 'Armageddon' myth about Iran's n-bomb. Closer to home, Canada's own Margaret MacMillan, now a rector at Oxford, finished an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail just before the Scottish referendum with the counsel that Scots ought to remain in the comparative safety of the UK, since the world had 'become a dangerous place with ISIS and the Russian aggression in Ukraine'. There was no mention of earlier events such as the Vietnam war or invasions of Iraq or the destruction of democracy in dozens of countries by the West. One is to infer they made the world safer. When Ukrainian rebels mistakenly shot down a Malaysian airliner, Maclean's magazine in Canada and the Economist in Britain both had magazine covers screaming "Putin the murderer'. No one bothered to question what possible motive the Russian President would have in downing a Malaysian airliner. No one bothered to report what had happened some decades ago when a US warship intentionally shot down an Iranian airliner with roughly the same casualties - the 'murderer' was given a medal by the US government. Did any of these magazines call Clinton or Bush Jr. a murderer for the crimes committed by these Presidents in Iraq? Sanctions which killed 500,000 infants were described by Madeleine Albright as a 'price worth paying'. The casualties from Dubya's war-crimes remain as estimates - since the news reported from that region was controlled by the US army. Estimates start at minimum in the hundreds of thousands and run upto 2 million deaths. Did Maclean's or the Economist publish covers with Bush Jr. as a mass-murderer?