I’ve often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.
A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America’s worst naval loss of life since the huge battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.
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But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them “nothing to see here” they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.
Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked use because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into helpless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.
I discussed that strange historical episode several years ago.
- American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 18, 2021 • 11,400 Words
More than a half-century has passed since that incident, and during most of those decades the power of such media mind-control over our population has remained enormous, even steadily growing more extreme.
Just a few weeks ago, the Israeli Mossad suddenly detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon, whose simultaneous explosions killed or severely maimed around 500 civilians including some children, while wounding many times that number. Not only was this an obvious war-crime but given the scale of the attack and the terrifying public impact of converting ordinary electronic devices into deadly bombs throughout an entire country, it probably constituted one of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the world, while setting extremely dangerous precedents for future strikes against other countries, certainly including our own. If our media had portrayed the incident one way, outraged Americans would surely have demanded that the terrorist state responsible be wiped from the face of the earth; but instead the media presented a different narrative, so our citizens either merely shrugged their shoulders or sometimes even cheered.
In a recent article, one of our contributors described the reaction he encountered at a dinner with some of his conservative Catholic friends, and I think his experiences are worth quoting at length:
Shortly after the now-infamous Israeli pager, radio and solar panel attacks in southern Lebanon, I met for dinner with a group of friends and acquaintances at the home of a local Catholic priest. After we had eaten and made the obligatory small talk, the conversation naturally turned towards politics and the expanding situation in the Middle East. Having already met with the group a handful of times during the past year, I was familiar with the position held by most of the men present concerning the issues of Israel/Palestine and international Jewish power. To a man they’re of the opinion that Israel is an indispensable ally of America and a defender of those hallowed ‘Judeo-Christian’ values in an otherwise uncivilized and bestial Middle East. (Perhaps, someday, a study will be conducted examining the reasons Christians so vehemently support the people who reject their Lord and Savior and have constructed an entire theological edifice based upon that rejection, even as they murder and maim their co-believers in the Middle East.)
On that last point, those Christians are probably unaware that traditional Judaism abominates their religion, with many Jewish leaders having sworn to eradicate Christianity from the Holyland, as was suggested in this short clip from Tucker Carlson’s long interview of a Christian pastor from Bethlehem earlier this year:
Tucker Carlson On Christians Supporting Israel
“If you wake up in the morning and decide your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread.” pic.twitter.com/K5xMAwexD0
— Censored Men (@CensoredMen) April 9, 2024
That same dinner conversation then turned to the current Gaza conflict and the use of those exploding electronic devices.
The conversation started out with a flurry of the usual vacuous platitudes about Israel having a right to defend itself and to respond accordingly to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. The wholly asymmetrical response by Israel which, according to the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, has already killed close to 200,000 Palestinians, hasn’t been sufficiently robust, at least to the mind of one of the faithful in attendance at the dinner. When the subject of the pager attacks in Lebanon arose, a few of the men, including the priest, began hootin’ and hollering their approval of the Jews’ egregious violation of international law. I began to hold forth on the immorality and far-reaching consequences of such an attack but was swiftly denounced by my willfully obtuse interlocutors who informed me that it was, in fact, a brilliant attack and quite proportionate after all, considering the mass rapes and other atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. Leaving aside the obvious irrationality of their argument, I resolved to make the case that Israeli intelligence most likely planned the operation years in advance and relied upon their deep infiltration of tech industries to rig the devices for detonation at the manufacturing level. Such penetration of key industries, I informed them, poses great risk to all people around the globe and this novel attack may very well have set a dangerous precedent. My suggestion that Israeli intelligence possesses the capability to pre-plant explosives into consumer products elicited snorts of derision, and, following a brief but equally remarkable discourse on the so-called Holocaust, the conversation moved on to more mundane matters.
Such severely skewed American reactions are hardly a new phenomenon. On December 7, 1941, the military forces of Japan launched a surprise attack against those of our own country, and I’m sure that the parents or grand-parents of the conservatives at that dinner had judged that as one of the most treacherous blows ever struck in warfare, providing permanent proof of Japanese villainy. Many Americans later regarded our nuclear annihilation of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as just retribution for that unexpected 1941 military blow.
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But one generation later, Israel did much the same thing, using a surprise 1967 attack to destroy the air forces of Egypt and Syria on the ground, thus allowing the IDF to easily win the war and seize territory from both those countries. Yet because of its media presentation, nearly all Americans at the time cheered on plucky little Israel for its brilliant military success.
In the aftermath of World War II, America and its allies established the United Nations to enforce international law and maintain the peace. Our fervently pro-Israel media has often described the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as one of the UN’s proudest early moments, with that international body giving a national homeland to the long-suffering Jewish people.
Then earlier this year, the UN General Assembly voted to admit Palestine as a member state, thereby providing a similar national homeland to the long-suffering Palestinian people, and as a consequence, Israel turned against its creator with a fierce vengeance. In a blistering address, Israel’s UN Ambassador had publicly—and literally!—shredded the UN Charter before the other members, denouncing that body as illegitimate and “antisemitic,” thereby seeming to declare his country’s bitter hostility to the entire world. I’m not sure that any similar scene had ever occurred at the UN rostrum, let alone coming from a country that owed its entire existence to the UN.
In another unprecedented development at the beginning of this month, Israel banned the UN Secretary-General from entering that country. Then, during the last week or two, the Israeli attack on the UN escalated from the symbolic to the military, with IDF forces repeatedly firing shells at the UN Peacekeeping troops in Lebanon and demanding that they leave that sovereign country, despite the longstanding Security Council resolution authorizing their presence. A couple of UN troops were wounded in these incidents and 15 were injured by what seemed to have been some sort of Israeli chemical attack.
Over the past twelve months, the Israelis have killed more then 200 UN aid workers in Gaza, and some prominent figures would like the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon to suffer a similar fate. As a Jewish former White House advisor who has lived and studied in Israel, Matthew Brodsky spent years briefing members of Congress and the executive branch on Middle Eastern issues, and he recently declared that “Israel should carpet bomb the Irish area and then drop napalm on it,” urging Israel to annihilate those UN contingents, which hardly seems the expected attitude of a former American official.
Although the UN created Israel, some surprising aspects of that legal relationship were covered in a lengthy interview a week or two ago with Col. Jacques Baud, a highly-regarded former Swiss military officer with extensive experience in the Middle East.
