Editorial
Headlines like “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” are the things of pogroms. This statement is not hyperbole. The opinion column by Steven Stalinsky on the Wall Street Journal is taken straight from the style-book of Joseph Goebbels. While Goebbels was the chief of the Nazi propagandists and Stalinsky is a rabid Zionist, their method of spinning fear, conspiracy, and scandal directed at concentrated populations of their target group stinks just the same. In both cases their interests are to mobilize hate and racism in the hopes of inspiring mob-based violence and reactionary attacks. Dearborn is the only predominantly Muslim city in the United States.
Since 1999, Stalinsky has served as the director of the Middle East Research Institute, a think tank funded by the Israeli state that provides “analysis” to the major US monopoly (imperialist) media outlets. The “non-profit” monitors the American media, in the interest of the Zionist occupation forces, and was co-founded by Yigal Carmon of the Israeli Intelligence Service.
“Many current or onetime Dearborn residents” Stalinsky writes, “have been convicted of terror-related crimes in recent years.” Such vagary hardly merits journalism; no attempt is made to quantify Stalinsky’s ambiguous “many.” Sane people, that is to say those not controlled by Israeli intelligence organizations, can only retort that “many” Americans all over the country have been convicted of terror-related crimes, with the overwhelming majority of them being white supremacists and not Islamist. This is not considered by Stalinsky because acts of terror against regular people do not suit the narrative.
On top of this, the laws and policy developed since the Patriot Act create a situation in which the most tangential and circumstantial evidence is magnified without due course to bend even minor suspicions into convictions on these types of charges. The wide scope combined with a tradition of racial profiling demonstrated by the old state begs the question of merit in almost all cases regarding people of Middle Eastern origin. In this way the “war on terror” takes a page from the book of the “war on drugs” which itself ropes so many innocent people into inflated conspiracy cases. The fact remains that even with the racial profiling and the widened scope of the law, the vast majority of terror cases are not coming from the Muslim population, but from organized and individual white supremacists. This says something about the situation in the US generally and itself debunks the fear mongering leveled at the Muslim population of Dearborn.
Stalinsky’s transparent and vulgar attempts to frame the population of Dearborn as “supporters of Hamas” and “Jihadists” relies only the basis that masses of the American people are sick to their core of genocide and are finding themselves increasingly in support of resistance to the Zionist occupation of Palestine. 25 years of Stalinsky’s propaganda efforts and the might of the media monopolies combined cannot make Israel look any better, and they are furious about it.
The imperialist monopoly media, just like the big imperialist politicians, are losing more and more legitimacy and entering greater contradiction with themselves. This fact is apparent not only in declining trust from readers, but in the fact that several of the media giants have performed mass layoffs, targeting those writers most likely to have a sympathetic ear to the masses. (LA Times alone laid off 900 unionized journalists last year, among others.)
In the recent weeks, a number of allegations from CNN staffers have gained public attention, claims that verify the facts many of us already know—that news is twisted in the hands of the monopolies to lopsided support for imperialist interests. The staffers accused the CNN higher-ups of sending directives that insist on restricting quotes and views from Palestinian sources, including Hamas, while taking the statements of Israeli officials on good faith and not fact-checking them. It is clear that the directors of the giant media outlet fear that even hearing the statements of the resistance fighters will garner too much sympathy in the US. The CNN directives also insisted that articles meet the approval of the Jerusalem Bureau.
A few days after the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, CNN appointed a new Editor-in-Chief and CEO, Mark Thompson. Thompson is one of the ultra-rich, worth about 13 million dollars. He has been proclaimed as the 65th most powerful man in the world by the monopoly Forbes Magazine and owns Ancestry.com, a genealogy monopoly that provides DNA samples of its customers to the US government—Ancestry claims that they do this only with a court order, however in high profile cases like the Golden State Killer, Ancestry provided DNA without a court order.
The New York Times, previously led by Thompson, has also exhibited the racist, anti-Middle Eastern bourgeois frenzy recently. The opinion column “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom” by Thomas Friedman, who has served as NYT’s Jerusalem Bureau chief, goes so far as to compare Iran to a “species of parasitoid wasp” and proclaims that US imperialism has “no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.” Again this should be taken by sane people as a naked effort to justify and encourage mass genocide through openly racist war mongering. His argument is dressed in a certain racist rhetoric at the core of which is a call for mass bombing—nothing new for Friedman.
Friedman is an agent undermined directly by the Flood. In 2002, he met with the Saudi Crown Prince to convince him to normalize relations with Israel. The Crown Prince responded favorably. Friedman’s massive political influence does not stop there—in 2011, NYT highlighted the fact that then-President Barack Obama repeated Friedman’s views on the Middle East. Friedman was an outspoken supporter for the US imperialist war of aggression waged against Iraq. His vulgar imperialist sentiment led him to proclaim on the pages of NYT in 1999 for a similar annihilation strategy against Serbia. He wrote: “if NATO’s only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let’s at least have a real air war,” and continuing to say, “it should be lights out for Belgrade.” “These are weak, tribalized states” he expressed, they “can fall apart in our hands.” The imperialist war monger concluded that the US must “give war a chance. Let’s see what months of bombing does for before we opt for weeks of invasion, where if we win, we get to occupy the Balkans for years.” His penchant for comparing oppressed countries to insects needing to be exterminated was clear in his opinion article 25 years ago when he called the region a “hornets nest.”
Friedman is not a fringe racist who idly shouts loud for indiscriminate bombing and mass murder; he is a significant ideologue for imperialism. He is so respected by the imperialists that he is awarded one-on-one interviews with President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Friedman has the ear of the biggest imperialists, so long as they have his. This is how the monopoly media operates in service of imperialism. The fact that the stench of his tone is offensive to other monopoly outlets does nothing to remove the shared blood from their hands. Racism, after all, is a dressing for imperialism, and it acts not as the cause for genocide but to pardon and hasten it.
photo: Thomas Friedman discusses US government policy with Secretary of State Blinken, Davos 2023, US Department of State
