How the Media Construct Myths

Sometimes we wonder how it is possible that the public believes so easily what the media and the elites tell them, about Islam and its threat for instance.

I've gained an insight into this by watching the second presidential debate on the TV, after which the media have on the whole immediately screamed victory for Obama because the biased CNN moderator Candy Crowley has wrongly taken the President's side on the question of how he (mis)handled the Benghazi consulate assault, although she later backtracked.

I distinctly heard Candy Crowley say “He did call it an act of terror. It did as well take two weeks... so Governor Romney is right" or something to that effect, but for a while I thought I had imagined this because no-one seemed to have noticed it.

When even Crowley herself explicitly confirmed and repeated that sentence: “I did turn around right after that and say ‘but you are totally correct that they spent two weeks telling us this was about a tape' ...he [Romney] was right in the main I just think he picked the wrong word”, I believed that the question was now settled, that the media could be economical with the truth but not go as far as telling an outright lie.

I must have been naïve, because the next day many media outlets were repeating that Romney got it wrong.

Day by day the evidence is mounting that Obama knew within 24 hours that this was a jihad attack but kept saying it was because of the Muhammad video to cover the failure of his Middle East policies. Even during the same debate he pointed out that he kept his promise of getting Osama bin Laden, as if to imply that al-Qaeda had been defeated.

In fact “former CIA Director Porter Goss told Fox News that, especially in North Africa, Al Qaeda is "much stronger" and "spreading out" throughout the region.”

It is clearer to me now how myths are created by press and broadcasting networks. A little bit at a time, like Chinese whispers: something gets reported in the media with a little subtraction or addition of "facts", then gets repeated with more changes, and so on. In the end, all these misrepresentations accumulate and become an avalanche.

They start by a small distortion here, followed by a minor alteration of the facts there. Gradually. So, unless you have been a very, very attentive reader, listener or viewer - or, more likely, somebody who has followed a particular event or subject for a length of time - you won't realize that what started as A, by slow and stealth transformations, has become B, non-A.

For example, newspapers have been using the expression "anti-Muslim" for the AFDI's subway ads, rather than "anti-jihad". That is intended to subtly instil doubts in readers' minds.

The media add a single piece of the puzzle a day to their complete picture of fabrications. They don't tell you abruptly and overnight that the Muslim Brotherhood is a nice, peace-loving, tolerant organization; no, they insinuate one day that they have renounced violence, they imply the week after that they have changed their radical positions of yore and in a few months, lo and behold, what was a dangerous Islamist association has been transformed into an ally of the West and upholder of freedom and democracy, in a sleight of hand worthy of the best prestidigitator.

What I think happened is that Obama or some-one in his team, easily predicting that during the presidential debate Romney would criticize Obama on his dealing of the Benghazi consulate attack, counted on the fact that Romney had not read the transcript of the speech given by the President in the Rose Garden the day after the assault, because it did not matter, that speech's exact wording is less important than the entire message sent by the President, which was that the attack was a consequence of the Innocence of Muslims film.

So the Obama camp tried and, with the help of the media, succeeded in spinning this story as if Obama in the Rose Garden had actually called the Benghazi assault "acts of terror", whereas in fact he hadn't. He did use the expression "acts of terror" in a general sense, as a conclusion towards the end of the speech, without a specific reference to the incident occurred the previous day in Libya.

He said: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for."

But when he was talking about that incident specifically, he called it "this type of senseless violence", "brutal acts", and "this attack": no mention of terrorism. "Senseless violence" indeed clearly refers to the reactions to the Muhammad film, since terrorism is violence with a planned objective. That the President did not attribute it to an act of terror is the right interpretation to give to his words in light of his insistence in the following two weeks in blaming the eruption of violence in the Muslim world, from Libya to Pakistan, on the YouTube movie.

As I said, I don't think that all this matters so much per se. What is important is the whole message, posture and policies.

But this is a useful lesson to learn in how the media exercise their deception.

The good news is that people are less and less accepting of this state of affairs. UK newspapers’ sales have been falling for quite some time, and The Guardian/Observer in particular have seen their readership decline, reporting last August an annual loss of around £54m, to the point that both newspapers (The Observer is The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper) are now “seriously discussing” an end to their print edition.

Obama Totalitarian Socialism's Early Signs

I knew that Obama was bad news even before he was elected President.

Four years ago, in 2008, during his first presidential campaign, my blog Of Human and Non-Human Animals was shut down by Blogger.

Not knowing why, I made several searches on Google until I found out that the same thing had recently happened to many other blogs. All these blogs had in common was that they had in any way been critical of Obama.

In a forum I found a very clear and detailed explanation of how the Obama campaign volunteers, many of whom "young, inexperienced, with little knowledge of the Internet" and, I would add, not particularly smart, had gone around the web looking for any minimal sign of dissent with their political star and tried to damage the sites containing these "heresies".

If the site was a Blogger blog, like mine, they flagged it to Blogger.

So I remembered that on this blog of mine, which was all about animal issues - its tagline is "Why giving animals a fair deal is good for humans too" -, I had posted an article entitled Candidates on Animal Rights.

In it I compared the policies of Obama and John McCain on animal issues, and found both of them seriously wanting.

I cannot know for sure, but all the available evidence, including the fact that my blog, like many others which had suffered the same fate, was then reinstated, points to my blog having been shut down for that reason.

This incident to me seemed a shocking display of censorship and curtail of free speech, especially in view of the fact that I hadn't even singled out Obama in my criticism, but had been even-handed with both of the then presidential candidates.

It immediately gave me a sense of bad things to come from Barack Hussein if elected as President of the USA, and this prediction turned out to be accurate.

Incidentally, when it comes to Obama there is always a double standard.

I remember four years ago he was treated by the media as a champion of the animal cause just because he had promised his kids a dog if elected to the White House.

Romney made an excellent joke last night, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner organized by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York to benefit needy children, when he said:

I've already seen early reports from tonight's dinner. Headline: Obama embraced by Catholics, Romney dines with rich people.

AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda

Jihad Watch has published my article AFDI Ads Put Anti-Jihad on the UK Media’s Agenda:

Pamela Geller’s subway ads have achieved the very important objective of making anti-jihad reach the headlines in the UK.

Even though the coverage was, as was to be expected, mostly unsympathetic to the ads, it’s not often that an ordinary person in Britain turns the TV on and hears the word “jihad” and even less “anti-jihad”, unless in connection with terrorist activities. Counterjihad posters in US main cities’ subways are a revolutionary novelty.

So I think that even if the media reports can distort and give the wrong impression about the campaign, the very fact that the general public learns about it has the positive effect of letting people know that there is a resistance to Islamic violence and arrogance, and a response to anti-Israel ads.

There are many in Britain who don’t believe the propaganda by the political classes and the media. The idea that the BBC, for example, is strongly politically biased is becoming increasingly popular, so we can expect that lots of people will take what it says with a pinch of salt.

The BBC covered the judge ruling in favour of the ads in the New York subway with “Pro-Israel 'Defeat Jihad' ads to hit New York subway”, clearly and predictably sympathetic with the MTA and CAIR point of view:

"Pro-Israel adverts that equate jihad with savagery are to appear in 10 of New York's subway stations next week, after officials failed to block them.
…Aaron Donovan, spokesman for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), told the BBC they had no choice but to run the ad.

"'Our hands are tied,' he said. 'The MTA is subject to a court-ordered injunction that prohibits application of the MTA's existing no-demeaning ad standard.

"'That standard restricted publication of ads that demean people on the basis of their race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification. The judge recognised our intention but found our attempt to be constitutionally deficient.'"

What “race, sex, religion, national origin or other group classification” is jihad? It is linked to a particular religion, yes, which is why we should be free to criticize Islam. But the ads don’t demean people for being Muslim, but just for embracing arms and killing other people. Who could object to “demeaning” murderers and terrorists?

Paradoxically, it is those like the MTA spokesman and the others who keep telling us how the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, who in practice, when they hear “jihad”, have the knee-jerk reaction of thinking “Muslims”.

Sky News similarly headlined: “Anti-Jihad Adverts To Run In New York Subway”:

"The controversial leader of the group behind the adverts says she believes that America is at risk from some Muslims.

"The head of a group that has won its fight to run controversial adverts in New York subway stations referring to some Muslims as 'savage' has told Sky News that she will fight 'to the death' for the right to offend people.

"Ms Geller told Sky News that she was unconcerned the adverts might make the subway network a target for violence.

"She said: 'Were there similar ads on the London buses and trains on 7/7? You know
there weren't.

"'I will not abridge my freedoms so as not to offend savages.

"'I won't take responsibility for other people being violent.

"'I live in America and in America we have the first amendment.'

"Ms Geller, who is a prominent supporter of Israel, stressed that she was not referring to all Muslims as savages, only those who engaged in what she characterises as ‘Jihad’.

"She believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country, and her group has launched similar campaigns before."


She believes that. And so believes everybody who has taken the time to look at the evidence as objectively as possible. That reference to “some Muslims” is ambiguous because it seems to imply, again, that Pamela Geller targets Muslims, although, for some unknown reason, not all of them.

Reporting on this without any attempt to explain the reasons behind someone’s actions is in itself deceiving. Telling that Geller “believes that America is under threat from some Muslims who wish to impose Sharia law on the country” to an audience that has never been informed about what Islam preaches, how its history unfolded, what its effects globally today are, and what Sharia law involves, is implicitly portraying her as a conspiracy theorist.

Russia Today, another news channel that broadcasts in Britain, reported on the Washington court ruling:

"Judge Collyer openly described the posters as ‘hate speech’, but said the message was protected under the First Amendment as ‘core political speech’ and did not accept the Metro’s argument that it incited violence and constitutes ‘a gamble with public safety’.
AFDI, whose poster has been condemned by over 200 public organizations, had to fight a similar legal battle in New York, again winning the right to place the ads."


The word “hate” is another of those over-used and abused words, like “racism”. The politically correct and those protected by them never hate, they are just righteously angry (against injustice, presumably). Anti-jihadists who write ads hate, but Muslims violently rioting are just angry (even rightly so, because someone provoked them with – how dared they! - a film). The English Defence League staging a peaceful demonstration in Walthamstow is hate, but the far-left extremists and Muslims who pelted them with bottles and bricks only showed their anger against these “bigots”.

Hate has obviously come to mean the thought crime of not thinking politically correctly.

In the press, both The Daily Mail and The Guardian have run several articles on the subject.

They both reported, among other things, on the Mona Eltahawy incident. The MailOnline had an interview with Pamela Hall in which she talked about her plans to sue Eltahawy for the damages she caused to her clothing and equipment during her 'defense of free speech'.

The Guardian, in Comment in Free, asked its readers, “Mona Eltahawy and the anti-Muslim subway ads: is hers the right approach?”. The comments to the post are mostly answering no, drawing a distinction between exercising the freedom of speech and vandalism, and concluding that Eltahawy’s action was damaging public property and therefore illegal. This is one of the ever increasing number of cases in which the people who comment on liberal media’s articles reveal themselves to be much less on the left than the paper itself.

A commenter noticed the “anti-Muslim” in the headline, and wrote: “Strictly speaking, these ads are anti-violent-Jihad rather than anti-Muslim. That is, unless you believe that all Muslims automatically support violent Jihad. But, as we are told here so often, only a tiny, tiny minority of Muslims -- who misunderstand their Religion of Peace -- support violent Jihad. It is these people who are described in the ads as savages.”

In US Politics the Right still Exists

I am not American but I like to follow US politics.

It’s refreshing to see that there is a real difference between the two party candidates on many important issues, whereas here in the UK where I live there is no genuine, mainstream right-of-centre alternative commanding a large number of votes.

The British Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, David Cameron, has sold out numerous conservative values.

His party did not receive enough votes at the last general election in 2010 to form a majority government on its own and, rather than having a minority government, the Tories are ruling in a coalition with the left-leaning Liberal Democrats.

This necessarily involves compromises, but it’s the type of compromises that Cameron chooses that represents the problem.

The Lib Dems wanted to reform the House of Lords so that unelected members would not make up the whole of it, but would only be a minority. Cameron faced an internal opposition to the reform from within his party and anyway, in the case of a reform, his privilege to appoint peers who the electorate would never vote for, like his Muslim friend Baroness Warsi, would be diminished. In 2007, Warsi was appointed Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion (I wonder what “community” is most in need of a minister to guarantee its cohesion with the others in the UK – hint: Warsi is a Muslim of Pakistani extraction). Since she had not been elected by anyone, to take up that post she had to be created a life peer as Baroness Warsi.

So, as an exchange of favours, Cameron dropped the House of Lords reform and renounced something unimportant to him, namely the freedom of religion enabling the Anglican clergy not to marry homosexual couples in Church, as his Lib Dem partners requested.

Romney does not seem to be like that.

Romney Beat Obama and Crowley on Libya. Crowley Video

This are the exact words of Candy Crowley during that infamous TV second presidential debate:

"CROWLEY: He -- he did call it an act of terror. It did as well take -- it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that."

Her wording is confused and ambiguous, but to me it sounds like she was so anxious to save Obama's face when the discussion reached the hot-potato topic of the President's farcical - and tragic - treatment of the Libyan consulate assault, that she rushed to confirm that Obama did call it a terror attack before adding, as an afterthought, "it did as well take two weeks", which was the whole point of Romney's statement.

The media did not carefully listen to her words, they just picked up her attitude which was clearly on Obama's side as if that meant anything more than a bias on her part, as if instead that solved the issue in Obama's favor.

At first I doubted if I had heard correctly, since nobody else seemed to have heard or paid attention to those crucial words: "it did as well take two weeks or so".

When I saw the above video in which Crowley herself confirmed what she had actually said, I realized that I was right the first time around.

All this post-debate obsession with who won and who lost, as if this were a football or boxing match, is missing some of the most important points.

Being in England, I watched the presidential debate on Sky News, left-leaning as nearly all British mainstream media. The minute the debate ended Sky News jumped to the conclusion that Obama had won, among other things because - and this is hard to believe but true - the moderator Candy Crowley of CNN confirmed Obama's lie that the President had called the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi an act of terror the day after it occurred, whereas the truth is what Romney said, i.e. that Obama's first response to the attack and murders had been to blame them on 'spontaneous' protests against the Youtube Muhammad video and it took him several days to admit the truth.

Do these mean scoring points, a moderator wrongly taking a candidate's side on a point of fact, like a referee determing the result of a soccer match with a wrong decision, really matter more to our deranged media than the substance of what the debaters, potential future US Presidents, said? This is not a game.

I do not fault Romney with anything in the Benghazi violence part of the debate, except that he could have attacked Obama's policies in the Middle East much more forcefully than he did, explaining that Muslim-raised Barack Hussein's support for the 'Arab Spring' was in fact aiding and abetting the very wintery rise of Islamists like the Muslim Brotherood and strengthening of Al Qaeda in North Africa, the very same people behind the Benghazi attack.

I realize, however, that the time he was given may have been too limited for him to do that in full.

How Close Abortion and Infanticide Can Be

The video above shows a CNN report on Obama's opposition, in 2001 when he was an Illinois state Senator, to the Illinois state's Born Alive Infants Protection Act, a bill to give legal protection to live babies surviving abortions, so that they would not be thrown away and left to die.

Obama voted against Born Alive and was the only senator to speak against it on the senate floor for 2 consecutive years.

The federal version of Born Alive was approved unanimously 98-0 by the US Senate. It passed overwhelmingly, approved from left to right, in the US House of Representatives. President Bush signed it into law on August 5, 2002.

As chairman of the Illionois Senate Health & Human Services Committee, Obama stopped a bill with identical wording of the federal law from being introduced in Illinois in 2003.

The reason Obama had given for voting against the Illinois state's Born Alive Infant Protection Act was that this bill was different from the similar federal law that was passed, in that it was open to being interpreted as making all abortions illegal and did not protect Roe v. Wade.

The video report shows a debate on the issue between Democrat James Carville and conservative Bill Bennett.

As you can easily see in the video, only Bennett has a valid argument: the federal law and the Illinois bill are identical, so this is not about Roe v. Wade, this is not about abortion. It looks like one of Obama's many falsities.

Carville has no arguments at all, valid or not. All he does is using ad hominem attacks against Santorum, thinking that his socialist peers will find him funny, and against the nurse who supported the bill.

Imagine for a moment if this happened in a court of law: Bennett's statement would have been accepted, Carville's would have been rejected as argumentative.

It's easy to see why the best brains belong to the right end of the political spectrum. Since socialism of various shapes and forms is the current dominant ideological orthodoxy of the West, it takes more intellect - as well as guts - to challenge it than to go along with it.

Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment

Jihad Watch has published my article "Time To Give Pakistan the South-African Treatment":

It may seem an unlikely possibility, now that the Islamic world is demanding sharia, in the shape of anti-blasphemy laws, to be imposed all over the globe and Muslim Baroness Warsi, newly-appointed Minister for Faith (i.e. Islam) in the UK government, has signed during the UN recent meetings a surreal agreement between the UK, that old -- and now former -- defender of democratic freedoms, and the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) pledging that the UK and the OIC will "work together on issues of peace, stability and religious freedom", but sometimes attack is the best form of defence.

South Africa was isolated by the international community due to its apartheid policy, which put pressure on Pretoria and played a role in ending the apartheid. The British Commonwealth, of which the country was part, turned out to be particularly important in this process.

During the apartheid, the British felt particularly responsible for what they believed to be South African discriminatory policies because of the strong ties the UK had with that country through the Commonwealth, the international organization that comprises almost exclusively Britain’s former colonies.

In 1958 the African National Congress made an appeal for international solidarity. The Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan may be too demoralized and terrorized to even ask for outside help.

I am not here making comparisons between Pakistan and South Africa, which since the end of the apartheid seems to have deteriorated.

The only leaf I am taking out of the South African book is the way international repudiation of a regime or treatment considered as odiously unfair can be an effective weapon against it.

Pakistan, another member of the British Commonwealth, has already been suspended from the Commonwealth twice: in 1999 after Musharraf seized power in a coup, and in 2007, because of its imposition of emergency rule, until “full restoration of fundamental rights and the rule of law“, for its "serious violation of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values.

Isn’t Pakistan’s treatment of its Christians “a serious violation of the Commonwealth’s fundamental political values”?

Let's see.

The Constitution of Pakistan (PART III, Chapter 1) says: “A person shall not be qualified for election as President unless he is a Muslim of not less than forty-five years of age and is qualified to be elected as member of the National Assembly.”

In addition, the Constitution (PART VII, Chapter 3A) rules that non-Muslims cannot be judges in the Federal Shariat Court, which has the power to abrogate any law considered un-Islamic.

At least since the 1990s, we have started to learn how Pakistani Christians suffer the worst forms of discrimination only because of their religion.

The infamous Pakistani blasphemy law mandates that anyone who offends the Quran must be punished, even with the death sentence.

A 1998 United Nations document on “Prevention of Discrimination against and the Protection of Minorities”, mostly concerned with Pakistan, says: “The use of an accusation of “blasphemy” -- an ill-defined term which can be expanded to mean anything that any accuser dislikes -- merits serious attention. Some accusations of “blasphemy” can be ill-disguised death threats - as was the case in 1994 regarding the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Sudan, Mr. Gáspár Biró - and when they are not, they can be considered as sufficiently dangerous to lead to kowtowing, and even censorship at the United Nations”.

Since 1994, Amnesty International has been calling for a change in that law because it is used as a tool against religious minorities:

AI is concerned that a number of people facing charges of blasphemy, or convicted on such charges have been detained solely for their real or imputed religious beliefs. Most of those charged with blasphemy belong to the Ahamdiyya community but Christians have increasingly been accused of blasphemy, among them a 13-year-old boy accused of writing blasphemous words on the walls of a mosque despite being totally illiterate. The following case histories are supplied: Anwar Masih, a Christian prisoner; Arshad Javed, reportedly mentally ill, sentenced to death; Gul Masih, a Christian, sentenced to death; Tahir Iqbal, a convert to Christianity, died in jail while on trial; Sawar Masih Bhatti, a Christian prisoner; Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan, Muslim social activist; Chand Barkat, a Christian acquitted of blasphemy but continuously harassed; Hafiz Farooq Sajjad, stoned to death; Salamat Masih, Manzoor Masih and Rehmat Masih, three Christians.”

In 1996, another Christian, Ayub Masih, was incarcerated in solitary confinement for two years, convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 1998 due to a neighbour’s accusations that he supported Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Eventually his lawyer proved that the accuser had used the conviction to force Masih's family out of their land and take control of the property.

It is supposed to be in connection with this episode that the Pakistani Catholic Bishop John Joseph killed himself in 1998 to protest the blasphemy laws, for the repeal of which he had been campaigning. Before his death, Bishop Joseph had publicly declared that the charges against Ayub Masih were false, and fabricated to force 15 Christian families to drop a local land dispute with Muslim villagers.

Since then the story has just been a repetition of many similar cases, so much so that even homosexual and human rights activist Peter Tatchell – not exactly a friend of the Church – has condemned persecution of Christians in Pakistan, and the Pakistan United Christian Welfare Association has demanded a separate province in Pakistan to protect the country’s around 2.8 million Christians from persecution.

One of the most recent horrors is that of the 11-year-old Christian girl threatened to be burnt alive by a Muslim mob for another false “blasphemy” accusation, while her family and several other Christian families were driven out of their homes in terror.

And Hindus are also an oppressed minority in Pakistan.

The UK’s National Secular Society, whose president Terry Sanderson said: “There is certainly a need for some kind of inter-religious understanding among OIC member states, a number of which suppress Christianity and other religions in a brutal and merciless fashion”, may also be in favour of pressure brought on Pakistan, which is certainly one of the most serious offenders among the OIC’s member states Mr. Sanderson is referring to.

Other campaigns of international political, financial, economic, cultural and sporting sanctions against Pakistan should also be conducted, as they were against South Africa.

South Africa’s bans from sporting events were employed as an effective instrument of pressure, and so could be banning Pakistan from Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, and the like.