Israel Learned Its Approach To War Propaganda From The U.S.

In Iraq and Syria, the United States deployed many of the same justifications that Israel does today.

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, The Progressive

We have both been reporting on and protesting against U.S. war crimes for many years, including those committed by U.S. allies and proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia: illegal uses of military force to try to remove enemy governments or “regimes”; hostile military occupations; disproportionate military violence justified by claims of “terrorism”; the bombing and killing of civilians; and the mass destruction of whole cities.

Most Americans share a general aversion to war but tend to accept a militarized foreign policy because we are tragically susceptible to propaganda, the machinery of public manipulation that works hand in hand with the machinery of killing to justify otherwise unthinkable horrors.

a soldier looks at burned out cars in iraq

This process of “manufacturing consent” works in a number of ways. One of the most effective forms of propaganda is silence—simply not telling us, and certainly not showing us, what war is really doing to the people whose homes and communities have been turned into America’s latest battlefield.

During the most devastating campaign waged in recent years, the U.S. military dropped more than 100,000 bombs and missiles on Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, and other areas occupied by ISIS (or Da’esh). An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul, while Raqqa experienced even more destruction.