TV News LIES

When U.S. politicians are forced to discuss critical Middle East matters, more often than not, their remarks either display an ignorance of facts, are shaped more by political needs than reality, or are just plain dumb. Commentary about the popular revolt in Egypt provides a case in point.

There was no doubt that the events in Cairo were momentous and, therefore, deserving of response. In the case of most U.S. political leaders, however, struggling to come up with the right TV sound bite didn't require actually knowing anything about Egypt.

A sprawling crime scene. That is what Gaza felt like when I visited in the summer of 2009, six months after the Israeli attack. Evidence of criminality was everywhere—the homes and schools that lay in rubble, the walls burned pitch black by white phosphorus, the children’s bodies still unhealed for lack of medical care. But where were the police? Who was documenting these crimes, interviewing the witnesses, protecting the evidence from tampering?

For months it seemed that there would be no investigation. Many Gazans I met on that trip appeared as traumatized by the absence of an international investigation as by the attacks. They explained that even in the darkest days of the Israeli onslaught, they had comforted themselves with the belief that, this time, Israel had gone too far.

How is it that one of the most incredibly important and far-reaching new health policies of the twenty-first century went into effect this past week, and you probably haven't heard of it?

I'm referring to the new guidelines that protect the rights of all patients at more than 6,000 hospitals participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs to put anyone they choose on their visitation list. Despite the fact that this policy has implications for everyone in the United States, it's been underreported overall and misreported by straight mainstream media as a same-sex partners story.

Why does this ludicrous man seek to connect me (Daivid Icke, whose name he doesn't even know how to pronounce) and others exposing the global conspiracy with the outrageous shooting of a Congresswoman and multiple murders in Arizona?

Why does he try to dub me a 'right-winger' when I believe that all extremes, 'wings' and label-thinking have lost the plot and also try to connect me with violence when the very foundation of everything I say is to emphasise non-violence?

According to a 2007 survey, the United States leads the world in gun ownership: 90 guns per 100 people. We are a country with five percent of the world's people and between 35 and 50 percent of its civilian-owned guns. That's something like 270 million weapons.  

Repeated studies have shown that the United States is far and away the leader among the world's developed countries in gun violence and gun deaths. There is no other developed country that is even close. Over 30,000 Americans die every year from gun violence. Most of these are suicides but in excess of 12,000 a year are homicides. Another 200,000 Americans are estimated to be injured each year due to guns.

Do you believe that it is in Americans' interest to allow a small group of U.S. leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community? And, despite their proven record of failure to protect America -- from Indochina to Iran to Iraq -- do you believe they should be permitted to clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate? If so, you are betraying the principles upon which America was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly "unamerican" subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit U.S. Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect Americans at home.