Funny really, when the US Air Force killed Tarek Ayyoub, on a day when it also attacked Al Jazeera English and two other news organisations I dont remember everyone jumping up and down talking about freedom of speech and how the bombing of Baghdad should be screened on every channel. Instead, journalists were mostly very keen to toe the line: yes, a journalist was killed but really, he was one of theirs and anyway, if he didnt want to be killed he shouldnt have been there, battlefields are dangerous places. Which begs the question that if you have a war on terror and other linguistic concepts, where exactly is the battlefield? When the President of the United States comes out with his stream of infantile bullshit about crusades and wars on abstract nouns, where do you go to be safe? The answer seems to be you shut your mouth and dont screen the effects of airplanes dropping bombs at random over a city the way al Jazeera did in this video. And you happily repeat the fantasy that its all a precision operation with supremely accurate munitions that only kill bad people. We are good. They are bad. We liberate. They murder. We are rational. They are fanatics. We protect liberty and freedom. The more so when we wont report on bad things we do. Killing people in their offices who simply turned up to do their job is a bad thing. It doesnt become a good thing when you kill hundreds of times more of them, or if they have different colour skins or medieval beliefs.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 07:30:03 +0000
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