Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist based in Moscow, Russia. His articles have been featured in many publications, including Russia in Global Affairs, The Moscow Times, Russia Insider and Infowars.com. Bridge is the author of the book on corporate power, “Midnight in the American Empire”, which was released in 2013.
Published time: 20 Nov, 2015 13:25
With every new manifestation of global terrorism, Western media outlets are dutifully serving as the mouthpiece for Islamic State, promoting its mad message and crazed claims without ever scrutinizing the group’s dubious origins.
Ever since Russia opened its bombing campaign against Islamic State forces in Syria all hell has broken loose on the planet. On Oct. 31, a Russian Airbus was brought down by an explosive device over the Sinai Peninsula, killing 224. On Nov. 12, a bomb exploded in Beirut, Lebanon killing dozens. On Friday the 13th Paris was hit by a string of terrorist attacks against public venues that left 129 dead and 352 wounded.
In each of these savage events, the Western mainstream media – with nothing more than breadcrumbs for evidence – rushed to name Islamic State as the perpetrator. One gets the feeling that if an ice cream truck ran over a puppy in Detroit and ISIS claimed responsibility, the Western MSM would be tripping over themselves to break the story first.
Trumpeting Islamic State’s claims of responsibility following every act of violence is promulgating an atmosphere of fearthat can be easily manipulated by the powers-that-be.
“We are being bombarded now with a media propaganda campaign, it’s just non-stop talk where we’re told not to go out on the street, we’re supposed to be fearful and keep quiet,” writer and journalist, Gearoid O’Colmain, told RT from Paris.
“This is essentially a propaganda campaign to make people in France fear Muslims.”
Geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen also expressed bewilderment with the“absolute flood of speculation” following the Paris attacks, saying “the Western media has already basically decided this is an ISIS attack.”
It’s going to be very hard to stop this juggernaut from a public relations point of view, even though we’d like to see a proper investigation to know exactly what happened here in Paris, but I dare say we might not be afforded that luxury,” he added.
The (Un)usual Suspects
The Western media fails to remind its viewers that there are many different groups in Syria –first and foremost, the Syrian people themselves – that are fiercely opposed to NATO bombing their sovereign territory. In fact, one of the gunmen in the course of the Paris attacks was reported to have yelled, “This is for Syria!” Does it sound logical that a fighter from Islamic State would utter a declaration of solidarity for the very country he is alleged to be fighting against?
It is highly reasonable to believe that the terrorists in the Paris attacks were in fact Syrian nationals seeking retribution for the US-led assault on their country (By way of example, imagine if an Arab military coalition decided to attack Canada because the country was experiencing political strife. Isn’t it safe to assume that some Canadians may be extremely tempted to seek vengeance against Arab targets?).
This possibility, however, is never mentioned by the mainstream media, nor will we be able to hear the killers defend themselves in a court of law because – as happens like precision clockwork in every such incident – the bad guys areduly,conveniently, permanently eliminated from the face of the earth.
Dead men tell no tales, nor do they have their day in court. The public is just expected to believe the ‘official’ version of events, despite the glaring lack of evidence not to mention defendants.
Another strange ‘coincidence’ involving this sudden tsunami of terrorism is how clumsy the terrorists are with their documents – documents, it should be added, that seem incredibly resistant to catastrophic conditions.
As with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Charlie Hebdo shootings, a crispy clean (Syrian) passport was found lying right next to one of the suicide bombers following the Paris attacks.
How convenient! Three terrorist attacks on three Western targets where passports are left at the scene of the crime identifying the culprits. Who needs detectives these days with such stupid criminals running around?
Moreover, what terrorist with a death wish would find it compulsory to bring along his passport on the mission? What passport could withstand the force of such a blast?
Needless to say, some people are expressing skepticism over such strange happenings.
“The ‘found passport’ worked for them for 9/11,” wrote Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy. “It worked again for Charlie Hebdo. So now they have used it a third time. They know that Americans are total dumbsh*ts and can be told anything. No matter how preposterous, the dumbsh*ts will believe it.”
There are still more reasons that the ongoing wave of terrorist attacks deserve more media scrutiny. Before Russia entered the fray against ISIS, such acts of terrorism outside of the Syrian theater were relatively tame by comparison to the last three weeks of hell on earth. This begs the question: If the US-led forces were really bombing ISIS, why were things so quiet on the Western front in terms of retaliatory actions during that time? Why did ISIS only start acting like a hornet’s nest being poked once Russia opened its shock-and-awe offensive?
It’s almost as if the global puppet masters, sensing that Russia’s bold incursion into Syria was disrupting its geopolitical designs in the Middle East, experienced a childish temper tantrum and flipped the chess board rather than continue with a game that was fast approaching checkmate (For the skeptical reader ready to scream ‘conspiracy theory,’ please reflect upon the words of the late US historian Gore Vidal who observed that “conspiracy theory is now shorthand for unspeakable truth”).
Now, with these very suspicious series of attacks on soft targets, this terrorist proxy army, which many commentators had said was “on the ropes,” appears to have been magically energized – despite the massive Russian attacks. Any journalist worth his salt should be questioning this inexplicable comeback at this particular juncture.
Yet today it is up to a handful of uncompromised world leaders and a few alternative media renegades to shed some light on the ugly truth behind the rise of Islamic State.
During the recent G20 Summit, President Putin said he shared Russian intelligence data on Islamic State financing with his colleagues that showed the terrorist organization is being financed from 40 countries – including some G20 member states.
“I provided examples based on our data on the financing of different Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) units by private individuals. This money, as we have established, comes from 40 countries and, there are some of the G20 members among them,” the Russian leader told a news conference.
Calling Seymour Hersh…
So why have the investigative journalists in the Western media matrix gone missing in action when it comes to investigating this global menace known as Islamic State? Why is this group being so readily accepted at face value? Just like the same-day claims that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Western media seems only interested in making the world tremble at the very name ‘Islamic State.’
This environment of fear and loathing gives NATO countries a free pass to continue with their wars of occupation and neocolonialism, while, at the same time, destroying civil liberties at home. Brace yourself, French people, because very soon you too will be the lucky recipients of your own undemocratic counterpart of the US PATRIOT ACT.
Until it can be proven otherwise, ISIS is a Western-made tool of oppression – a veritable crowbar being used to break down national boundaries and wreak havoc both at home and abroad.
“There is no war on terror,” Colmain went on to say. Instead, “there is a war being waged using terrorist proxy groups and they are being used against nation states that are resisting US and Israeli hegemony…”
“You now have terrorist attacks being committed by terrorists funded, armed and trained by Western intelligence agencies. There is no such thing as ISIS; ISIS is a creation of the United States. We know that from official sources of the US military themselves. Declassified documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed that.”
The declassified report mentioned above clearly states that for “THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…”.
Western powers facilitating the rise of an Islamic proxy army should not surprise anybody since the exact same strategy was implemented in Afghanistan in 1980 against the Soviet Union.
American geopolitical guru Zbigniew Brzezinski, then national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, admitted to being the architect of the plan to arm the mujahedin, thus dragging the Soviet Union into a decade long struggle in the Central Asian country, which has been rightly dubbed “the graveyard of empires.”
In a 1998 interview with Counterpunch, Brzezinski scoffed at the idea that some“stirred-up Moslems” could somehow destabilize the global chessboard.
Counterpunch: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
CP: Some stirred-up Muslims? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
ZB: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
Meanwhile, none other than Hillary Clinton, the Democrats hopeful in the upcoming presidential elections, left no doubt as to who was to blame for creating al-Qaeda, the very group that allegedly attacked the United States on 9/11.
In Clinton’s own words, “We had this brilliant Idea that we were going to come to Pakistan and create a force of Mujahedeen and equip them with stinger missiles and everything else to go after the Soviets inside Afghanistan and we were successful.”
“The people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago.”
It is no secret that Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State were trained in 2012 by American instructors at a secret military base in Jordan.
The German weekly Der Spiegel reported in 2013, that “some 200 men have already received such training over the past three months and there are plans in the future to provide training for a total 1,200 members of the ‘Free Syrian Army’ in two camps in the south and the east of the country.”
Jordanian intelligence services are also participating in the program, which aims to build around a dozen units totaling some 10,000 fighters to the exclusion of radical Islamists, Spiegel reported.
Meanwhile, reports continue to indicate that the United States is either being incredibly negligent in its training of “Syrian moderates,” which have a suspicious tendency for crossing over to the ISIS camp with their US field training and shiny new weapons, or willfully complicit in arming and protecting the group.
That is the main question the Western mainstream media needs to ask right now: What exactly is the relationship between Islamic State and the Western powers today?
@Robert_Bridge
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!
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