Obama and his good friends in the far-left media

Medialens provides a corrective to the “liberal” Guardian over its blind repeating of US government talking points regarding Israel and Iran:

On August 26, the Guardian newspaper published an article titled, ‘US takes on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme in one massive gamble.’ Julian Borger and Ewen MacAskill told readers:

“The Obama administration’s approach to two of the world’s most intractable and dangerous problems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme, is to link them together in the search for a solution to both.

“The new US strategy aims to use its Iran policy to gain leverage on Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.”

The “Iran policy” is based on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s threat of “crippling sanctions” against Iran. (BBC online, ‘Israel-US settlement deal “close”‘, Analysis by Jeremy Bowen, August 26, 2009)


The sanctions threat is to ensure that Iran does “not compromise on uranium enrichment by the end of next month.”…  The Guardian told its readers that not only are sanctions supposed to pre-empt any Israeli military action against Iran, “they are also a bargaining chip offered in part exchange for a substantial freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” The paper quoted one official “close to the negotiations”:

“The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.”

So much for Obama’s much-hailed Cairo speech in June 2009 in which he promised a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” (‘Obama speech in Cairo’, Huffington Post, June 4, 2009.)

The Guardian article presented the US as a valiant peace-seeker:

“The Obama administration is setting out to juggle two potentially explosive global crises, while walking the tightrope of a shaky and nervous global economy. It is not going to be easy, but Washington appears to have decided it has no option but to try.” (Borger and MacAskill, op. cit.)

This is a deeply misleading picture of the US in the Middle East and the wider world, as we have often explained in our books and in media alerts. We are to believe that the world’s number one rogue state is searching for benign solutions to the world’s most “intractable problems”. This fiction is standard in corporate media coverage.

As the independent journalist Jonathan Cook commented to us:

“This analysis in yesterday’s Guardian is almost a masterclass in how the liberal media unthinkingly reflect elite priorities.” (Jonathan Cook, email, August 27, 2009)

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