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On 5/13/13 2:26 PM, Lester Schonbrun wrote:
I claim there is a similarity between reporting of events in Syria and past
reporting about Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Libya, etc.. It seems
to me that Assad is being singled out in the way Hussein, Noriega, Ortega,
Qaddafi, and Milosevic were.
This is not true, at least with respect to Liyba. Until the Arab Spring,
there was not much in the way of Qaddafi demonization. I wrote about
this here:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/what-5-years-of-lexis-nexis-reveals-about-libya-and-the-west/
This was typical:
The Washington Post
November 6, 2007 Tuesday
Oil Wealth Fuels Gaddafi’s Drive For Reinvention
By Ellen Knickmeyer; Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: TRIPOLI, Libya
Brother Leader Moammar Gaddafi still exhorts his people to greatness
from billboards, banners and murals. But these days a different kind of
command is driving Libya’s transformation as the newly opened country
taps into oil wealth: “izala,” Arabic for “raze it to the ground.”
Surveyors are spraying the word in red paint up and down Libya’s
Mediterranean coast. The orange-vested road crews are tagging for
demolition the old Libya — low-rise, stucco Libya, sleepy under decades
of Gaddafi’s socialist economy and international sanctions.
To rise in its place, Gaddafi’s officials say: the increasingly
capitalist Libya, with new buildings for the country’s new stock
exchange. Airports to ferry in and out a dreamed-of annual flow of 30
million oil workers, tourists and other travelers. The world’s
second-largest port after Singapore. Railways. Highways. Hospitals.
Schools. Luxury beachfront hotels.
Libyans and Westerners here cite a statement attributed to Gaddafi:
Libya must destroy in order to rebuild.
“I can’t believe they’re going to do it,” one white-haired shopkeeper
said this past weekend at his snack shop on the coast road east of the
capital, Tripoli. “Izala” was scrawled across the front of his sandstone
shop, marking it for bulldozing to clear the way for a highway.
(clip)
I an understand why Lester has so little understanding of the press
coverage on Libya before the Arab Spring or the hostility toward the
Syrian opposition leader in Foreign Policy magazine.
If your take on these issues is based on a steady diet of wsws.org, the
PSL, Voltairenet, Global Research, MRZine et al, you would be left with
no other conclusion. That, after all, is the purpose of propaganda.
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