Glenn Greenwald said in a recent interview with Amy Goodman that “one of the Guardian newspaper big flaws as an institution is they develop personal feuds with people they cover. And when that happens, they dispense with all journalistic standards. So, one of the people who they have particular hatred for is Jeremy Corbyn.” Then he described newspaper techniques for feeding a story to the minds of readers, using the case of Julian Assange as an example, with a standard protocol being used when their “key claims ended up collapsing”: “retraction and correction of several of the collapsed claims. And, of course, none of those corrections or retractions went anywhere near as far as the original false claims themselves did.” I could not help recalling Glenn Greenwald’s words as soon as I heard the tragic news of the Manchester massacre on the evening of May 22nd, which I followed closely (nearly nonstop) until the evening of May 23rd — almost 24 hours. I was waiting for any news outlet to ask some critical questions about this condemned crime, beyond the apparent objective of their coverage, which is that of feeding fear to the minds of viewers and forcing them to submit to the extreme right-wing government narrative, especially during this very critical time (prior to the general election, which will take place in Britain on 8th June 2017, in which the polls were showing, on the day of the massacre, that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party were heading for an absolute victory in Wales with 44% in the polls, with prospects that this could be the case in other parts of the union.
In a security state like the United Kingdom, in which the number of security cameras might exceed the number of people living in the country, in addition to the most draconian spying laws in Europe by which the UK government collects all of the data that the NSA in the US has been collecting illegally for many years, but with one difference: it is completely legal in the UK. There is an extreme spectrum of capabilities of facial and voice recognition systems, as well as an army of constables who have to speak another language (other than English) spoken throughout the world to be accepted for employment in the police in the UK, analysing the phone and cyber-calls of any suspected individual. I could not move away from a pressing question which had not been asked during the first few hours when people were being fed the horrible story: was the murderer known to the police and intelligence before he committed the crime? I expected that he be known, as was the case with Khalid Masood (known as Adrian Elm before converting to Islam), who committed a crime in London in March 2017, but whether he had been known to the police was not stated in mainstream media in the UK until the shocking hours had passed and the framed news had been fed to and settled well in the minds of viewers. It turned out that my expectation was true. I could find evidence of my expectation after 16 hours on the Independent website only, but not on the Guardian or BBC websites until the first 24 hours had passed and the audience had digested and assimilated the official narrative fully. In fact, the real story (as per the Independent) was that Salman Abedi “returned from a visit to Libya just days before carrying out the Manchester attack and may have travelled to terrorist strongholds in Syria”. He was also known to security services as an “associate of Isis recruiter Raphael Hostey, also from Manchester, who was killed in a drone strike in Syria last year”. Therefore, a pressing question, when all of this information is true, is: why did the police and security forces let this man slip from their radar to commit this ugly crime? Some observers may have contemplated some conspiracy scenarios. In fact, for such a failure of government, Prime Minister Theresa May should resign, not come out, with her shiny makeup and giant pearl necklace, and address the nation about the terrorism that has attacked our freedom, and, by default, suspend the election campaign, raise the level of terrorism threat to critical for the first time since 2007, signalling that a further attack may be imminent, and bring thousands of soldiers from their barricades to the streets of Britain.
The actions of the Tories along with the conformist mainstream media, which did not bother to present any critical question to the government, did not do the nation any good, but only created more fear in the hearts of ordinary people who were canvassing and heavily preparing for massive, popular rallies in public places similar to Manchester Arena, where the massacre took place, to support Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. Furthermore, they put to rest, at least in the media domain, the very recent scandal of the “dementia tax” in the Tory manifesto in the coming general election, which angered the basis of the Tory constituents, who felt shockingly the vacuous slogan — “big society” — of the Tories and the betrayal and contempt towards every elderly person in Britain. Likewise, mainstream media hostility towards Corbyn has shifted since the news of the Manchester massacre to completely disregarding him or his allies, and hinting indirectly at Corbyn being weak when it comes to fighting “terrorism”, in contrast to the magnified coverage of Theresa May as being a “Tough Lady”, as she likes to describe herself while drawing on Margaret Thatcher’s title “Iron Lady” — who managed to crush all the powers of the trade unions in Britain in the 1980s.
Furthermore, another pressing question has never been asked as to why a young man born in Manchester and at the age of 22 decided to commit suicide and kill youngsters of his age, who were supposed to be part of his lively community, at least in theory, like a typical integrated second-generation immigrant to the United Kingdom. But nobody in the mainstream media has asked this critical question and many others about the role of the United Kingdom in creating a foundation for the so-called “Islamic State”, even though they colluded for many years with radical Islamic forces on almost every continent, as has been documented extensively by the prominent British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis in his book entitled “Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam”, to create in Afghanistan, with the help of US partners, the organisation of the “Afghan Mujahidin” in the 1980s to fight Soviet invaders, guaranteeing flawless funding to the invented organisation by Saudi oil money as well as sustained fuelling by Wahhabi fundamentalist ideology. Then in 2002, when the US decided (as per George W. Bush) to “kick some ass” and smash Afghanistan, members of that organisation who were enjoying their stronghold in Afghanistan had no choice but to migrate from their localised position to every place they could reach where there were people who could be infected and brainwashed by the same techniques that they had been taught by their former masters in the CIA and MI6, as Noam Chomsky observed in his book entitled “Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy”. Similarly, the same scattered groups of the “Afghan Mujahidin” could not find a better location than the failed state of Iraq from which to emerge, whose catastrophic story has slipped through the memory black hole of the British mainstream media, which seem unaware of the third law of motion of classical mechanics as formulated by the British father of modern scientific thought, Isaac Newton: “All forces occur in pairs such that if one object exerts a force on another object, then the second object exerts an equal and opposite reaction force on the first,” expecting the British actions in Iraq to contradict the Newtonian laws and have no repercussions within the British mainland whatsoever. Their historical amnesia has also overlooked the disastrous story of Libya, from which the parents of the attacker of the Manchester massacre came, which has been another product of British unmatched skill, with its American partner, in creating chaos everywhere in the Middle East without even contemplating any exit plan to help the people who are affected by this chaos out of its spiralling degradation, and to support them in ascending to any sort of transitional, stable society, one which is not a mere failed state.
Sadly, there are many other pressing questions upon which I do not anticipate the conformist mainstream media in Britain will touch in the future. However, we will still hope that a possible win for Jeremy Corbyn in the next general election might prepare the grounds for addressing these questions; if not answered fully, we will live to shed tears while witnessing the tragedies of similar future massacres and many other innocent victims from ordinary British people.
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