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Telegraph
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
David Lammy is unfit to be Britain's Foreign Secretary
As if Israel was not facing enough challenges, at the very moment it finds itself facing an existential war on seven fronts, it is cursed with a British Foreign Secretary of the calibre of David Lammy. It is like some kind of divine comedy. This morning, the MP for Tottenham took to the airways to talk tough about the Jewish state, threatening sanctions on the 'appalling' regime in Jerusalem as it strives to defend Western freedoms against the forces of jihad. It was most revealing, but not in the way the Foreign Secretary appeared to think. Lammy's rhetoric exposed not the supposed shortcomings of Israel but his own gullibility to Hamas propaganda, ignorance of the Middle East and inadequacy for high office. Yesterday, a video emerged apparently showing Hamas thugs marching half-naked Gazan civilians who had received Israeli-American aid to an unknown destination after rounding them up for punishment. This took its place among countless other videos of Hamas killing, torturing and intimidating its own people as it continues to use them as pawns in its attempt to exterminate the Jews by way of Western media. Yesterday, another short clip showed a gathering of brave Gazans risking their necks to rally against their jihadi overlords. Shamefully, these courageous souls showed more opposition to Hamas than displayed by Britain's Foreign Secretary. The truth is as obvious as it is widely overlooked. Israel is a democracy that only wants its hostages home and those threatening its people defeated, then to be left alone; Hamas wants to destroy the Jews, and is willing to bring the Strip down around their ears in the process. We know that the Israeli-American aid efforts are designed to circumvent the United Nations; the UN agency UNRWA has been reported as working hand-in-glove with the jihadis. We also know that this starves Hamas of the source of its income, bringing its defeat much closer. That is why the terrorists and their media partners have been creating as much propaganda as they can to convince the world that Israel is – for some reason – both going to the trouble of providing aid to Gaza and then massacring anybody who comes to claim it, blackening their international reputation in the process. Bit of a waste of effort, no? The Jews are known for many things, but not normally for their stupidity. It is quite obvious that this war comprises a bunch of depraved jihadis who herd their own people to death for propaganda, against a democracy fighting a war it did not start while confronted with human shields. Should Israel just give up? What then? Yet Lammy and the rest of this atrocious Government has been entirely taken in by the disinformation. When's the last time you heard our Foreign Secretary criticising Hamas or their enablers in the West? UNRWA employees reportedly took part in the atrocities of October 7. At least 1,200 of them, according to Israeli intelligence, are card-carrying members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Has the Foreign Secretary ever made mention of that? His interview with BBC Breakfast this morning was a case in point. All the usual slurs were present. In an exhibition of preening self-fashioning, he stated that he was 'sickened' and 'appalled' by Israel. Jerusalem's actions were 'grotesque', he said, as Lammy had seen 'innocent children holding out their hand for food… shot and killed in the way that we have seen in the last few days'. The Foreign Secretary might as well have delivered a speech entitled 'your foreign policy is in the hands of a man who is fool enough to believe Hamas propaganda'. Lammy declared that if Israel failed to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, Britain would impose further sanctions upon it. Does Lammy really think that it is purely in Israel's gift to reach a ceasefire? Doesn't it take two to fight a war? Again and again, negotiations in Qatar have been derailed by Hamas, which strings the talks along only to scuttle them at the last minute. Why? Because it understands that if it released the hostages, it would soon be out of power. For Israel to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza now, with its citizens still in the catacombs and the jihadis still clutching the levers of power, would only store up further atrocities, war and unrest in the future. Israel has tried unilateral withdrawal in the past. In 2005, it pulled all Israelis out of Gaza, handing over the keys to the Palestinians. The result? A terror state in which every aspect of governance was geared purely towards the deaths of the Jews. Lammy's short-sightedness is beyond belief. But it is not just Israel that the Foreign Secretary is betraying. It is the West as a whole, which accelerates towards its final decline with every jihadi victory.
Hans India
13-07-2025
- Politics
- Hans India
Strategic strike by Ajit Doval
Kudos to Ajit Doval, National Security Advisor for delevering an impressive & illuminating speech at the Convocation ceremony of IIT, Chennai, wherein, he shot two birds at one go, by exposing the blatant lies of the Pakistani Military/ Civil establishments who constantly boasted by stating that they downed Raffles and destroyed Indian Airbases during Operation- Sindoor. His speech also hit the nail on the heads of Western Media particularly the New york Times which spread misinformation about India's losses of its Air assets without showing any visual proof to buttress their claims, till date. His appeal to the IITians to focus on emerging fields like Artificial intelligence and Quantum computing is praiseworthy. R J Janardhana Rao, Hyderabad
Al Jazeera
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Why manufacturing consent for war with Iran failed this time
On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs. The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of 600 Iranians. This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called 'the Middle East'. That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice president and two secretaries, told the world 'Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace'. There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion. But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers? In the 12 days that Israel's illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers. Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative. And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands. Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed. Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV. Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel's unending violence in an active voice. Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as 'human shields'. Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as the truth. A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media. Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat —not a people, but a problem. The word 'Islamic' is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished. Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order. Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission. It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken. And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just 'weeks away' from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise. But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say 'nuclear threat' often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of 'keeping the world safe'. This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms. Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about 'The New Middle East' with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago. But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war. After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed. They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq. At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance. And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world. Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live. They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli self-defence. The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat. The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war. And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, 'the ceasefire is in effect', telling Israel to 'DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,' after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran. Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on. But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky. Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Argaam
24-06-2025
- Business
- Argaam
Understanding ‘Neo-Orientalist' Narratives in Western Media
This is just one example of how our region has been portrayed in countless of articles in Western media, entrenching stereotypical and ignorant (perhaps on purpose) views of our region. Let's take another one. 'Saudi Arabia needs to bring in foreign capital to continue spending." Such a statement, again in a recent article published by a prominent Western media outlet that helps shape the Western investors' perception of the world not just our region, encourages critical thinking on how seemingly straightforward economic statements in a supposedly 'impartial' journalistic outlet may carry subtle ideological and politically-motivated meanings. These two portrayals of Saudi economy and the Arabian Gulf reflect a systematic and common narrative found in Western discourse regarding, which I refer to in this article as 'neo-orientalism.' This concept builds upon Edward Said's seminal theory of Orientalism, which critiques how Western representations have historically constructed and perpetuated stereotypical and often reductive images of the 'Orient' to serve certain interests in the West. By largely ignoring in their 'analytical' pieces strong and factual economic indicators like the expansion in Saudi non-oil sectors over the past years, especially manufacturing, mining and renewable energy, these narratives perpetuate outdated assumptions that fail to reflect the selfdependent modernity in Saudi Arabia and its evolving economy. This selective reporting thus reveals a tendency to understate or sideline substantive economic achievements that do not fit their preconceived frames. Factual data speaks louder than words. The Saudi real GDP growth from non-oil activities reached 3.9% in 2024, driven by continued investment expansion in the non-oil sectors. These sectors contributed last year with 51% to Saudi Arabia's economy, marking a literally historic achievement in the Kingdom's e_orts to develop the non-oil sector since the launch of Vision 2030 in 2016. Non-oil GDP remained resilient at 4.2% y/y growth in Q1 this year. Non-oil activities expanding robustly by 4.3%, while non-oil exports surged 13.4% y/y. In March, manufacturing output surged by 5.1% y/y. This pattern highlights both the sector's growing importance to non-oil GDP. Oil income accounted for just 56% of total government revenues in Q1 2025 (before the eruption of large-scale military confrontation between Israel and Iran on June 12), down from 62% a year earlier. An objective analysis of these data suggests that such genuine economic progress in the kingdom challenges the prevalent neo-orientalist discourse often found in some Western media narratives. Neo-orientalism tends to emphasize dependency, dysfunction and mismanagement in our region while minimizing or overlooking positive developments. With mineral reserves now estimated at SR9.37 trillion ($2.5 trillion), a 90 percent increase since 2016 due to new discoveries of rare earth elements and other valuable resources, Saudi Arabia exhibits clear potential to expand beyond oil dependence. Additionally, the construction of the world's largest single-site solar power plant in the kingdom, anticipated to generate 2,060 megawatts by 2025, signifies a strategic commitment to renewable energy and the strategic planning to become a hub of electricity exporter to the region and Europe. The proactive push to integrate global tech companies (like the recent Chinese Lenovo) into local manufacturing further reflects a forward-looking economic vision. I argue that Western media coverage in their 'analysis' and 'in-depth reporting' is rooted in a neoorientalist framework, which overlook these multifaceted advances, while instead emphasizing government budget deficit related to declining oil revenues. Such emphasis on fiscal challenges, without equal attention to diversification e_orts and resource development, limits the depth of economic analysis and reflect political motivations in shaping a simplified narrative to their readers. A more comprehensive perspective would consider both the challenges and the substantive initiatives underway, thus providing a balanced understanding of our region. Today, old Orientalism has been dressed up and made to look new, like a smart business suit hiding the same old stereotypes and oversimplification.
Time of India
04-06-2025
- General
- Time of India
'Foreign Media's Skewed...': Hindu American Org Lauds India's Pahalgam Delegations I Suhag Shukla
/ Jun 04, 2025, 10:31AM IST Despite firm support from Western governments following the Kashmir massacre, Western media coverage is drawing criticism for its language. Many outlets are referring to the perpetrators as "gunmen" or "militants" rather than acknowledging the act as terrorism. Watch TOI Podacast as Hindu American foundation's Suhag Shukla lauds India for owning the narrative. Watch#KashmirAttack #PalkiSharma #WesternMedia #Terrorism #IndiaUnderAttack #MediaBias #PakistanTerror
