Why the consent of the manufacturing for war with Iran failed this time | Israeli-Palestine conflict

On June 22, American war planes crossed Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs. The attack was not in response to a provocation; He came to the heels of the illegal Israeli assault that cost 600 Iranians. It was a return to something familiar and well practiced: an empire bombing innocents through orientalist abstraction called “Middle East”. That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two secretaries, told the world that “Iran, the Middle East intimidator, was now to make peace”.

There is something scary in the way the bombs are baptized with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in stability clothes. Calling this peace is not just an improper term; 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 attacked them to plead with their attackers?

During the 12 days that the illegal aggression of Israel against Iran lasted, images of Iranian children drawn from the wreckage remained absent from the first pages of the Western media. In their place, there were long characteristics concerning the Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers. The Western media, commonly the language of erasure, only disseminate the victimization which serves the story of the war.

And it is not only in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months, the inhabitants of Gaza have been hungry and cremated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; The realistic estimates put the number to hundreds of thousands. Each Gaza Hospital has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.

The main human rights groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch has already said that Israel commits a genocide, and yet most Western media do not say this word and add elaborate warnings when someone dares to say live on television. The presenters and publishers would do something other than recognize the endless violence of Israel in an active voice.

Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli army has faced any media censorship, neither criticism nor examination. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet there are no media cries of Israelis used as “human shields”. The Israeli army and government officials are regularly surprised to lie or make genocide affirmationsAnd yet their words are always reported as the truth.

A recent study revealed that on the BBC, Israeli deaths have received 33 times more coverage by death than Palestinian deaths, despite the Palestinians who die at a rate of 34 to 1 compared to the Israelis. Such a bias is no exception, this is the rule for Western media.

Like Palestine, Iran is described in a carefully chosen language. Iran is never conceived 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 as an insult in each report. This helps to signal silently that the Muslim resistance to Western domination should be extinguished.

Iran does not have nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do it. And yet, only Iran is considered an existential threat to the world order. Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to give in. He survived coups, sanctions, assassinations and sabotage. He survived each attempt at hunger, to force or isolate him in submission. It is a state that, despite the violence that has launched it, has not yet been broken.

And therefore the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes essential. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American titles have whispered that Iran is only on the week of the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialize.

But fear, even when it is not founded, is useful. If you can keep people who are afraid, you can keep them silent. Say “nuclear threat” quite often, and no one will think of asking questions about children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.

This is the Modus Operandi of the Western media: media architecture not built to shed light on the truth, but to make the permission of violence, dress the aggression of the state in technical language and animated graphs, to anesthetize the public with euphemisms.

Time Magazine does not write on the crushed bones of innocent under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, he writes on “The New Middle East” with a blanket Surprisingly similar to the one he used to propagate the change of diet in Iraq 22 years ago.

But it was not in 2003. After decades of war and a live genocide, most Americans no longer accept old slogans and distortions. When Israel has attacked Iran, a survey showed that only 16% of American respondents supported the United States to join the war. After Trump ordered air strikes, another survey confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36% of respondents supported this decision, and only 32% supported the continuation of the bombardment

The failure to manufacture war consent with Iran reveals a deep change in American consciousness. The Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq who have left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis and Iraqis dead And a whole region in flames. They remember the lies on the weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of dead American soldiers and the tens of thousands of people. They remember the humiliating retirement of Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the endless bloody tangle in Iraq.

At home, Americans are told that there is no money for housing, health care or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for additional militarization. More than 700,000 Americans are homelessmore than 40 million live under the official poverty And more than 27 million have not health insurance. And yet, the US government is maintaining the highest defense budget by far in the world.

The Americans know the precariousness they face the house, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact that American imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months, they have watched a genocide broadcast sponsored by the United States.

They have seen countless times on their phones, bloody Palestinian children drawn from the rubble while the traditional media insist, it is a self -Israeli defense. The old alchemy of dehumanizing victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. Digital age has broken the monopoly on the story that once made abstract and necessary distant wars. The Americans are now refusing more and more to be moved by the familiar war drum.

The growing fractures of public consent did not go unnoticed in Washington. Trump, still the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war. And therefore, on June 24, he went to social networks to announce“The ceasefire is in force,” telling Israel to “do not drop these bombs”, after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.

Trump, like so many people in the United States and Israeli political elites, wants to be called a peacemaker while putting war. For leaders like him, peace has meant something quite different: unhindered freedom to commit a genocide and other atrocities while the world looks.

But they failed to make our consent. We know what peace is, and he is not dressed in war. He did not fall from the sky. Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And it doesn’t matter how many times they strike, people remain, from Palestine to Iran – uninterrupted, unspoken and little disposed to kneel in terror.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.