During the NATO bombardment, news from Libya dominated the front pages and was the first news item on every Western and Arabic television station. There was 24-hour coverage about the Libyan Liberation miracle and the great victory achieved by NATO and the revolutionaries. Nowadays it is very rare to find a Western reporter there and even more rare to read a decent report about Libya and what is really going on there.
BSN Editor Note: In case you were wondering about the recent saber rattling and media hype for attacking Syria with Tomahawk cruise missiles, remember the real reason the west attacked Libya in 2011. The 144 tons of gold belonging to the people of Libya is currently sitting in a bank vault in the city of London – will this ever be returned we ask rhetorically?
The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong. Libya’s 2011 uprising was never peaceful, but instead was armed and violent from the start. Muammar al-Qaddafi did not target civilians or resort to indiscriminate force. Although inspired by humanitarian impulse, NATO’s intervention did not aim mainly to protect civilians, but rather to overthrow Qaddafi’s regime, even at the expense of increasing the harm to Libyans.
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”
Hysterical claims that Qadhafi was on the verge of carrying out a genocide rang out in the Western press. However, these had little basis. Forte quotes Alan J. Kuperman, noting that, “The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured either fully or partially — including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya.” During his 42 year rule, Qadhafi faced numerous coup attempts and armed revolts. Though he typically dealt with the alleged perpetrators in a brutal fashion, at no point did his regime behave in a genocidal manner.
Corporate media coverage of atrocities in Egypt, Libya and Syria has closely matched US-UK government interpretations and priorities.
While the US government has refused to describe what was very obviously a military coup in Egypt on July 3 as a coup, many media have also tended to shy away from the term, referring instead to the ‘ousting’ and ‘removal’ of the elected government.
In reporting atrocities in Libya and Syria, the BBC focuses heavily on the word ‘crime’, but described the mass murder in Egypt on August 14 as a ‘tragedy’. Killing in Syria is routinely described as a ‘massacre’, but in Egypt often as the less pejorative ‘crackdown’.
The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), formulated at the 2005 UN World Summit, is based on the idea that state sovereignty is not a right but a responsibility. Where offending states fail to live up to this responsibility by inflicting genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity on their own people, the international community has a responsibility to act. Economic sanctions and the use of military force can thus be employed as ‘humanitarian intervention’.
By David Edwards Last month, a ComRes poll supported by Media Lens interviewed 2,021 British adults, asking: ‘How many Iraqis, both combatants and civilians, do you think have died as a consequence of the war that began in Iraq in 2003?’ An astonishing 44% of respondents estimated that less than 5,000 Iraqis had died since 2003. 59% believed that fewer […]
Based on Prof. Maximilian Forte latest book, “Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War On Libya and Africa” (Baraka Books, Montreal, 2012), and nearly two years of extensive documentary research, this film places the 2011 US/NATO war in Libya in a more meaningful context than that of a war to “protect civilians” driven by the urgent need to “save Benghazi”. Instead it […]
By agency reporter (ekklesia) Lawyers for the UK Government claimed yesterday (21 May) that it should not be held accountable in British courts for its role in the rendition and torture of Gaddafi opponents in 2004. Responding to a claim brought against the Government by a Libyan victim of a joint UK-US-Libyan ‘rendition’, ministers’ lawyers argued that the case should […]
The thing about authentic, legitimate revolutions these days is that all of their legitimacy comes from external sources and is dropped from the air in explosive 2,000 pound bursts of authenticity. This weekend, marking the second anniversary of the start of protests that would usher in a bloody and prolonged NATO-led coup to overthrow the Libyan Jamahiriya and Muammar Gaddafi, […]
Bomb thrown at Al-Baraka police station destroys what remained of building, causes no casualties by MEO A bomb destroyed a police station in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi early on Thursday but caused no casualties, a security source said, in a second attack targeting the building. “An explosive device was thrown at Al-Baraka police station in Benghazi, destroying what […]
