Television in Iraq

Some Iraq network TV logos [1]

Some Iraq network TV logos

2,519 words

It is instructive to look at what Jewish-Leftist forces do when they overthrow nations. In particular, how do they use the media, especially television, in conquered countries to mold elites and masses to their will?

The American invasion and occupation of Iraq furnishes an example. 

In 2012 Iraq’s population was 27.5 million, roughly equal to Texas’s 26.1 million, but less than California’s 38 million. Its 437,072 sq. km. size makes it bigger than Texas but smaller than Alaska, 0.8 x the area of France or 1.2 x the area of Germany.

Economically and socially, Iraq in 2003 was a Third World country weakened by 8 years of war with Iran in the 1980s, the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, and years of Jewish and “Western” economic, political, and intelligence agency sabotage, subversion, assassinations, and infiltration.

Iraq map [2]

The US invaded the country on March 20, 2003. Having been meticulously isolated beforehand, Iraq had no allies.

Pretexts for the invasion included charges that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, harbored or supported al-Qaeda, possessed “weapons of mass destruction” (a propaganda term for nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons possessed by the aggressors and Israel), abused “human rights,” or that the invaders sought to impose “democracy [3].”

None of this was true. Quite simply, Jews wanted Iraq destroyed, so the US and the rest of the world destroyed it.

Rule #1: Destroy What They Have

Shutting down Iraq’s television system was a top priority of the invasion forces.

In the 1990 Persian Gulf War the US destroyed Iraq’s main telecommunications building on the second day of the attack.

In 2003 the US Air Force struck Iraqi television with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device, or “E-Bomb,” to destroy what the US called Saddam Hussein’s “propaganda machine.” (See here [4] for a sketchy report about the use of the highly secret weapon, the existence of which the Pentagon refused even to acknowledge. Note that the 2009 date on the CBS site makes no sense; the correct date of the report is March 25, 2003. To verify this, see footnote 296 of a 2010 law review article, “Requirement of Military Necessity in International Humanitarian Law and International Criminal Law [5].”)

“Television,” according to a contemporaneous ABC News report [6], “is one of the biggest propaganda tools Saddam Hussein has as he completely controls the airwaves.” ABC, however, omitted any mention of the EMP device.

Hussein called for mass uprisings against the invaders. In a televised broadcast he said to the Iraqi people:

The enemy has violated your lands and now they are violating your tribes and families. If you cause them any damage, no matter how small, they will flee. Don’t wait for our orders. Just fight them. Every one of you is a military leader. Fight them in small groups, hit their frontlines and their rear units so the whole advance will stop. And when it stops, attack them. If they deploy [prepare to fight], leave them alone, don’t fight them, but if they rest somewhere, attack.

To illustrate academia’s hand in all this, the 2003 ABC report quoted Sarah Sewall, then program director (later Director) of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy (“human rights”—I like that), part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “Unless you cut off Saddam’s ability to portray an image of being in control, you have given him a huge military advantage,” she said.

Savvy readers will not be surprised at the Carr Center’s upscale digs [7].

Sewall, who is currently a Lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a member of the US Defense Policy Board, has longstanding ties to senior levels of the Democratic Party, the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and the American military. She is married to Massachusetts State Representative Tom Conroy (D.), presumably Irish American, by whom she has four children.

“Sarah Sewall.” Such a New England-y, WASP-sounding name. So why are her looks a little off [8]? Perhaps her Old Testament first name is a better guide to her identity than her last name.

If the good guys of the world ever gain any traction again, it will behoove them to think seriously about destroying the bad guys’ broadcasting facilities and establishing an alternative broadcast infrastructure. Of course, they will need the personnel, expertise, and resources required to do so, just as they will need the personnel, expertise, and resources required to set up a government and run a country.

Rule #2: Give Them What You Want Them to Have

Before the invasion, the Pentagon’s office of psychological operations and its Zionist Office of Special Plans division run by Jews Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith drafted a white paper outlining the establishment of a “Rapid Reaction Media Team [9]” to serve as a bridge between Iraq’s former state-run media and what was to become the Occupation’s Iraqi Media Network (IMN).

As envisioned, the rapid reaction media team would create narratives designed to make Iraqis feel like they were North Koreans who turned off state television one night and in the morning turned on “the rich fare of South Korean TV.”

The US government would substitute new media to serve “as a model for free [sic] media in the Arab world,” including regulations against “hate media.”

“Hand-picked” Iraqis would provide “the face” for the media campaign. Plans for “Entertainment and News Magazine programming” ranked “Hollywood” above news shows in conveying US policy, though both would be used.

Important themes of the new media would include the “crimes” of the old regime, “Saddam’s palaces and opulence,” and “a bright new day.”

“Anti-terrorism” messages have also been important. Online you can watch 5 US-made commercials [10] [4:30 mins., Arabic only] broadcast on Iraqi television that, in terms of style and psychology, look much like what we see every day: the brave, suffering “people” united against malign insurgents, all of whom are “terrorists.”

There is no reason to believe that Iraqi audiences don’t respond to controlled news, entertainment, and propaganda the same way other audiences worldwide do.

Though U.S. policy formally opposed Iraq’s geographical disintegration, the media would in fact emphasize internal divisions between Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurds.

An academic named Eric Davis [11], director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, is involved in reshaping Iraqi society through management of government, media, and academia there.

Part of his work focuses on rewriting Iraqi history to furnish a totalitarian, globalist narrative designed to fit Iraqi elites and masses. I don’t know whether Davis is Jewish (he doesn’t look it), part-Jewish, or married to a Jew, but he speaks perfect Newspeak.

Davis’s work is funded by the United States Institute of Peace (“Institute of Peace,” hah), a furtive federal neoconservative/neoliberal agency housed near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC in an aesthetically ugly structure designed by Moshe Safdie, an Israeli architect in Canada who designed Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum.

The “Institute of Peace” has been heavily involved in the Jewish-Allied conquest and subjugation of the Middle East.

In a publication of the Carnegie Council [12] (President: Joel H. Rosenthal)—note the network of interlocking Establishment institutions—summarizing Davis’s federally-funded Iraq work, we read:

Iraq’s mass media and appropriate government ministries can be used in the effort to disseminate a better societal understanding of [pre-Ba’athist 1921–1963] developments. Because historical memory needs to be syncretic, they can choose forms of memory that resonate with the populace’s needs. This can be done, for example, through television programs, new educational curricula at the secondary school and university levels based not on imported norms but on [selective use of] Iraqi history, and through soliciting opinions from an array of [ideologically compatible] social groups, such as professional, labor and women’s groups, on how best to discuss the past in order to construct fora in which to launch the rebuilding [alteration] of Iraqi civil society. (Emphases added.)

Following the conquest, the US-Jewish network imposed a de-Ba’athification [13] policy modeled partly after the de-Nazification of Germany after WWII and what was done to white South Africa after its takeover.

Since such policies are quite intentional, detailed examination of these massive, top-down political and cultural transformations should furnish a better understanding of exactly how Jews and Leftists control whites and others, as well as provide valuable insights into how positive revolutionary change might occur.

Since entire societies have deliberately been turned, politically, ideologically, and morally in very short periods of time in directions diametrically opposite to what they had been, the same process should work in reverse.

Another shadowy group with its finger in the Iraqi pie is the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs chaired by former Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright (D.).

The NDI was created by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy and is affiliated with the Democratic Party, the Socialist International, the Liberal International, and the Centrist Democrat International (Christian Democrats). Among its projects is a “Diversity in Iraq [14]” TV program [30 mins.].

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) led by American proconsul L. Paul Bremer quickly developed a national FM-radio and TV channel allotment plan for all major Iraqi cities and towns. It began issuing radio and TV licenses to approved broadcasters in June 2003.

The Occupation forces also funded the Iraq Media Network, a government television outfit. The IMN evolved into today’s state-owned Al Iraqiya television network [15], one of the most-watched in Iraq together with privately-held Al-Sharqiya TV, mentioned below. The Al-Baghdadia [16] network is also popular.

During the 9-year Occupation from 2003–2011, several state-run and nominally “private” TV networks were established, providing Iraqis with the kind of “57 channels with nothing on” entertainment Westerners are used to.

TV's dominance in urban Iraq (7-city survey). Note a universal pattern in modern states: "discussions," 1% [17]

TV’s dominance in urban Iraq (7-city survey). Note a universal pattern in modern states: “discussions,” 1%

Entertainment Programming

According to the New York Times’ enthusiastic Baghdad bureau chief, There Is Someone [18]‘s creators “wanted to see how far they could push the limits of what is acceptable on television here. So they settled on sex.” Five or six men sit in front of a studio audience and joke about “sexual satisfaction, adultery, drunkenness and women’s menstrual cycles.”

One of the show’s producers “wore black wraparound sunglasses and a gold chain” and greeted the Times‘ representative with “an elaborate handshake in the style used by rappers.”

The show, the Times enthused, is “subversive,” “challenges orthodoxies, social ideas, and traditions,” “pushes boundaries,” and introduces “Western-style notions of free speech.”

It has “become a national sensation. Bootleg DVDs of previous episodes are brisk sellers in the city’s markets.”

There Is Someone is broadcast over the Al Sumaria [19] television network established in 2004 by a Lebanese businessman.

Salam Shabab [20] recruits 14 to 18-year-olds (much of Iraq’s population is under age 35 [21]—click on “Iraq” for 2010 to see a graph of its population pyramid) from different races, religions and geographical backgrounds, most of whom have not previously interacted with people from different regions or left their hometowns, to compete in teams. The objective is to “promote diversity” in viewers’ minds.

Al-Sharqiya [22], “The Eastern One,” a private satellite TV network owned by Iraqi Saad al-Bazzaz, ranks with government-run Al Iraqiya (see above) and Saudi-owned news channel Al-Arabiya  as the nation’s most popular.

Since its founding in 2004, Al-Sharqiya has offered a lineup laden with reality TV shows.

Labor and Materials (a local version of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) stars a home improvement crew that surprises a family each week by rebuilding its war-damaged home.

On Ration Card, $1,000 is given to a lucky family whose ration card number is drawn from a bin.

Blessed Wedding pays $6,000 of a poor couple’s wedding expenses in exchange for letting TV cameras film them from engagement to married life.

The Gentlemen profiles Iraqis who became wealthy from the booming Occupation economy.

Ramadan’s Riches sponsors needy children and families.

Your Meal On Us offers needy Iraqis food, a gift of $2,000, electrical appliances, and a luxury edition of the Koran.

On Free Cash (Al Rasheed TV) people are asked simple questions and receive the equivalent of $30 for each correct answer.

Al-Hawasin is a crime show about gangs and thieves.

Familiar formula: pretty, Westernized girls.  Arab Iraqi TV Presenter Rosil Al Azawi. [23]

Familiar formula: pretty, Westernized girls. Arab Iraqi TV Presenter Rosil Al Azawi.

A popular variety show is Caricateera (Caricatures), which “coincidentally” stars three Sunni Muslims, three Shiites, and one Kurd.

One year after the invasion, USA Today was as thrilled by Caricateera as the New York Times is with There Is Someone. The paper gushed, “It’s must-see TV for millions of Iraqis every Friday. Thousands more catch the show on bootleg videodiscs, which sell for less than $1.”

In one scene, a “6-foot-tall drag queen is trying to kiss a 4-foot-tall man [a dwarf]. Their antics are interrupted when they are caught by a woman who claims to be the drag queen’s mother.”

In another skit parodying telenovelas [24], Latin American soap operas that are popular in the Middle East, the drag queen, now wearing a dress with balled-up newspapers for breasts, plays a young woman in love with the dwarf’s character.

Al-Sharqiya owner Al-Bazzaz was formerly head of radio and television under Saddam Hussein until defecting in 1992. His current network was launched in March 2004. Al-Bazzaz is today a full-fledged media mogul, the so-called “Rupert Murdoch of Iraq.”

Al-Sharqiya may be a Zionist enterprise operated by an Iraqi front man. Its wealthy, high-status owner has long been associated with neoconservative Jews such as Daniel Pipes [25] (1995 interview) and Michael Rubin [26], and was issued his broadcast license by Occupation authorities.

Iraqis receive Establishment satellite broadcasts from outside Iraq as well. I read that possession of satellite dishes was forbidden under the Ba’athist regime—presumably to forestall Zionist/Hollywood undermining of the nation. But I do not know whether it is true.

Resistance

Some broadcasters tried to resist, but were quickly quelled.

Notable in this regard was Al-Zawraa TV, an Iraqi satellite television channel known for airing video footage of insurgent attacks against US-led coalition forces.

The network featured the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF)-produced show Hidden Camera Jihad [27], a video compilation of insurgents attacking US forces with slapstick-style soundtrack and video effects.

The station was owned by Mish’an al-Juburi, leader of the Sunni Arab Front for Reconciliation and Liberation, who was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in October 2006 after being accused of embezzlement.

He started his Al-Zawraa network the following month, but was immediately blocked from satellites. He switched to others, but they too dropped him. His network offices in Iraq were closed by Occupation forces, so he moved to Syria, but ultimately his broadcasts were jammed completely. The network lasted 7 or 8 months before disappearing in July 2007.

Unimpeded access to satellite television is probably a necessity for successful resistance movements today, so the mechanisms by which authorities or ethnic groups legally and illegally block dissident satellite broadcasts needs to be thoroughly understood. If you legally gain access, the odds are great that illegitimate means will be employed against you, as in every other venue.

Even in the absence of overt oppression, I suspect that Al-Zawraa’s combination of religious programming, encouragement of Jihad, and videos depicting violent action against US troops would have fallen flat in competition with talk shows featuring jokes about women’s menstrual cycles and comedy sketches in which drag queens smooch male dwarves.

“Quality” Hollywood-style entertainment wins out every time.

Ask any red-blooded American.