Haj Soleimani’s Assassination Misreported in The Western Media

Trump’s worst lies given a pass
Empowering Weak & Oppressed

Kevin Barrett

Jumada' al-Akhirah 07, 1441 2020-02-01

News & Analysis

by Kevin Barrett (News & Analysis, Crescent International Vol. 48, No. 12, Jumada' al-Akhirah, 1441)

The Western mainstream media (MSM) regularly exposes at least some of the lies of the narcissistic sociopath in the White House, Donald J. Trump. On December 10, 2019, the Washington Post published the eye-opening headline, “President Trump has made 15,413 false or misleading claims over 1,055 days.” Fifteen thousand lies in a thousand days! In other words, since taking office, Trump has been telling an average of one lie every single waking hour. And those are just the ones the Post has discovered and seen fit to report. If all of Trump’s private and unreported lies were known and added to the list, the expression “he lies like he breathes” might turn out to be literally as well as figuratively true. One could vainly comb the annals of US and world history in search of a comparable paragon of mendacity.

Yet though mainstream reporters and editors know that not only Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, but the US military as well, are a pack of pathological liars, MSM coverage of the murder of General Qassem Soleimani has largely echoed the official lies. On December 31 CNN published “A month-by-month look at Donald Trump’s top lies of 2019” featuring the opening sentence, “A defining feature of the Donald Trump presidency is the bombardment of lies — Trump’s unceasing campaign to convince people of things that aren’t true.” Five days later, CNN reported Soleimani’s murder without even questioning Trump’s absurd excuses for his shameless, undisguised war crime. The CNN report opened:

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN): US President Donald Trump has said that he ordered a precision strike to “terminate” a top Iranian commander who was plotting “imminent and sinister attacks” on Americans, adding that the decision was one of deterrence rather than aggression. “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war,” Trump said in a statement from his Mar-a-Lago resort on January 3, the same day a US drone strike on a Baghdad airport killed Qassem Soleimani. Later, while at a Miami church for an Evangelicals for Trump event, the President said, “He was planning a very major attack and we got him.”

Nowhere in the CNN report was doubt cast on pathological liar Trump’s obviously dubious claim that Gen. Soleimani was “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on Americans,” specifically “a very major attack.” In the ensuing days, when Trump all but admitted that these claims were lies, the media downplayed Trump’s criminal mendacity. The result was that ordinary people in the MSM’s audience were left with the strong first impression that had been drilled into their shocked and impressionable brains by the initial reporting: Trump had killed Soleimani to save American lives.

Trump’s claim that the premeditated murder of Iran’s top military commander and most popular public figure represented “deterrence rather than aggression” was self-evidently false. Murdering another country’s top military commander is, by definition, an act of aggression — the supreme war crime under international law as established by the Nuremburg Tribunals, a crime punishable by death. Yet rather than calling for his execution, the media uncritically reported Trump’s nonsensical statement. In the ensuing weeks, absurd claims that impending assassinations of other nations’ leaders would represent “deterrence rather than aggression” continued to be vomited up by the White House and the Pentagon, and reported with mindless credulity by the Western MSM.

Reuters, the news service most closely associated with the Rothschild banking family, helped Trump and Pompeo walk back their initial big lie that they murdered Gen. Soleimani to prevent a massive and imminent attack on Americans. In a January 13 article “Pompeo says Soleimani killing part of new strategy to deter US foes” Reuters reported, with a straight face, Pompeo’s insane threat to murder the top leaders of Russia and China to “restore deterrence.” The article begins, “US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday said Qassem Soleimani was killed as part of a broader strategy of deterring challenges by US foes that also applies to China and Russia, further diluting the assertion that the top Iranian general was struck because he was plotting imminent attacks on US targets.”

The Reuters story made it clear that Trump had lied about the supposed threat posed by Gen. Soleimani, “On Sunday [January 12], Defense Secretary Mark Esper said he had seen no intelligence forewarning of imminent attacks on embassies. Trump on Monday added new fuel to the controversy by saying ‘it really doesn’t matter’ whether Soleimani posed an imminent threat.” Reuters cited Pompeo’s claim that the murder of Gen. Soleimani was part of a “new strategy of deterrence” that would be applied across the board: Russia, China, and other nations can expect to be “deterred” from doing anything Trump and Pompeo don’t like by watching their top leaders get blown to bits by American drones.

The Reuters story straightforwardly reports Pompeo’s drooling lunacy as if it were normal and rational. Nowhere in the story is there any suggestion that other nations, including those possessing thousands of nuclear weapons, might object to having their most popular leaders blown to bits; nor is there any suggestion that such actions have taken the United States far beyond mere war crimes, into the realm of sheer madness.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister, ‘Adil ‘Abd al-Mahdi announced on 11-29-19 that he would submit his resignation to parliament in the wake of increasing violence across the country. What he did not announce until after the Soleimani assassination, in a speech to the parliament, is that the Trump regime had been threatening to un-leash protests like the country had never seen if its officials would not turn over half of the oil revenues to the US and reject a deal with the Chinese to rebuild infrastructure. When ‘Abd al-Mahdi rebuffed all US attempts at intimidation and attempted to publicize the threats coming from Washington, Trump threatened to kill him and his minister of defense. The text of this speech has never been reported in the corporate Zionist mainstream media.

So what was Gen. Soleimani “deterred” from doing? Negotiating peace! Iraqi Prime Minister ‘Abd al-Mahdi explained, “I was supposed to meet Soleimani on the morning of the day he was killed, he came to deliver me a message from Iran responding to the message we delivered from Saudi to Iran.” As Max Blumenthal reported, “Soleimani had arrived in Baghdad not to plan attacks on American targets, but to coordinate de-escalation with Saudi Arabia. Indeed, he was killed while on an actual peace mission that could have created political distance between the Gulf monarchy and members of the US-led anti-Iran axis like Israel.”

Naturally the MSM tried to downplay ‘Abd al-Mahdi’s revelations. Fox News, ignoring Trump and Pompeo’s history of lies, reported their denials as if they were credible, “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scoffed Tuesday [January 14] at a suggestion that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was on a diplomatic mission to Baghdad when a US drone strike killed him, insisting that the story is ‘fundamentally false’ and ‘propaganda.’ …The notion that Soleimani was on some sort of peace mission was first floated by Iraqi Prime Minister ‘Adil ‘Abd al-Mahdi…”

Even supposedly liberal, anti-Trump, pro-Democrat MSM outlets heaped vile slander on the martyred Gen. Soleimani. On January 2 (Washington time when it was already early morning January 3), just minutes or hours after the murder, CNBC rolled out a propaganda piece that was probably pre-prepared by some Pentagon flack before the assassination, headlined “America just took out a man many consider the world’s No. 1 bad guy.” The slanderous author, a certain Jack Novak, emitted an overflowing sewer of verbal diarrhea featuring such bizarre claims as “the Quds commander was hated by ordinary Iranians.” In fact, even Western sources admit that Gen. Soleimani polled over 80% popularity in Iran and was not only that nation’s most popular public figure, but one of the most popular men in the entire region, beloved even by many of those who did not share his agenda.

Even the radically anti-Trump “left” felt obliged to frame their pathetic little timid words of dissent with such disclaimers as “Gen. Soleimani was undoubtedly a bad guy, but…” Either these controlled opposition voices lacked the time and resources to research the matter and learn that Gen. Soleimani was almost universally admired by those who knew anything about him, including his enemies; or they felt obliged to echo the mindless propaganda of the corporate-owned-and-operated MSM in order to avoid being deplatformed and silenced.

Shortly after the murder of Gen. Soleimani, when Trump tweeted threats to bomb Iranian heritage and cultural sites, no Western media outlet frankly reported the truth: that Trump had clearly committed a war crime. Twitter did not even ban Trump. But Facebook, owned by Netanyahu’s friend Mark Zuckerberg, banned Babson College professor Asheen Phansey for posting a satirical suggestion, “[The Supreme Leader of Iran] should tweet a list of 52 sites of cultural American heritage that he would bomb… Um… Mall of America? …Kardashian residence?” Babson College then fired Phansey over his satirical joke.

The MSM also went along with Trump’s lie that “no Americans had been injured” in Iran’s January 8 retaliatory rocket attack on US bases in Iraq. Nine days after the attack, Captain Bill Urbain of US Central Command revealed that Trump and the military had been lying, and that at least 11 Americans had been injured and evacuated to hospitals in Germany and Kuwait.

The upshot: ignoring the biggest and most criminal lies of the man they have correctly labeled a narcissistic pathological liar, the “Trump-haters” of the MSM and pseudo-alternative “left” media, like their right-wing counterparts, effectively helped Donald Trump get away with one of the worst war crimes in modern history by failing to honestly and critically report on the murder of Gen. Qassem Soleimani. This abject failure of Western media perfectly illustrates the rotten, decadent emptiness of Western liberal secularism, with its hollow promises of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In fact, virtually the entire Western press is in the hands of billionaire oligarchs, many of them staunchly pro-Israel, and those on their payroll, whether producers, editors, or reporters, know that their job is to propagandize for their masters’ interests, not seek out and report the truth. Apparently, the materialists and atheists who dominate the West don’t mind spending their lives as professional liars, because they do not believe in God, nor do they believe that they will ever be held accountable for their actions.

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