Israel has launched a round of airstrikes on Iran which the western news media are falling all over themselves to falsely frame as “retaliatory” strikes against an unprovoked missile attack by Iran.
As always, history begins the moment Israel is attacked, and all events leading up to that attack vanish from the official record as the imperial propaganda services churn out their headlines.
“Israel Launches Airstrikes Against Iran in Retaliatory Attack,” reads a headline from The New York Times, subtitled “Israel had promised strikes after Iran fired several waves of ballistic missiles at Israel earlier this month.”
“Israel has begun its retaliatory strikes on Iran, source says,” reads a headline from CNN.
“Israel begins retaliatory strikes against Iran following missile barrage targeting Israelis,” reads a headline from Fox News.
“Israel launches retaliatory attack against Iran,” reads a headline from Axios.
“Live updates: Israel says it has launched retaliatory attacks in Iran,” reads a headline from NBC News.
“Israel fires retaliatory strikes against Tehran over ballistic missile barrage,” reads a headline in The New York Post.
“Israel Launches Strikes Against Iran In Response To Ballistic Missile Attacks,” reads a headline from Forbes.
What the imperial propaganda services are omitting from their headlines is the fact that Iran’s ballistic missile strikes on Israel earlier this month were themselves a retaliatory attack against multiple Israeli assassination strikes. Israel had launched an attack on Iranian soil when it assassinated the leader of Hamas’ political wing Ismail Haniyeh in July, and then killed an Iranian military official in an assassination strike in Beirut.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released a statement at the time making it clear that the missile strikes were in response to the assassinations of Haniyeh and IRGC commander Abbas Nilforoushan, as well as Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah.
This is all publicly available information. There is no nation on earth that would accept a foreign nation openly assassinating its military officials and conducting assassination strikes on its soil. Any nation would consider such aggressions an act of war, including — and especially — the United States.
The western media are portraying Israel as the innocent victim who was attacked out of nowhere by Muslim barbarians because the western media are propaganda services for the western empire. Their job is to frame the US and its allies as virtuous freedom fighters defending their people against unprovoked attacks by evil villains, in order to manufacture consent for the murderous and tyrannical agendas of the US power alliance.
The PR spin of these shameful press institutions is so indistinguishable from state propaganda that their messaging mirrors perfectly the position of the US government, who said in a statement following the Israeli airstrikes that they were an act of “self-defense” in retaliation for an Iranian attack.
“We understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense and in response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel on October 1,” said White House National Security Council spokesperson Sean Savett.
We still don’t know whether this latest round of violence will spiral into the horrifying new war we’ve all been fearing as the worst-case nightmare scenario in the fallout from Israel’s murderous behavior this past year. While Axios and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid report that the US expects Iran to retaliate, as of this writing it appears that the fighting could stop here as long as Israel doesn’t keep attacking.
“Both Iranian media, unofficial accounts, and those of aligned militias are downplaying the attacks,” the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi said on Twitter, adding the significant caveat:
HOWEVER, only the first phase of the attack has been completed. Whether the effort to downplay the strikes can survive the night and several phases of attacks, remains to be seen.
We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.