As a teacher, I've spent an enormous amount of time over the past few days dealing with disinformation, prejudice, and the media frenzy over the attacks. Most of my students are young, conservative, and don't really have a clear idea about America's involvement in Middle Eastern politics. What they do know is that a group of Palestinians was seen celebrating the bombing. This image has become particularly hard to deal with, even when I inform them that most Palestinians deplored the attack, and that, even if they did view the U.S. as an enemy, they would never have wanted this sort of action to occur. As a former member of the video industry, the images really bother me, because of the repetition of shots, and the use of angles to indicate that a smaller crowd was a mass. These are all old techniques to make a few people into a crowd, and a crowd into a mass event. The media's attitude in all of this really sickens me, since they seem to have created catch phrases and slogans almost instantly (America's New War, indeed -- go to h**l, CNN), along with a nifty radar type graphic background with matching music and blips. The American mainstream media has always had a problem dealing with foreign policies that don't agree with ours, especially when it comes to the Middle East, where an enormous amount of history has to be discussed in order to put the events into context. All of this seems to have been completely ignored in the process of creating a mindset that can lead to the justification of the murder of innocents in the pursuit of international justice.
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