How Atrocity Propaganda Manufactures Consent For War.

The Latest Atrocity Propaganda About Iran Is The Latest In A Long Series Of Atrocity Propaganda Claims Used To Manufacture Consent For War.

In my last article, I raised serious questions about the highly questionable claim from TIME magazine that Iran killed 30,000 protestors in two days, sourced to only one named person, the German-Iranian eye surgeon Amir Parasta, who, as I noted, has served as a lobbyist for U.S. and Israeli intervention in Iran and the U.S./Israeli opposition puppet, Reza Pahlavi.

The fabricated claims about Iran are being pushed in the service of atrocity propaganda, the act of creating fake or overblown claims of atrocities committed by official enemies in order to manufacture consent for war, which always involves committing real atrocities.

The claims about Iran have been far from the first time this tactic was deployed by the U.S. to manufacture consent for war.

The most infamous use of atrocity propaganda was during the first Iraq war, where false claims that Saddam Hussein’s troops were throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait were used to manufacture consent for the war.

As journalist Phillip Knightley reported, the fabricated story was first conceived when “An organisation calling itself Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10m contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill & Knowlton, to campaign for American military intervention to oust Iraq from Kuwait.”

Following this, he noted:

The Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress was meeting in October and Hill & Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell the babies’ story before the congressmen. She did it brilliantly, choking with tears at the right moment, her voice breaking as she struggled to continue. The congressional committee knew her only as “Nayirah” and the television segment of her testimony showed anger and resolution on the faces of the congressmen listening to her. President Bush referred to the story six times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam’s regime.

In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the incubator babies atrocity and the final margin in favour of war was just five votes.

But it later turned out that, “The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States”.

Similarly, atrocity propaganda was used to justify the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011 to oust Muammar Gaddafi.

The most outlandish claim used to justify the regime change bombing was the fabricated claim that Gaddafi was handing out Viagra to his troops and encouraging mass rapes against civilians, a claim that was quickly debunked by human rights groups on the ground.

But years after the bombing that deposed Gaddafi, the UK parliament, in a report released in 2015, reveals that the central claim for the intervention- that Gaddafi was and was going to continue to massacre his own civilians- was false, and in reality, he was fighting Al Qaeda-linked militants while avoiding civilian areas.

“The proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”, the report noted, adding, “the Gaddafi regime had retaken towns from the rebels without attacking civilians in early February 2011” and “the disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians”.

It added, “émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene” and “rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence”.

Furthermore, it noted that, “It is now clear that militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion from February 2011 onwards.”

Most recently, mass atrocity propaganda was used to justify the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Western backing of it.

Hamas was repeatedly blamed for every Israeli death on October 7th, despite the fact that Israeli media confirmed that Israel issued the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7th, the controversial Israeli military doctrine which calls for the Israeli military to kill their own people to prevent them from being taken hostage.

One source in the Israeli Southern Command told Haaretz that the order was given to “turn the area around the border fence into a killing zone, closing it off toward the west” and that, “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”.

Israeli Air Force Colonel, Nof Erez, referring to the Israeli response on October 7th, said, “This was a mass Hannibal. It was tons and tons of openings in the fence, and thousands of people in every type of vehicle, some with hostages and some without”.

Aside from ignoring the “mass Hannibal” unleashed by the IDF, which killed many, if not a majority of the Israelis killed on October 7th, many of the most outlandish claims made about Hamas atrocities on October 7th were outright false.

Israel and the United States claimed that Hamas beheaded 40 babies on October 7th, but Israel’s social security data later showed that only one baby was killed on October 7th, the 10-month-old Mila Cohen, who was tragically caught between gunfire at the Kibbutz Beeri.

Furthermore, Israel and the United States unleashed a mass fabrication claiming that Hamas committed mass rape on October 7th, a claim which was repeated endlessly to justify the confutation of the genocide.

But no video, photographic, or forensic evidence shows that any rapes occurred on October 7th.

Buried in a UN report which attempted to launder the claim based on now discredited “witness testimony”, the report wrote, “The mission team, specifically the forensic pathologist and the digital analyst, reviewed over 5,000 photos, around 50 hours and several audio files of footage of the attacks” adding, “In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified”.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that, “at Shura Base, to which most of the bodies were taken for purposes of identification, there were five forensic pathologists at work. In that capacity, they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia”.

The United Nations Human Rights Council inquiry eventually acknowledge that no evidence existed of rape occurring on October 7th, writing, “The Commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies. For the same reasons, the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation. Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate, or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment.”

Now the atrocity propaganda playbook is being resurrected with an evidence-free claim that Iran massacred 30,000 protestors in order to manufacture consent for another war.

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