COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
In one of the most appalling propaganda segments I have ever seen in my life, CNN’s Dana Bash launched into a fire-and-brimstone sermon on Wednesday comparing anti-genocide university protesters to the brownshirts of Nazi Germany — doing so in defense of a fascistic police crackdown against those very same protesters.
After playing a clip of Zionist activist Eli Tsives theatrically claiming campus protesters at UCLA were blocking him from his classroom, Bash solemnly said, “Again, what you just saw is 2024 in Los Angeles. Hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe, and I do not say that lightly. The fear among Jews in this country is palpable right now.”
According to journalist Jeremy Lindenfeld — who happens to be Jewish — Tsives wasn’t even being denied access to his classroom, but was only being denied access to the protesters’ encampment which he’d conveniently decided he wanted to walk through in order to get there. Dana Bash makes no mention of this, framing this instead as a terrifying attack on Jews which could soon see them being loaded onto trains headed for extermination camps.
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Bash played a clip of New York City Mayor Eric Adams saying “There is a movement to radicalize young people, and I’m not going to wait until it’s done,” as though preventing the spread of radical political opinions is something a mayor is elected to do in the United States.
“They’re calling for a ceasefire,” says Bash. “Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages.”
This is a brazen propagandistic lie. Israeli forces had been routinely murdering Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in the weeks and months preceding the October 7 attack. On October 6 2023, The New Arab published an article titled “2023 is ‘deadliest year’ for Palestinian children say human rights groups,” citing the Defence of Children International — Palestine along with other sources.
“This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment,” said Bash, adding, “You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.”
Ah yes, such brave, up-punching journalistic integrity for you to talk about the Israeli hostages, Dana.
Not like we haven’t been hearing about them every single day from the imperial media for the last seven months while orders of magnitude more Palestinians are butchered by US-supplied war machinery.
“At UCLA, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter,” Bash says.
Another lie. The footage going around makes it abundantly clear the violence is being consistently instigated by Zionist counter-protesters, with videos of pro-Israel thugs launching fireworks and hurling bottles of chemicals into the encampment, ganging up on a protester on the ground and beating him with sticks, and tearing down parts of the encampment while screaming “Second Nakba!”
Later on in the same segment of Bash’s own show, CNN’s Stephanie Elam contradicts Bash’s both-sides lie by commenting on some of this footage, saying, “And you can see that in the video, it looked like people from this side were breaking down the encampment from the pro-Palestinian side last night, throwing objects in there.
“As well as it looks like some sort of maybe pepper spray or something coming from the other side over here.”
It should here be noted that Dana Bash gets her surname from her first husband Jeremy Bash, who went on to serve as the chief-of-staff for both the CIA and the Pentagon. The woman is pure swamp.
It should also be noted that CNN’s own staff recently leaked to The Guardian that they have been pressured to report on the Gaza onslaught with an extreme pro-Israel bias, attributing the pressure to the network’s new CEO Mark Thompson.
I for one think it’s great that the imperial media are becoming so transparently obvious about their propagandistic nature, and I hope they keep exposing mainstream Westerners to the fact that the primary purpose of these outlets is to promote the information interests of the US and its allies.
Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you, so hopefully they keep going mask-off like this for everyone to see.
Caitlin Johnstone is an independent Australian journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article was first published here and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
