Fear Porn at the BBC

By Ian Greenhalgh

I happened to catch a snippet of the BBC News on TV today, a rare occasion for me as I pretty much gave up watching the TV News months ago. As a friend of mine wittily observed, they should rename it ‘The Bad News’ as there’s never anything positive on it. A cynical person might suspect this was a deliberate ploy by ‘Auntie Beeb’ intended to sow fear and loathing of ‘ISIS’ among the British sheeple.

The segment I watched was a report on the current situation in the Syrian War; the talking head ‘expert’ was an ex-British Army officer and he laid out an extremely gloomy picture. To summarise his key points:

• ISIS didn’t capture Ramadi, they simply walked into the place after the Iraqis ran away.

• The Iraqi Army at Ramadi was 3,000 strong and well-equipped with US hardware but they ran away from ‘250 local tribesman under the black flag of ISIS’.

• The Iraqi Army is worse than useless because they have kicked out all the US-trained officers and instead ‘hired their friends’.

• ISIS have an almost free hand to strike wherever they wish, whenever they wish, throughout Syria and Northern Iraq

• The Syrian Army has lost the will to fight.

Oh dear, things really are looking bad for Syria and Iraq; their armies are a joke and ISIS is running rampant. Or so the BBC would have us believe. Luckily, we don’t have to take the BBC’s word as gospel, we can ask our friends on the ground in Syria and Iraq just what is happening and I did just that.

I began by asking about Ramadi and what really had happened there in order for ISIS to be able to capoture the town. The burden of guilt has been placed squarely on the heads of the Iraqi defenders; the BBC telling us they simply downed tools and ran away. However, what they failed to mention was the involvement of the USA who strongly ‘suggested’ to the Iraqi leadership that no Shi-ite reinforcements be sent to Ramadi as they might be loyal to Iran (a Shia nation). This lack of reinforcements caused the troops in Ramadi to be overrun.

Of course, this humiliating defeat could have been averted if US air strikes had been carried out. We are told by the mainstream media that the capture of Ramadi took place ‘despite overwhelming US air power’; this is a blatant lie – no US air strikes took place and the 7 strikes carried out by the Iraqi air force are being labelled ‘coalition’ with the bogus claim that they were flown by US pilots. The sad truth of the matter is the US did nothing to prevent the fall of Ramadi; in fact, US pressure contributed to the defeat.

However, all is far from doom and gloom; while ISIS have been enjoying success in Iraq, at the same time they lost a key battle in Idlib province of northwest Syria.

A group of Syrian soldiers were entrenched in the hospital of the town of Jisr al-Shughur, besieged by fighters claiming allegiance to Al-Nusra. For 20 days, this group of 250 Syrians armed only with small arms – Kalashnikovs and RPGs but led by the inspirational Col. Mahmoud Sabah defended the hospital and it’s patients from countless assaults. By an enemy that enjoyed the advantages of advanced heavy weaponry including TOW wire-guided missile launchers. Col. Sabah had lead his men to the hospital to defend the injured men, women and children there after Al-Nusra stormed into the city three weeks ago.

President Assad had promised to rescue this brave group of fighters and the hospital patients they were defending; today the rescue came in the form of an elite special forces unit of the Syrian Army who liberated all of the defenders and patients, killing over 100 Al-Nusra fighters in the process. President Assad contacted Col. Sabah personally and told him that he and his men, in their heroic actions and sacrifices truly represented the fighting spirit of the Syrian army. All of the Syrian defenders and both military and civilian wounded were evacuated – no-one was left behind.

This story of heroism, of 250 Syrian solder encircled and beseiged, resisting for 3 weeks with Kalashnikovs and RPGs; ending in a morale boosting victory and rescue is seen by the Syrians as being a fitting response to the scurrilous lies told by the Western media who would have us believe the Syrian Army was falling apart, it’s will to resist broken.

This is no isolated pyrhhic victory, ISIS and it’s allied groups are losing a great deal and the will of the Syrian Army to fight and the Syrian people to endure remains unbroken. This is in stark contrast to the doom and gloom presented to us in the Western media.

It is always galling when a mainstream media outlet lies to us, doubly galling when it is the BBC which is financed by tax payer’s money – in effect, the British people are paying the bill for being propagandised and deliberately mislead.

Last week, a friend of mine, a single mother of two in her early 30s posted this update to her Facebook page early one morning:

“I think the news gets more and more like a horror movie every day!!! Why are we letting ISIS destroy the world?? Worse and worse everyday!! The civilians will never have any quality of life!! I’m sure it would be more humane to drop an atomic bomb on them all. “

Here we see the result of the propaganda and fear porn the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are pumping out – a very ordinary, typical young woman who hasn’t much interest in politics was so affected by the gloomy, doom-laden content of that morning’s TV news broadcast that she felt compelled to express the feelings of horror, disgust and fear that had been imprinted onto her. Quite clearly their fear porn tactics are working effectively.

I’ve made the mistake of replying to these sorts of posts before and explaining that the stories we are being told by the TV are anything but the truth; a mistake because I was berated for being a ‘crazy conspiracy theorist’ and chided for ‘believing what I read on the internet’. So this time I avoided saying anything controversial and merely offered a bit of advice for dealing with the onslaught of fear porn:

“ISIS is designed to strike fear into people, so we all must fight it by not giving in to fear. Wars will continue to happen as long as the fat cats of this world can turn a huge profit on them. The 5 biggest arms exporters are USA, Britain, France, Russia and China and those 5 countries also happen to make up the 5 permanent members of the UN security council, so don’t hold your breath for peace any time soon – war is too profitable!“

The advice to not give in to fear is given added relevance by recent events surrounding the Jade Helm controversy. As all readers of VT are doubtless aware by now, we had to clear the decks of a ‘lunatic fringe’ of writers who were contributing to the fear porn with outlandish and unsubstantiated tales of FEMA prisons that were in actually storehouses for whiskey and sinister goings on inside (and below!) a number of closed Walmart stores.

This handful of disgruntled writers were not alone in pushing the hardcore fear porn over Jade Helm, Alex Jones also dished it out liberally and YouTube is awash with videos that claim to have uncovered some sinister and hitherto-fore secret aspect of the operation. If you were to listen to these people you would be quaking in your boots at the thought of the US borders having been closed and hordes of mind-controlled Federal paramilitary psychopaths running around extracting ‘dissidents’ from their homes to be locked up in a Walmart prison camp.

Here at VT we prefer to stick to the facts and leave the distribution of hardcore fear porn to others who seem to be rather adept at it, so adept in fact that the cynical person might wonder if they had been trained in the black art of fearmongering and were being employed as agents of mass distraction – people won’t notice what’s really going on if we have them worrying about the ISIS bogeymen training in Mexico; the extraction of dissidents by paramilitary goons in black or whatever else they can dream up to scare Joe Public.

Some famous bloke once remarked: ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’

You know, I think he might have had a point.

Ian Greenhalgh

Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts.

His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world.

His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events.