sbs: tv for liars

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,10264401%255E25717,00.html


SBS: TV for liars

Those who hate Jews and love lies would have enjoyed watching SBS this week. The rest of us have every right to feel betrayed.

28 July 04

WE pay SBS to be "multicultural". We also expect it not to tell lies. So SBS has doubly betrayed us by showing a two-part "documentary", The World According to Bush, that is spit-flecked in its Jew-hatred and frenzied in its lying.

Here's a film that accuses American President George W. Bush of being a religious crazy, controlled by "calculating" Jews yet also paid off by their Muslim enemies.

He is a "liar", "political whore" and "idiot" whose grandfather was "Hitler's banker", and whose father personally installed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Bush himself now runs "an organised mafia".

Has the SBS run anything more insane and shameful?

Worse, the credits on last night's final episode of this film by Tunisian-born William Karel even thanked SBS for its "collaboration".

Last week I wrote about Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and wondered: didn't the Left care about its lies?

Well, no. Some reviewers said that even if Moore was dodgy, he "provides a service", as the Sydney Morning Herald's political editor put it. But The World According to Bush was, another admitted, "more accomplished, professional".

It is? Let's check a few of its "accomplished" lies.

The World According to Bush first sneers that Bush is so Christ-crazy that he prays in public - shocking to intellectuals who worship atheism. His team "kowtows to religion, to extreme religion", spits one of the film's "experts". And it has an "anti-Muslim bent", adds another.

Cut to footage of Ed McAteer, a "Christian Zionist" extremist who claims every grain of sand in Israel belongs to the Jews.

What we're not told, of course, is that McAteer -- made to seem Bush's mentor -- actually condemns him for wanting a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its joint capital. But why spoil a conspiracy story?

Indeed, several "experts" then claim neo-conservatives led by a Jew, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "are pulling all the strings" in America.

Wolfowitz is "abusing America's power" to work for Israel, and is helped by another Jew, defence analyst Richard Perle, "one of the three most dangerous people" in the US. "These people" are "calculating and manipulative".

A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, lists the four who actually run their idiot president: "Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bernard Lewis the academic, Paul Wolfowitz."

In fact, Lewis is just a historian with no government job, Feith a Pentagon official a few rungs from the top, and Perle a private citizen who hasn't met Bush since he became president. But who cares, when we've got here a list of . . . Jews.

The film doesn't label them all as Jews, but a wink's as good as a yellow star to a bigot. Baer helps by explaining that these men aimed to "crush Saddam Hussein for the benefit of Israel . . . A pretext, that's all they needed".

Pretext? Cut to footage of the September 11 attacks.

Another ex-CIA man, Robert Steele, then reappears to snarl: "General Clark has said publicly on 9/11 . . . the White House called him and said, 'Pin it on Iraq'."

Actually, it was not General Wesley Clark but anti-terrorist chief Richard Clarke who was asked by Bush, not the "White House", to "see if Saddam did this", not "pin it on Iraq", as Richard Clarke reports in his book.

General Clark, who ran for the Democrat nomination for November's US election, has also denied any such request was made of him by the "White House" or Bush, whatever this film may claim: "No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to September 11."

But that's the kind of "evidence" this film uses.

Take, for instance, former US ambassador Joe Wilson.

Wilson says on the film he was sent to Niger by the CIA to check reports Saddam had tried to buy uranium there for an illegal nuclear weapons program. "There was nothing to the story," he declares. His visit proved "this information was false".

So he was shocked when Bush later claimed in his State of the Union address: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

This, Wilson and other anti-war activists, have long screamed, was a "lie".

But the liar was Wilson. Niger's former prime minister Ibrahim Mayaki had actually told him an Iraqi team indeed visited Niger in 1999 in what Mayaki thought was a mission to buy uranium -- Niger's main export. Niger's former mining minister even told Wilson another lot of Iraqis tried to buy 40 tonnes of uranium a year earlier.

As the US congressional inquiry into September 11 said last week, Wilson's reports "lent more credibility" to the CIA's belief that Saddam was searching Africa for uranium. The Butler inquiry into Britain's intelligence services agrees this belief was "well-founded".

Wilson's unmasking as a liar has received almost zero publicity here. Instead, his far more popular lies get yet another airing on the SBS.

So do Internet conspiracy claims that the Bush family has long armed the world's worst killers. They've "dined with the devil", as this film puts it.

Grandfather Prescott Bush is called "the secret banker for Adolf Hitler", and accused of having companies -- seized during the war for "trading with the enemy" -- which ran a Polish mine using slaves from Nazi concentration camps.

In fact, Prescott Bush held one of 4000 shares in a Dutch-owned bank in the empire of German tycoon Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was indeed an early backer of the Nazis, but denounced Hitler before the war for persecuting Jews and Catholics and was locked away.

Meanwhile, the Nazis invaded Poland, seized Thyssen's mine there in 1939 and used slaves from Auschwitz to work it after 1940.

Prescott Bush is innocent. SBS has defamed the dead.

The living, too. One "expert" then says, without contradiction, that "George Bush (the father), when he was vice-president . . . actually set up Saddam Hussein, actually backed him, actually put him in power".

More lies. Bush wasn't elected vice-president until 1981, two years after Saddam, long Iraq's true boss, made himself president.

Then we're told Bush Sr "armed and financed Saddam", sending biological materials for weapons to "Saddam's military laboratories", while Bechtel built "the factories that would enable Saddam to produce WMDs" -- biological and chemical weapons.

The truth to this popular lie? As a US Senate inquiry found, America's Centers for Disease Control and the non-profit American Type Culture Collection did send Iraq biological materials in the 1980s, thinking they would be used there as they were in other countries - to develop treatments for animal and human diseases.

These were sent not to "military laboratories", but mostly to universities and health officials, who secretly passed on some to scientists working on Iraq's WMD. You know, on the weapons this same film also claims "never" existed.

United Nations weapons inspectors have said the US officials responsible were simply "naive", and no evidence suggests any worse.

As for Bechtel, it won a bid to build two legitimate petro-chemical plants in Iraq that could have made by-products used in mustard or nerve gas. But Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait cut short Bechtel's work.

Nor did the US "arm" Saddam. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found more than 80 per cent of the weapons Iraq imported from 1973 to 2002 came from the three nations which tried hardest to save Saddam -- Russia, France and China. Germany was also the biggest supplier to Iraq's chemical weapons program, say UN records.

US "arms sales" to Iraq amounted to just four helicopters two decades ago -- all sold to private buyers, but seized by Iraq's military.

The film doesn't even try to prove its smear that Bush's "political career" was "funded" by bin Laden's rich family -- which includes some 50 half-brothers and sisters, estranged from the terrorist chief. And there is no proof.

It instead distorts evidence to "prove" the usual Big Lies -- that Bush "stole" the election, bin Laden relatives were allowed to fly out of the US after September 11 when everyone else was grounded, and so on.

What a sick brew. Its flavour is best caught when author Norman Mailer is asked if the war at least gave Iraqis a sniff of democracy.

"They don't deserve democracy," he sneers.

So how did our SBS come to spend our money on such wicked bigotry and lies?

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