Deception

In a few weeks from now, the war in my country will enter a new year leaving the number of hundreds of thousands of victims increase and every other aspect of life there decreases. Seven months passed since I came to the United States and everyday passes, I discover how Americans are being manipulated by their TV media.

Last semester, I met one of my professors in the English department and had a little talk about Iraq. I was shocked of the little information she had. Most of the students, if not all, in my university have the same little information of what is really happening there and why it is happening. All they know is that there are American soldiers there fighting to protect them from Bin Laden.

So many people ask me about my life there and how I survived and became able to get out of the country. When I tell them my survival story, the expressions on their faces become of those watching a horror movie. They are shocked and mad at how deceived and misled they are. All I can hear from them are words like, “really? Oh My God! I can’t imagine that! We don’t see that on TV”… Of course, they can’t imagine or see that since these TV stations don’t cover the real life Iraqis because their main concern is Brittney Spears’s bold head and Anna Nicole’s mother-boyfriend battle of whom should get her dead body. I am even thinking of writing to both of them and tell them that they should burn the body and divide her ashes so that each one of them has parts of her.

I have had my television in my apartment since last September. If I don’t have night classes, I tend to watch the news on the main channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS, not that I depend on their news but to see the kind of coverage they offer. There is nothing about the lives of people who are dying in hundreds of thousands in a war that seems has no end in the horizon.

Most images I see on these channels are of TV shows that deal with beautiful models trying change geeks or a woman and her husband jump like a clowns in a deal or no deal show. Well, it’s money! Who cares about what is happening in Iraq!?

At the Forum Theater in my university, I had the chance to watch “Weapons of Mass Deception,” a documentary by Danny Schechter examining the US media coverage of the War in Iraq. The film sums up why Americans are being deceived and how they are being manipulated by the Bush administration.

In the film, John Donvan, an ABC correspondent says,

We have never, including me, shown the viewer what it’s really like and how
horrible war is.

CNN’s Christiane Amani’our admits,

The press is muzzled. I’m sorry to say that television, including my station,
is intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News.

So! It’s been four years since the invasion. I can’t blame the media only. I blame the American people as well for letting this media misleading them. I said it before and I say it again here that Americans live in a bubble. They should get out of this bubble and see what is really happening in the world. Americans here are always shocked of how Arabs know about them more than they know about Arabs. If you don’t find news on TV, read the newspapers, read blogs, read news articles from other countries. Ignorance or neglect or whatever you call it is harmful, if not to you, It’s harmful to other countries. When I say other countries, I mean people not governments.

baghdadtreasure@gmail.com