Information Control, Part 3: Covering Up Violence

Educational publisher McGraw-Hill announced recall and destruction of college textbooks with a truthful map of the steady encroachment of Israel's land theft from Palestine. Teachers like me have been using versions of this map for years, but I guarantee you that most secondary or post-secondary students in the U.S. have never seen anything like it. And they never will if Zionist controllers of the narrative get their way. What kind of pressure did they bring on McGraw-Hill that resulted in abrupt recall of their  text? 

With a title like Global Politics, the textbook editors should have kept the map and added a chapter on information control with Israel's constant policing of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign as a case study. 

Just last week police arrested a woman at a Paris International Women's Day march wearing a "Boycott Apartheid Israel" shirt. France is not alone in passing legislation that criminalizes the increasingly successful BDS campaign  -- Israel itself has done so, and the U.S. House of Representatives has tried on more than one occasion.

Then there is the case study of how corporate media portray frequent violent attacks on protesters brave enough to show up at rallies for the demagogue with the bad hair.

Photo credit: HUSclub Rich on Facebook

The most notorious event took place at the University of Illinois in Chicago this week: thousands of student protesters diverse in race, ethnicity and religion shut a rally down. The man who cancelled claimed Chicago police told him to do so, but police denied it. 

Many of us feel encouraged by the example of young people coming together to say "oh hell, no!" to race-baiting and threatened oppression if the demagogue actually gains office. (So far he is just a media celebrity with no experience in governing, which is powerful enough to be taken seriously in this day and age I guess.) It's no surprise that corporate media outlets like CNN falsely portrayed the protesters as violent, selling the U.S. public on the notion that white privilege is under attack and that it is time to be scared, very scared.

There's a history here, too.

Racial justice blogger Shay Stewart-Bouley in a post to BlackgirlinMaine observed that the demagogue,

...trades in dog-whistles and has been richly rewarded for his bombast by now being on a speeding train headed directly for the GOP nomination, much to the dismay of the establishment GOP who must now grapple with the house they allowed to be built on the foundation of hate after the 2008 elections.

Here's a good, short video making the connection between dog-whistles, racism, and why the white working class in the U.S. is so panicky right now. Also the history of using that fear to control government policies.

Guess what? Economic discrimination over generations is a form of violence, too. It results in malnourished children living in sub-standard housing that is bad for their health. It results in broken families who can't afford to stay together. It results in missed educational opportunities, and chronic unemployment. Mental stress, substance abuse, and addiction. Lack of health care. Homelessness and despair.