 "Donald Trump, Gurpatwant Pannun and Western media’s duplicity and rank hypocrisy")
Readers of Firstpost would be familiar with my frequent critique of Western media’s hypocrisy and double standards. What never ceases to amaze is the depths Western media can plumb to run the narratives that suit them. They can do this despite a terminal loss of credibility because of one big reason.
Western media, especially the liberal corporate media outlets aligned with the American Deep State and ‘the Blob’, have a near monopoly on global discourse. It is nearly impossible to gain traction in challenging their narratives, no matter how meaningful the critiques are because media’s influence is incumbent on American soft power, and consequently they wield enormous interpretative and nomenclature clout. What do I mean by this?
Consider the fact that a few days ago US presidential candidate Donald Trump came in for stinging criticism from nearly all Left-liberal media outlets for allegedly “threatening to place Liz Cheney before a firing squad.” Now, that is a serious charge indeed. If the Republican contender for the President’s post, a former resident of the White House, threatens to execute one of his bitter critics, he deserves to be called out.
Vice-president Kamala Harris, who is hoping to become the first ever female president of the United States, wasted no time in calling for disqualification of her rival from the race, saying that Trump has “increased his violent rhetoric” and that “anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified, and unqualified, to be president.”
Tough to disagree. Except that Trump said no such thing. If we reproduce the exact comments delivered by Trump in conversation with Conservative podcaster and influencer Tucker Carlson, we may find the degree of media distortion to be unbelievable.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsWhile criticising Cheney, a lawmaker and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney – one of the neocons responsible for the disastrous and morally odious Iraq war, Trump said at an event in Arizona that “she’s a radical war hawk,” adding, “let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
He continued: “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
By no measure of imagination can be this be interpreted as a suggestion to put Liz Cheney “before a firing squad”. And yet we have alarmist headlines from the likes of New York Times (Trump Assails Liz Cheney and Imagines Guns ‘Shooting at Her’), CNN (Trump says ‘war hawk’ Liz Cheney should be fired upon in escalation of violent rhetoric against his opponents), Washington Post (‘Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Liz Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’), Daily Beast (Trump Fantasizes About Shooting Female Rival In The Face), and nearly every single liberal media outlet.
This isn’t just a leap of bad faith; such blatant disinformation amounts to election interference. The media bias against Trump portrays journalists involved in this exercise as political actors with press pass. And this where Western media’s nomenclature and interpretive clout kicks in.
While it is plainly evident that these media outlets were engaged in barefaced propaganda in the name of journalism to politically undermine the Republican presidential candidate, the dishonest narrative prompted the attorney general of the state of Arizona to launch a probe into Trump’s comments, and the same media outlets were then cheering on the development.
The attorney general of Arizona even took the opportunity to make this into a legal case.
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) November 4, 2024
The media picked up the absurd suggestion as if it were totally reasonable.
Look. @Reuters @thehill @NBCNews @Forbes pic.twitter.com/KK8P7CPfly
What I have laid out so far is just one layer of dishonesty. The second, deeper layer emerges when we compare Western media’s treatment of Trump’s rather innocuous comments where he takes an anti-war stance, with the whitewashing of Khalistani terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun’s repeated threats of violence against the Indian state, its leaders, diplomats, civilians and repeated incendiary rhetoric on breaking India into pieces.
Pannun, who has been at the centre of a murder-for-hire conspiracy that has roiled India-US bilateral ties, is a dual American-Canadian citizen who was designated as a terrorist by India in 2020. In recent times, Khalistani operative Pannun, who is the chief of banned Khalistani group Sikhs for Justice, has threatened to blow up an Indian airplane, issued assassination threats against Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann, and has dared Prime Minister Narendra Modi to participate in the Republic Day function on January 26 without security cover.
Notice Pannun’s exact comments: “I dare Modi, you come to Delhi without your security. If you are a popular leader, come to Delhi on R-Day without security and SFJ (Sikhs For Justice) is going to avenge the assassination of Shaheed Nijjar by raising the Khalistan flag…”
Pannun, a New York-based lawyer who according to credible estimates is also a US Deep State operative, knows his way with words and has stopped just short of openly calling for violent assassination of the Indian prime minister, yet the threat is suggestive, specific, and menacing.
And yet Pannun has repeatedly been treated with kid gloves in Western media that has given him a long rope. The frequent threats of violence and chilling comments issued by the Khalistani operative who regularly holds non-binding referendums in Canada to split India, have been tamped down as his First Amendment rights and exercise of free speech.
Now compare the hysterical interpretation of Trump’s anodyne comments with the benign elucidation of Pannun’s incendiary remarks and one gets an idea of the levels of deception rampant in Western media.
Worth noting that the Trudeau regime, which finds no fault with the acts of violence and intimidation by Khalistanis against Indian diplomats, political leaders or the Canadian-Hindu population, and that has turned a deliberate blind eye to Pannun’s misdeeds, has been quick to take action when it comes to perceived threats against Trudeau.
In 2022, the Trudeau government charged a protestor, a man from Ontario, with “uttering threat to cause death and uttering threat to cause bodily harm” for attending a Trudeau campaign with a poster depicting a hangman leading the prime minister to a noose.
All the long-winded definitions of exercising freedom of speech, in this case, were thrown into the raging waters of the Niagara Falls.
The duplicity and hypocrisy of Western media is plain for everyone to see. Hypocrisy is a function of power. So long as India continues to rise as the fastest-growing major economy, it will gather economic and military might and consequently enough clout to tackle the insidious narratives from the West. Till such time, we need to call out each and every instance of duplicitousness for what it is.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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