Bomb Hats Away!

Does this seem like too much fuss over a few cartoons? Does it seem like the Muslims must all be crazy? Does it seem like "something must be done?"

Whenever I find the mass media monopolizing its airwaves and headlines with the same story, hammered over and over, it makes me wonder what they're trying to hide.

The Bush administration, through Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, yesterday accused "Iran and Syria" of "deliberately stoking rage" against the cartoonists. "Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes and the world ought to call them on it," she told a news conference. Yesterday, Bush himself urged Muslims to stop the violence. That was helpful, since we all know the Muslims will do anything Bush suggests.

No, wait—that's Saudi Arabia. That's the country that tells the Muslim world what to do, much as the Vatican tells the Catholic world what to do. But have Bush or Rice condemned the Saudis? No, they picked on Iran and Syria, two countries that Cheney announced his intention to attack as early as 1992 when he wrote his plan for world domination for PNAC.

Are Iran and Syria innocent of inciting Muslims? No, of course not. But they are small potatoes compared to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis play the tune and the Iranians and Syrians dance to it.

So why didn't Condi criticize the Saudis?

Could it be because the Bush family is in league with them? After all, Gee Dubya has been photographed with the Saudi royal family dozens of times, even before he stole the presidency. Bush himself invited Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal to his State of the Union address. That's the speech where Bush announced his plan to cut oil imports from the Middle East by 75% by 2025, only to retract the announcement the very next day. Perhaps the prince was horrified at the prospect?

There's also the ongoing mystery of why, when 15 of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers were Saudis (and none of the remaining four were Afghani or Iraqi), we attacked Afghanistan and Iraq to retaliate.

Meanwhile, New Orleans still hasn't been repaired, and most of the black folk who survived aren't returning. If the neo-cons had wanted to change New Orleans into a white city, they couldn't have planned it any better.

Then there's the fact that Bush has included privatization of Social Security in his new budget proposal, though he didn't say a thing about it in his State of the Union address.

But you wouldn't know about any of this, because there's no longer any room for New Orleans in the news. Instead, the media has been hijacked by an image of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb hat.