The plot of that movie involves a network of "Arab" terrorist cells, which commit acts of increasingly violent intensity against civilian targets in New York City. Video clips of President Clinton commenting on the attacks launched by his administration against the networks of Osama bin Laden are spliced into the movie footage. As the terrorists wreak more havoc and kill more people, New York City is placed under martial law; anyone who looks "Arab" is rounded up and placed in internment camps, even as the violence continues.
In the end, the movie becomes a sermon on how to moderate attacks on the Constitution and on ethnic profiling of Americans, while the nation goes on to fight the foreign, "Arab-terrorist" enemy.
When "The Siege" opened in November 1998, it was greeted with protests from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, who charged that it "portrays Arabs and Muslims as a homogeneous, threatening mass," and labelled the film, produced by Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox, "dangerous and incendiary."
Despite such protests and relatively poor reviews, the movie sold several million dollars worth of tickets and has done well in its video release. In remarking about how successful the movie-brainwashing effort has been, Lane noted, in the "New Yorker," that the majority of Americans reacted to those events with the same kind of unreasoned emotion that they expressed at the multiplexes or in their own home theaters:
"And the exclamations from below, from the watchers of the skies caught on video, as they see the aircraft slice into the side of the tower: where have you heard those expressions most recently? - the wows, the woohs, the "holy shits" - if not in the movie theaters, and even on your own blaspheming tongue?" "Hollywood, through films like "The Siege" and "Die Hard," writes Lane, has provided a "sensory education ... fed to a hungry public."
In the days following the attack, President Bush's approval rating shot up to above 90% and stayed there, especially after his nationally televised address of Sept. 13th. Following the speech, a CNN commentator observed that the President's approval was so high because he was behaving the way Americans expected him to: "like the President in "Independence Day" (a blockbuster movie about an attack on Washington and the U.S. by aliens) or the presidential character played by Martin Sheen in the "West Wing" (a popular TV show)."
And you still think that you haven't been brainwashed?
"Morphing" The Enemy Image ---
Take a close look at the image of Osama bin Laden, as it appears on the television screens in this time of a new "war." In psyops terms, bin Laden has become the image of the enemy - the picture that a targetted population keeps in mind as the person, or, specifically, the "type" of person it is fighting. There is the swarthy complexion, the beard, the burnoose, the weapon in hand - it is all there, all as expected, an ideal subject for the projected rage and hatred of an injured nation. No matter that bin Laden is not really the evil mastermind.
In the days and weeks leading up to the attack, media-watch organizations reported that the major U.S. television news outlets, including the cable networks CNN and Fox News, devoted an inordinate amount of time to what consists of their "international" coverage, to bin Laden, describing him as a "terrorist mastermind" or a "terrorist controller," almost always accompanied by a photo or video clip to drive their point home.
But his creation by the media as a "terrorist mastermind" doesn't really begin there. To understand what happened, one needs to look at a nearly 30-year span of news reporting that has led us to this point, where some character, a former and current asset of U.S.-British-Israeli intelligence networks, operating from "caves" and other bases in one of the most remote and isolated areas of the world, has become U.S. "Public Enemy Number One?!"
Look at the bin Laden enemy image as a morphing process that begins with the television image of the Black September terrorists of the 1972 Olympics. Then, continue to the 1973 images of Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat; later, there are the images of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and the fanatic mullahs.
Think of someone in Hollywood's central casting trying to find a person to portray the terrorist archetype, given these past figures and images: An oil- rich, almost mystical clerical type (although he holds no religious position) who looks like a morph of "enemies" Arafat and Khomeini, gets the part."
The population has also been pre-conditioned to accept the "story line" that terrorists who would do such things as took place on Sept. 11th "MUST BE ARAB AND/OR MUSLIM FANATICS," as thousands of televised hours of misreporting have repeated. Arab organizations in this country report polling results showing that, by a large margin, Americans believe, even without supporting evidence, that any act of terrorism has "Arab" origins or "Arab" perpetrators.
As one intelligence source said this week, within minutes of the World Trade Center attack, Americans had decided that this was done by "Arab terrorists" connected to "terrorist mastermind bin Laden." "They didn't need to be told to think this," said the source. "They had already been conditioned to believe it." Are such people not "brainwashed?"
We are told that our press is "free", but isn't that a lie? How "free" can it be, if the most important event of our time is lied about, at almost every turn and grossly misreported?; if the truth is nowhere to be found among the smorgasbord of news outlets that comprise our glorious, "free" press?
In Nazi Germany, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels boasted that the press was "free" to report whatever it wanted. But, the press was "coordinated" through the operation of a "press trust," that encompassed all media. The Nazis planted stories in the press to suit their ends and the trust dutifully reported them, with various spins that might give the appearance that not all media were receiving information from the same spigot.
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