The question that's never asked. The answer that's never given.

Couric: earns millions in the propaganda industry

I just saw a clip of Katie Couric, a US newscaster asking the politician Rand Paul, about Trump’s call for stopping all Muslims from entering the US. He doesn't agree but he does say there needs to be "stricter scrutiny" and that “I think there are a lot of people hell-bent on attacking us, and we do have to review who is coming, and how many people come, and where they come from,”

If this newscaster was anything but a mouthpiece for the US state department and US corporate foreign policy, the next question should have been "Why would so many people be hell bent on attacking us, Senator Paul?" 

The problem is that this question is a dodgy one.  It demands an answer that can pose problems. The imbecile Bush’s answer to this question was because we are "free."  People in other countries hate us because of our freedoms he said that more than once.  The other important reason for their hatred of our way of life according to Bush was that they’re “evil.”

After the horrific attacks we collectively know as 911 these childish answers worked for millions of Americans whose knowledge of the outside world and our government’s activities in it is practically non-existent. But we are 15 years on and for politicians like Paul and others who do not believe the lies they tell their own constituents, there has to be a better alternative. Trillions has been spent, Americans have died. The world is a mess.

So we have terrorism driven by religious hatred. This is primarily a religious war; it’s the crusades all over again.  Muslims are backward medieval zealots and their goal is to dominate the world.

This is much better than evil in the abstract but that’s what most Americans believed when they asked me, an English immigrant, about the situation in Northern Ireland. Protestants and Catholics just couldn’t get along, it was a religious struggle.  This was also the general idea fed to the British public that was even closer to that conflict geographically. It is a religious, not an economic issue. And the English bourgeois always portrayed the Irish as lesser human beings. I explained to my American friends (after I became fully aware of it myself) that it would be most likely that a Catholic or Protestant worker wouldn’t have a clue about the main theological differences between the two versions of Christianity (confession aside) but the Catholic would know that they got worse housing, worse jobs, and were socially discriminated against in many other ways Protestants weren’t. Protestants no doubt knew it too but had the ideology of British imperialism and religious prejudice to fall back on. Once we see the economics behind events like these things become much clearer.

In order for me to understand this I had to gain further knowledge of the historical relationship between Britain (the English really) and Ireland.  The occupation of Ireland for centuries by the British, the taking of their land then charging them for living on it, mass murder and violence etc. There is much to know about this history and why the 6 counties in the North are still part of the UK. To the average Irish person, this history is rooted deep in their consciousness.

I don’t know how many times people here in the US say to me with confidence that Jews and Muslims will never live together they’ve been fighting this war for centuries---a thousand years one person told me. This is completely false as anyone who delves in to it knows. The mass media could inform us but the truth is dangerous for those that own the media. Muslims and Jews lived in relative harmony for generations. It was the creation of the state of Israel, the emergence and domination of Zionism and what is basically a European colonial settler state, that changed this. It is Christian Europe that has a history of slaughtering Jews and waged a genocidal war against them, not Arabs or Muslims.

Once we understand these truths it allows us to understand the world as it really is, why Israel is an ally of US imperialism. Why Ireland is divided. The cause of events are clear. Science allowed us to see that lightning was not god’s anger as the religious authorities told us but a product of real and explainable phenomena. For centuries those seeking these answers, for daring to question the wisdom of the servants of god could lose their lives, better keep quiet.

But the truth sets you free as they say and eventually the liars are exposed. That’s why we have to ask ourselves the question “Why are people attacking us?” We should have asked that after September 11^th 2001.Those like Katie Couric and Rand Paul know the real reason and it’s their job to obscure it. It’s why we have to seek the answer ourselves and that answer will be fundamentally different from the answer Rand Paul, Barack Obama, George W Bush or Donald Trump would give.

That is also why Katie Couric won’t ask the question. Better leave it alone.