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| Image: Screenshot from LiveNOW from FOX |
Written by Julie Telgenhoff
Fox News posted a video under the headline:
“U.S. Strikes Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Over an Attack That Killed Troops in Jordan.”
That headline tells the audience exactly how to process the story. Iran attacked Americans and Americans died. The United States struck back, and justice was served.
The current official account says Iranian missiles and drones attacked a military base in Jordan on July 17, killing two American service members, leaving another missing and injuring others. The United States then launched additional strikes against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, claiming the targeted forces were responsible for the attack.
That is what we are being told.
Perhaps every detail is true. Perhaps some of it is true. Perhaps crucial context has been removed. The problem is that the American public has no independent way to verify what happened, who authorized what, what intelligence supposedly established responsibility or what occurred before the moment selected for the headline.
We receive military statements, government-approved footage, satellite images, anonymous intelligence claims, carefully edited news segments and emotionally loaded headlines. Then we are expected to form an instant moral judgment which is to support killing people in another country before the first commercial break.
Artificial intelligence has made this information crisis infinitely worse. Video can be fabricated. Voices can be cloned. Photographs can be generated. Real footage can be stripped of context, relabeled and circulated as evidence of something entirely different. Authentic material can also be dismissed as artificial intelligence whenever it becomes inconvenient.
Yet at the exact moment when trusting visual and official evidence has become more dangerous than ever, millions of people appear more certain than ever.
They do not ask what came before the attack. They do not ask why American troops are stationed in Jordan. They do not ask who benefits from expanding the war, what negotiations collapsed or how many Iranian civilians have already been killed. They do not ask whether American attacks on Iranian infrastructure helped produce the retaliation now being presented as the beginning of the story.
They simply demand more blood. These were among the comments posted beneath the Fox News video:
“Turn Iran into the world’s largest parking lot.”
“Unconditional surrender. Nothing less.”
“Don’t stop until 100% submission.”
“It’s about time to extinct the IRGC now.”
“Iran only understands the language of violence. May the USA military speak to them loudly.”
“The only time we stop is when there is no one to make a deal with.”
“Lock and load.”
“They should finish the job.”
These comments are disgusting.
They are the words of people treating war like a football game. They are cheering for bombs to fall on cities they could not locate on a map, filled with human beings whose names, families and lives mean nothing to them.
“Turn Iran into a parking lot” does not describe a surgical strike against a military target. It imagines the obliteration of a country containing tens of millions of people. It means homes, hospitals, schools, animals, children and generations of history reduced to rubble.
There is nothing patriotic about craving that destruction.
What makes the spectacle even more grotesque is how often this bloodlust is wrapped in Christianity. “God bless our military,” someone writes, surrounded by demands for extinction, submission and annihilation.
Which God are they blessing?
Certainly not the Jesus who told people to love their enemies, bless those who curse them and show mercy. Their version of God has been merged with the Pentagon, draped in an American flag and placed aboard a bomber. Christianity becomes another weapon of empire: our soldiers are blessed, our dead are sacred and everyone killed by our weapons becomes an anonymous consequence of war.
Americans have been shown what this language hides before.
On July 12, 2007, a U.S. Apache helicopter crew opened fire on people in Baghdad. Among those killed were Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. The helicopter footage was later released by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder.” It showed the attack from the military’s own camera and allowed the public to hear the crew’s words as human beings were targeted below.
That was the reality missing from the sterile phrase “collateral damage.”
The dead were not pixels. They were not enemy markers on a screen. They were people. A van that arrived to help the wounded was also fired upon. Children inside the vehicle were injured.
That footage revealed the obscene distance between how warfare is sold and how it is experienced.
The public is shown a clean launch from an aircraft carrier. It is not shown the human body after the missile arrives.
It is shown a glowing target on a military screen. It is not shown the mother searching through concrete for her child.
It is told that infrastructure was “degraded.” It is not shown families without electricity or clean water.
It hears that a target was “neutralized.” It never learns the person’s name.
Reports about the current campaign say American strikes have already hit bridges, electrical facilities and water-desalination infrastructure in Iran. Iran has retaliated across the region, including in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. The fighting has expanded, diplomacy has deteriorated and civilians throughout the region are being placed in danger.
This is how wars grow. Every attack becomes the justification for the next one. Each country presents its strike as defensive and the other side’s strike as unprovoked savagery. The audience is given a fresh starting point every morning so yesterday’s aggression can be forgotten.
Fox’s headline begins with the American retaliation. It does not contain the entire chain of events that led to it. A headline rarely does.
That is precisely why an informed population should hesitate before demanding the destruction of another nation.
Americans were deceived about Vietnam. They were shown incubator stories before the Gulf War. They were sold weapons of mass destruction before Iraq. They were promised short wars, precise strikes, liberation and democracy. The bodies accumulated long after the television cameras moved on.
Now the same public has entered an age when governments, militaries, intelligence agencies, corporations, algorithms and artificial intelligence can all participate in manufacturing perception.
And the response from the sheep beneath the Fox video is not caution.
It is “Turn Iran into a parking lot.”
They do not know what is true. They do not know what has been omitted. They do not know whether the images they are seeing are authentic, selectively edited, mislabeled or generated. They do not know who has already been killed on the other side.
But they are certain of what they do want. They want more blood and war.
That may be the most frightening weapon of all: a population trained to confuse vengeance with patriotism, propaganda with knowledge and mass killing with the will of God.
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