TREND TRACKING LESSON: DON’T BUY THE HEADLINES

In today’s hand-held world of reading soundbites, it’s important to read more deeply into the story if you want to understand how the current events form future trends.

The examples of how the west has learned to hate/blame Iran is again made clear with this headline in last week’s The Wall Street Journal: “Saudi Attack Originated In Iran, U.S. Says.”

Read the first sentence: “U.S. Intelligence indicates Iran was the staging ground for a debilitating attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, people familiar with the discussions said.”

“U.S. Intelligence indicates?” Indicates? Where is the hard proof?

Indicates merely means “to suggest without providing hard facts.”  

And note the ambivalent phrase: “People familiar with the discussions.” 

Who are these people?

They won’t tell us, but we should believe them.

When making accusations that can lead to a major global catastrophe, how about some hard proof provided by qualified, named sources?

While leading off with inflammatory accusations, The Wall Street Journal article, like many others in the mainstream media, buried the following revelation much later in the long report: “But Saudi officials said the U.S. didn’t provide enough proof to conclude that the attack was launched from Iran.”

Why wasn’t this essential fact included at the top of the article?

They do it all the time.

This is an important trend-tracking lesson. Don’t buy the headline. Read the entire story, look for the facts and assess them, and draw your own conclusions. 

Remember the Trends Journal motto: “Think for Yourself.”

The WSJ did it again this past weekend in a story about new sanctions the U.S. put on Iran: “The sanctions on Iran’s central bank Friday and two other major state financial institutions were punishment for attacks on critical oil supplies in Saudi Arabia.”

Reading this story pretends to make clear the sanctions are justified because Iran was guilty of the attack.

Not one shred of proof was provided, and in the entire article it was never mentioned that Iran denied having a role in the attack, nor that the Houthis said they launched the drone strike.

Further confusing the real reasons behind the recent drone attack and escalating tensions between Iran and the U.S., the mainstream media has underplayed the effects of two key U.S. policies:

1. President Trump illegally broke the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal in which Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear activities in exchange for the U.S. and E.U. lifting economic sanctions that had been imposed on them.
    
2. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran had been complying. After breaking the agreement, President Trump then re-imposed a series of crippling sanctions on Iran that have collapsed its economy, causing food and medical shortages on innocent Iranian civilians.

Following the latest round imposed by Mr. Trump targeting Iran’s central bank, he bragged Iran’s economy is “going to hell.”

“All they have to do is stop with the terror.”

“Terror?” What terror? Where is the proof?

There is proof of terror.

But it’s not by the Iranians.

It’s by America’s second favorite ally in the Middle East, following Israel: Saudi Arabia.

The ongoing, devastating Saudi attacks on Yemen, which the UN has cited as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, backed with weapons provided by the U.S., is the real “terror.”

These hard, cold murderous facts are ignored by the mainstream media.