MALAIKA MAHLATSI | The US-Israel war in Iran and politics of manufactured consent

In 1988, American linguist Noam Chomsky and economist Edward S. Herman authored Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

This seminal contribution offered an incisive critique of mass media, contending that it is a propaganda tool in the hands of the elite. The authors reflect on the complex ways in which governments and corporations use the media to cement the status quo by not only using ownership as a means of control, but by punishing dissent through the use of legal instruments such as lawsuits against those who dare to ask uncomfortable questions.

Their propaganda model, which illustrates the peddling of ideas and the function of systemic biases in corporate mass media, explores filters that are used to manufacture consent. One of these is ideological control.

While the book focuses specifically on the anti-Communism that defined the Cold War period in the West, Chomsky has since gone on to update this using contemporary anti-ideologies such as the Islamophobia that has defined media narratives in the West following the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. These anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, whether such a threat is real or imagined.

Over the past week, the United States (US) and the apartheid state of Israel have been manufacturing consent for their illegal and unjustified war in Iran. On 28 February 2026, the US and the apartheid state of Israel launched missile strikes across Iran, killing the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei. On the same day, US strikes killed hundreds of school children in the southern city of Minab.

Since then, more than a thousand Iranians have died at the hands of the US and the apartheid state of Israel.

The murderous regimes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have spread their terror to Lebanon, while the war against the people of Palestine continues.

Trump has claimed that the war in Iran is the result of an “imminent threat” that Iran posed to the US, including the storage of nuclear weapons (which US intelligence has since disputed) and an alleged assassination attempt on his life. Netanyahu and the Zionist government of the apartheid state of Israel want us to believe that they facilitated this war to ensure global peace.

The absurdity of a genocidal regime that has slaughtered more than 72,000 Palestinians since 2023, and whose very existence was the result of violent displacement and dispossession of over 700,000 Palestinians, makes such claims a cruel irony.

But it is not the first time that the US has manufactured consent to wage war against a sovereign state – and to do so based on complete lies. Long before the Trump’s regime kidnapped the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Madura, who is currently incarcerated in an American jail, the US government started wars in many parts of the developing world through manufactured consent.

In 2001, the US went to war in Iraq on claims that Saddam Hussein, the country’s former leader who was assassinated by the US in 2006, had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Western media regurgitated this narrative, cementing in the minds of Americans that Hussein posed a national security threat to the US and the rest of the world. People were made to believe that stockpiles of WMDs existed in Iraq and would be used to annihilate the world.

This blatant lie was put to rest in 2005 with the release of the Duelfer Report, which was sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and led by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group. It confirmed that no WMD were found in Iraq, stating that the regime had ceased active production in 1991.

This conclusion was reached following intensive searches by over 1,000 American inspectors. No active WMD programmes or stockpiles were discovered in Iraq. The report concluded that while Saddam had ambitions to restart the programmes if sanctions were lifted, no concrete plans were ever initiated.

The American government had no choice but to admit that there were never WMD in Iraq. It called off the search in 2005, by which time, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed, leaving immeasurable destruction in Iraq.

The apartheid state of Israel continues in its weaponisation of anti-semitism, blackmailing the world into believing that any criticism of Israel amounts to a hatred for Jews. In reality, criticism of Israel is directed at the murderous Zionist regime that has caused untold suffering in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and much of the Arab world.

It is not directed at Jewish people, many of whom have spoken out against the actions of the Israeli government and stated unequivocally: “Not in our name!” The scare-mongering by the apartheid state of Israel serves to weaponise the history of the Holocaust to silence those who stand opposed to the gross violation of international law that defines the Israeli government.

A historical injustice, the Holocaust, is being used to legitimise wars across the Middle East, with the argument that Israel has the right to exist. But such a right seems to only apply to Israel. For the people of Palestine, and now of Iran, the right to exist does not apply.

The right to self-determination is negated, with both Trump and Netanyahu seeking to decide the fate of a sovereign people by going as far as to want to determine who must lead them.

While Western media has largely remained a conveyor belt in the injustice and violence that the US and Israeli governments have visited upon the Arab world, many people are standing up to the established narrative. Across the world, ordinary people are protesting the war in Palestine, the kidnapping of Maduro and the illegal war in Iran.

Independent media, in particular, has led the charge in rejecting the manufactured consent that permits the US and the apartheid state of Israel to continue their joint assault on the world. It is abundantly clear for the world to see that what is happening in Iran has nothing to do with an “imminent threat” that the country poses to the US and Israel.

The Iranian regime is not innocent or admirable, but it is the people of Iran who must determine their fate, not Trump or Netanyahu.

We must reject the idea that might is right – that those with military and economic power can invade sovereign nations for the purpose of facilitating regime change. And we must see clearly who the real “axis of evil” that George W. Bush spoke about in 2002 in reference to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Malaika is a Geographer and researcher. She is a bestselling author and PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.