Is Trump Ranting about Hannibal Lecter to Distract from the Hannibal Directive?

Israel actually kills its own people so that it doesn't have to meaningfully negotiate with Palestinians. But the system has a million ways to prevent the public from seeing something like that.

Professional showman Trump at recent rallies has been going off about Hannibal Lecter. This caused mockery and worse in various media.

His ostensible point is to demonize immigrants.

But Hannibal Lecter — the diabolical cannibalistic hyper villain from The Silence of the Lambs — seemed over the top for the purpose.

What struck me was the timing. Trump’s rants came just after there was a spike in media coverage about the Hannibal Directive following a Haaretz piece published on July 7.

The Hannibal Directive is a doctrine of the Israeli military that they would rather kill their own citizens — and possibly others — rather than face the prospect of them ending up as captives of a Palestinian group. The point is to ensure they don’t risk having to meaningfully negotiate with Palestinians.

So, Trump’s rhetoric causes me to wonder if some arm of the pro-Israeli propaganda machine got Trump to spout about Hannibal Lecter to confuse the US public, which is likely only now hearing of Israel’s murderous Hannibal Directive.

There clearly has been a shift. On June 26, Matt Miller at the State Department professed ignorance about the Hannibal Directive when I asked about it. That ceased to be the case when he was asked about it on July 8 (much more gingerly) by another reporter.

So, did Trump hype Hannibal Lecter to distract from the even more deadly — and non-fictional — Hannibal Directive?

We may never know, but this type of overlaying, to get a concept out of the heads of the US public, may be commonplace.

One example is the 2018 Disney big-budget film Black Panther. The name of the film obscured the history and even existence of the radical Black Panther Party, founded in 1966.

In the film Black Panther, the CIA is depicted as an ally of the good guys.

In real life, the CIA targeted the Black Panther Party.

Hollywood clearly did a favor for the CIA, FBI and rest of the establishment by helping to ensure when people now hear “Black Panther” many think about a fictional African country and not a real group in the US that challenged that same establishment.

And at least some of the manipulation of films by the Pentagon and CIA is documented, see by David Swanson: “The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda” and Matthew Hoh: “Lights! Camera! Kill! Hollywood, the Pentagon and Imperial Ambitions.”

This form of manipulation — propagandistic erasure from the public mind — is a sibling of what I call insider speak and just one of the horrific ways that the public has been propagandized to set the stage for the current genocide.

As a bonus, in the film Black Panther, the bad guys wear keffiyehs: