The following is a repost of a June 19 twitter thread.
On Monday June 15, EU envoy to Ethiopia Pekka Haavisto unleashed one of the most disgusting slanders to date against Ethiopia's leadership falsely accusing officials of saying "they are going to wipe out the Tigrayans for 100 years" in a February closed door meeting.
This derogatory fabrication was swiftly condemned by the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry as the ludicrous babbling of a deranged old man suffering from a "hallucination of sorts or a lapse in memory of some kind".
The Foreign Ministry went even further and bluntly called out Haavisto as a flat out racist and banned him from ever setting foot on Ethiopian soil again.
How did this disgraceful episode get covered by the media? If you were to glance at the headlines and coverage by the AP and other western sources, Haavisto's inflammatory accusation is presented as if it were a true statement.
The American and European press which pat each other in the back in perennial award ceremonies and tout themselves as paragons of independent journalism have demonstrated that they are nothing more than propagandists for their governments.
Statements coming from EU or American officials are uncritically accepted as fact and those of Ethiopia's leaders as unmitigated lies. The western diplomats and press aren't just failing to meet basic ethical standards of journalism and diplomacy but are in an outright war with the truth
Even the incontrovertible fact that the TPLF attacked an Ethiopian army base to ignite the Tigray conflict is cast aside with suspicion and qualified with "Abiy accuses the TPLF of attacking a federal army base" as if the massacre of thousands of Ethiopian soldiers is a footnote.
In a Tuesday NYTimes podcast Sabrina Tavernise asks Declan Walsh "How did Abiy Ahmed go from Nobel Prize winner to alleged ethnic cleanser?" in which the two spend 30 minutes painting a prejudicial trope of Abiy Ahmed as a sadistic leader who delights in rape, famine, and torture.
Nikolas Kristof wrote on Tuesday that "We should apply every ounce of leverage we have to rein in a savagery in Tigray that increasingly reeks of genocide".
All these sanctimonious journalists and diplomats are clearly deluded and believe they are morally superior to Ethiopians.
They concoct salacious stories putting words in their unsuspecting Tigrayan sources mouths like: "they want to cleanse your bloodline?" and bask in self-adulation: "after our report the American government dished out sanctions on Ethiopian officials. We're so damn good!"
The unrelenting, months long, character assassination of Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Eritrea and the Amhara by a morally bankrupt lot of European and American officials and journalists does not stem from a single ounce of concern for the people of Tigray.
These defamation campaigns waged against Ethiopia by the journalist and diplomat descendants of slaveholders, colonialists, and genociders stem from the same tree whose bitter fruit made their forefathers view Africans as subhuman savages that need to be civilized.
