The ABC and the Architecture of Empire: Zionist Aggression, Iranian Resistance, and the Ideological War for West Asia
The intensification of hostilities between Israel and Iran must be situated within the broader geopolitical and historical trajectory of sustained Zionist aggression and imperial complicity. Over the preceding decades and intensifying in the last two years, the Israeli regime, under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, has perpetrated multiple acts of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran. These have included coordinated embassy bombings, targeted airstrikes, and clandestine operations, all met with conspicuous silence or outright endorsement by Western states. Within this imperial matrix, Australia’s state broadcaster, the ABC, functions not as an independent journalistic institution but as an ideological apparatus aligned with Western hegemony. Rather than interrogating the structural and historical dynamics that underpin the Israeli state’s belligerence, the ABC recasts Iran’s legitimate acts of self-defence as escalatory and destabilising. Its editorial omissions and ideological framing serve to obscure the realpolitik of imperial war-making and delegitimise anti-imperialist resistance across the region.
Disinformation by Omission
Consider the ABC’s coverage titled “Iranian police identify ‘hostile’ drone-producing workshops inside Iran.” The description of these Mossad-established sites as merely ‘hostile’ constitutes a staggering act of journalistic obfuscation. These were not ambiguous facilities, they were operational extensions of a foreign intelligence agency conducting acts of sabotage on Iranian soil. This was not just espionage; it was a state-sponsored campaign of terrorism that directly provoked Iranian retaliation and catalysed the current war. The ABC’s refusal to name this as a flagrant act of Israeli aggression, an attack from within against a sovereign state, betrays its role as a mouthpiece for imperial interests. It rewrites an act of war into a bureaucratically sanitised incident, thus inverting the reality of victim and aggressor.
Absent is any serious engagement with the longue durée of imperial intervention in Iran, most notably the 1953 CIA-MI6 engineered coup that toppled Mohammad Mossadegh’s democratically elected government and installed the autocratic Pahlavi monarchy. This foundational moment in Iran’s modern history set the stage for decades of external domination, economic asphyxiation through sanctions, assassinations of Iranian scientists, and overt military threats. The ABC’s narrative void regarding these historical and structural aggressions exemplifies how liberal media sanitises imperial violence and pathologises resistance.
Likewise, the broadcaster fails to contextualise the repeated Israeli bombardments of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian territory. These include strikes on civilian infrastructure such as Gaza’s hospitals and schools, Damascus International Airport, rural villages in southern Lebanon, and, most egregiously, the deliberate targeting of humanitarian aid workers. Such acts of war, carried out in flagrant violation of international law, are either entirely omitted or framed as defensive necessities. Meanwhile, the responses of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syrian state actors are pathologised as irrational or extremist, thus erasing their political agency and the legitimacy of their resistance.
This representational asymmetry is not incidental. It reflects the ABC’s function as a mechanism of ideological reproduction, in which the Israeli state is naturalised as rational and civilised, while any regional opposition is rendered aberrant and dangerous. This dehumanisation of Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Iranians is central to the ideological scaffolding of imperialist propaganda.
Humanising the Settler, Erasing the Oppressed
The ABC routinely foregrounds Israeli discomfort while rendering the existential struggles of the colonised invisible. For instance, its coverage of repatriated Israeli nationals privileges the inconveniences of settler populations, many of whom retain dual citizenships and escape routes, over the profound material suffering of Indigenous populations defending their homes and futures. The displaced and bombarded in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Damascus, and across West Asia do not possess a secondary passport. They remain rooted in, and committed to, lands that have been subjected to colonial occupation and military aggression.
The broadcaster’s use of decontextualised dissent, such as anonymous Iranian critiques dismissing governmental responses as hollow, is a tactic of liberal journalism that undermines resistance movements by amplifying selective internal critiques while excluding any voice grounded in revolutionary anti-imperialist praxis. This method not only distorts the political consciousness of these societies but also erases the agency of those actively engaged in self-determination.
Palestinian resistance is criminalised, Hezbollah is pathologised, Syrian sovereignty is routinely ignored, and Iranian defence is demonised. The Israeli state’s violation of the airspace and sovereignty of four separate nations, its routine abductions, assassinations, and targeted killings, including of scientists and aid workers, its open apartheid regime, and its covert operations on foreign soil receive minimal scrutiny. The ABC’s refusal to characterise these acts as aggression is emblematic of its complicity.
A Media Apparatus of Empire
The ABC does not operate as a disinterested entity but is structurally integrated into a broader constellation of media, state, and capital. Its leadership is populated by individuals drawn from Australia’s political elite, many of whom maintain ideological and material affiliations with imperial power blocs. The broadcaster’s international coverage is therefore aligned with the geopolitical imperatives of the United States and its satellite states.
This alignment is not limited to rhetorical framing. It reflects in the ABC’s systemic underreporting on Australia’s arms exports to Israel, its military cooperation with NATO, and its participation in imperialist ventures such as the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The broadcaster is silent on Australia’s role in facilitating regional instability and reinforcing a global apartheid order through military, economic, and diplomatic means.
In this context, resistance actors in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine are uniformly constructed as rogue or extremist, while Israel and its Western benefactors are portrayed as stabilising and democratic. The ABC never interrogates the material foundations of Australia’s military-industrial alignment with Israel or its participation in the global war machine. Its complicity in the reproduction of settler-colonial legitimacy, both abroad and at home, is systemic.
Settler-Colonial Continuities
Australia, itself a settler-colonial formation, is deeply invested in maintaining global structures of racial and territorial domination. The ABC, reflecting the ideological priorities of the Australian state, only tolerates Indigenous expression when it conforms to liberal, non-confrontational paradigms. It is comfortable promoting narratives of reconciliation and symbolic inclusion, but hostile to any expression of Aboriginal sovereignty that entails land restitution, self-defence, or anti-capitalist struggle.
This mirrors its treatment of international anti-colonial actors. Just as Hezbollah’s defensive operations are vilified, so too are the historical and ongoing movements of Indigenous Australians erased or pacified. The broadcaster’s marginalisation of militant or organised resistance, in favour of depoliticised and fragmented expressions, reinforces the ideological coherence of the settler-colonial state.
From the Golan Heights to Gaza, from southern Lebanon to central Australia, the ABC perpetuates a narrative in which the settler is framed as endangered and the colonised as a threat. In doing so, it reaffirms the colonial imaginary of peace through dominance.
Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Media
The crisis of Australian media cannot be resolved through incremental reforms. What is required is the construction of a counter-hegemonic media infrastructure grounded in working-class internationalism, anti-imperialist solidarity, and revolutionary decolonisation. Such a media would prioritise the narratives of the oppressed, the colonised, and the resisting.
It would refuse to reproduce the ideological assumptions of capitalist modernity. It would name imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism as the drivers of conflict. It would provide critical support to Palestinian resistance, to Iranian sovereignty, to the reconstruction of Syria, and to the liberation of Lebanon. It would expose the ties binding Canberra, Washington, and Tel Aviv as instruments of global domination.
Historical precedents such as Radio Venceremos during the Salvadoran civil war, or more recent models like Telesur, Al Mayadeen, give Indigenous-run collectives in Australia a valuable blueprints for such a transformation. These platforms disrupt dominant narratives, cultivate revolutionary consciousness, and build internationalist solidarity.
Until such a rupture is achieved, the ABC will continue to function as a cultural arm of empire. It will uphold the myths of objectivity and neutrality while facilitating the erasure of colonial violence. It will speak the language of peace while legitimising war. It will quote ministers while ignoring the bombed and dispossessed. The struggle to liberate media is inseparable from the revolutionary fight against empire itself; only through collective, organized, and militant resistance can we dismantle both the imperial information apparatus and the global capitalist system it defends.
The Red Gum 