Her master’s voice

WHEN the secret histories are revealed, they will no doubt confirm that when Benjamin Netanyahu was born he did not, as most of us do, greet the world with a scream, cry or whimper. Instead, he shouted out with all the might in his tiny, still-forming lungs that Iran was only a few weeks away from building a nuclear weapon and had to be bombed into oblivion.

Thanks to Donald Trump, he finally got his wish. Almost. It’s that ‘almost’ that’s driving him mad(der) as his own nightmare now is that Trump, facing what is arguably a greater strategic defeat for the US than Vietnam, will call off the war without having achieved the aims Netanyahu desires. If that happens, not only will it not bode well for Israel’s doctrine of ‘Eternal War’, a cessation of hostilities also spells legal trouble for the Israeli prime minister apart from leaving the Gulf in a position where littoral states have to deal with/ bend the knee to a resurgent, confident and militarily capable Iran.

And so, simple logic dictates that any efforts for peace must be scuttled and anyone attempting to make peace must be targeted and discredited. And in that latter category, Pakistan tops the list for its mediation efforts. Enter CBS which was once considered among the most credible of American mainstream media establishments. It published a report alleging that Iranian military planes had been parked at Pakistan’s Nur Khan airbase, with the only source for this claim being some anonymous US officials. CBS noted that when Centcom was contacted they referred CBS to Pakistani officials, instead of giving a statement of their own. This is, in effect, a politely official way of saying ‘please don’t bother us with this’.

Amusingly, CBS alleges that these military aircraft were parked here during the ceasefire (the implication being that they would thus be safe from US bombardment) but neglects to mention that the Nur Khan airbase is the same place which — during the aforementioned ceasefire — was visited by Vice-President J.D. Vance himself, prior to which it hosted a full US intel and security team which — one imagines — may have ‘spotted’ these. Which then begs the question: if Pakistan was in fact hiding Iranian assets it could maybe, just maybe, have found a better spot?

So, what happened to CBS?

Such unexamined inconsistencies aside, the rest of the article is what we in the news business call ‘padding’. This is what one resorts to when there just isn’t any actual news or content to fill the page or mandatory minimum word count and consists of obliquely related information that is mostly fluff and background. For example, there is the undoubtedly shocking revelation that “Pakistan’s reliance on China for military assistance has risen dramatically over the past decade” or that “Islamabad has attempted to navigate both sides of the crisis”. One should perhaps heave a sigh of relief that CBS did not inform us that water is wet and that fire does indeed burn.

So what happened to CBS? The media group was acquired by Skydance Media, which was founded by David Ellison. The son of tech mogul and Oracle founder Larry Ellison who was, briefly, the world’s richest man. As such, he’s also the largest private donor to the Israeli army along with a variety of pro-Israel causes. His personal policy is Oracle’s policy; Safina Catz the Israeli-American former CEO of Oracle made this explicit when she declared that “if Oracle employees don’t agree with our mission to support the state of Israel, maybe we aren’t the right company for them”. And “if you’re not for Israel you shouldn’t be working here, it’s a free country”. Unsur­prisingly, pro-Palest­inian employees at Ora­­cle report an at­­m­osphere of “fear and self-censorship” with some layoffs being linked to employees’ pro-Palestinian social media posts. But Ellison and his family don’t just want to dictate what their employees are thinking, they also want to influence America — and the world at large. After taking over CBS, he appointed rabid Zionist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, which led to a purging of staff and the appointment of like-minded bureau chiefs.

Ellison is also the man behind the purchase of the US branch of TikTok which was celebrated by top US Zionists like Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League and Netanyahu himself. The reason was that they believed TikTok was driving pro-Palestinian sentiment in American youth, something that has not been dramatically affected by the sale to TikTok to an avowed Zionist. Not just that, Skydance also owns a huge chunk of US entertainment media, like paramount pictures, MTV, Comedy Central and even Nickelodeon. As for CBS, Weiss’ appointment heralded a precipitous decline in ratings and views, indicating that perhaps the scale of Israel’s atrocities is such that no amount of money can obscure the truth.

The writer is a journalist.

X: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2026

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