Saint Bill or Accessory to Mass Murder? The Dilemma of the Morally Relativistic Media

In the light of my last post and the very acute comments of Truepeers, lgude, Nancy Coppock and others, I have been compelled to take another look at the question of anti-Semitism in Bill Moyers’ remarks about The Bible and the genetics of violence. There was a lot of anguish and recrimination in the wake of that incident and I am just beginning to make sense of it. Mr. Moyers was obviously horrified and felt injured by the whole thing. It seemed, though, that the more he twisted and squirmed, the deeper he got. Just look at his wounded and frantic reply to Abe Foxman (Leader of the ADL). even while he is denying moral equivalency, he says “And although I specifically referred to “the rockets from Hamas” falling on Israel and said that “every nation has the right to defend itself, and Israel is no exception,” Note that he uses a venerable trick of rhetoric, the passive voice, to minimize the impact of the “rockets falling on Israel” (oh dear, another one “fell” just now), while he characterizes the Israelis as “shelling” the Palestinians. So he minimizes the violence of Hamas as they initiate their avowed plan to annihilate Israel and he demonizes Israel’s defensive response. A masterful wordsmith, Moyers is good but the more he talks the deeper he gets.

Neither does he mention that Hamas deliberately uses their own civilians as human shields or that the alleged Israeli atrocities he refers to have both had serious doubt cast on them. It appears likely that they were staged or otherwise faked, as has turned out to be the case with every other allegation of intentional Israeli atrocity in the past- Jenin, al Dura, Kfar Qana- you name it. Yet Mr. Moyers repeats the reports as fact, as justification for calling the Israeli action an onslaught. The characterization of the restrained and careful Israeli actions with terms like “onslaught” and “slaughter” juxtaposed with his blithe gloss of the “falling missiles” is not merely an argumentative pose, it betrays an inner contradiction in Moyers heart.

On one hand he considers Israel to be entitled to defend herself (as if she needed his permission) on the other hand, he wants, from the vantage point of his snug PBS studio to be able to pass judgment on what a fitting (proportional?) defense would be.

Proportionality? Israel’s armed forces always has done and continues to do their best at separating Hamas from their human shields and killing only the combatants. But that is not enough for Bill Moyers. He uses two examples, examples which all media professionals by the time he used them knew to be suspect, to imply that the Israelis are no better than those who want only to murder them. He pointedly ignores the obvious difference in the morality of the two sides. He pretends, as it were, that he has just walked into the room and sees Israel beating up the Palestinians without knowing any of the background. According to him, it is an onslaught and a slaughter and he hurls those epithets at Israel, not the hate-filled murderers who have caused the problem and intentionally placed their own people between them and the tiger they had taunted once too often.

He crowns his assault on morality with the remark that first caught our attention- the one he has already backed away from as “obviously not sufficiently precise”. (Ah, suddenly the man who has traded in words all his professional life has “misspoken? More likely he spoke too quickly and revealed to much) Not only did he state that it was the bible that “genetically encoded” violence in the Jewish people, even if he goes on to say, “A radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth,” he compounds his betrayal of common sense and moral decency by adding “Israel misses no opportunity to humiliate the Palestinians with checkpoints, concrete walls, routine insults” as if he agrees with the Islamist honor/shame formula that their humiliation must be avenged in blood.

Not content with tacitly supporting the blood-revenge paradigm, he willfully misinterprets the purpose of the IDF’s YouTube channel. The IDF posts video on YouTube to try to prove to Mr. Moyer and his ilk that the strikes in Gaza are done with greater precision and care than has ever been shown before by any military in the history of warefare- to show the world that even against a foe that is sworn to murder every Jew and destroy their state the IDF is performing with surgical precision and Talmudic respect for innocent life.

All Mr. Moyers sees is a further insult to Arab honor. He says, “As if boasting of their might, Israel defense forces even put up video of the explosions on YouTube for all the world to see.” This is quintessential honor/shame drama! “For all the world to see!” To him this is a bad thing!?!?

Nor does his attempt to dismiss his “genetic” remark as “insufficiently precise” address the sense in which the remark still stands as a blood libel. Casting the two sides as equally at fault and implying that Israel “humiliates” the Palestinians by having checkpoints and walls, none of which existed until they were reluctantly employed to protect Israelis from suicide bombers! Laying the blame for these things equally on Israel is a deep, immoral wrong.

Deny it though he may, this is moral relativism, leveling the moral difference between two sides of a dispute and then applying spurious “evenhandedness” that injures and impugns the party that is morally superior.
And that is the first key to understanding Moyers’ dilemma. In Moyers’ world, the only morally superior stance is his. He rejects violence without reservation and blames all who employ it equally. He looks down on Israelis fighting for existence against Hamas, fostered and supported by Iran and the Arab world all of whom want nothing less than the annihilation of Israel, and he rolls his eyes in pious disapproval at the violence. As Truepeers has characterized it in a comment to my original post about Moyers, “this is one of the most well-worn of moral failings: admitting the eliminationist nightmare while at the same time giving the blame, or at least some of it, to the Jews. It's a smug righteous way of saying I'm above all that, a pox on both their houses.”

The ultimate insult he offers, though, is the suggestion that he is actually “a friend” of Israel. “From my days in President Johnson’s White House forward,” he writes, drawing himself up in the bogus dignity of a wordsmith who has crossed the line back and forth from “journalist” to “spin-master” enough times that he clearly has lost sight of any difference between the two, “I have defended Israel’s right to defend itself, and still do. But sometimes an honest critic is a government’s best friend, and I am appalled by Israel’s devastation of innocent civilians in this battle, all the more so because, as I said in my column, it is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen. To be so indifferent to that suffering is, sadly, to be as blind in Gaza as Samson.”

The reason they call it “spin” is that is designed to make you so dizzy that you forget which end it “up”. If you were to take him at his word and grant that he is a “friend of Israel”, you would be tempted to believe that he was really an “honest critic” and that Israel was indulging in the “devastation of innocent civilians”. He says he is “appalled “ by it and so you would see it through his eyes as appalling devastation- even as those eyes of his studiously ignore the evidence of Israel’s humanitarian intent. He says the IDF web site is a humiliation for the Palestinians but isn’t it just as humiliating to him? He resents the fact that there is proof that his assertions are false and that his moral compass is not true.

Then, finally, trusting that his double talk has rendered us so woozy and nauseated that we will be powerless to resist its authority, he flashes us the gold plated, jewel encrusted, richly engraved, plain-as-day badge of the hypocrite. He taunts Israel, saying that the slaughter of innocents he so deplores, “is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen.”

But, Mr. Moyers, a truly honest critic would have to ask why Hamas “wanted it” to happen. A real friend of reality, let alone Israel, would have to admit that a political/religious movement that intentionally incites violence against its own women and children for its own gain is an abomination- that is guilty of what amounts to human sacrifice. An honest man whether a critic or not would be compelled to admit that such a movement no more deserves equal respect with a modern, western, liberal democracy like Israel than Hannibal Lechter deserves to be compared with Julia Child.

The real hole in Mr. Moyers’ soul is that the moral relativism he denies so passionately does not only endanger Israel (who can take care of herself), it is that he must avoid knowing that it is he himself who is endangering the defenseless women and children of Gaza. The facts and reality push him to that awareness and he uses all his intellectual power to avoid it.

He is on a slippery slope. He has already acknowledged that Hamas (like Arafat before them) know that, what ever calamity they bring down on their own people, moralistic idealists with a grudge against Israel like Moyers will be unable to resist the temptation to blame Israel. It is he, not Israel who is giving Hamas what they want in reward for endangering their own people.

In spreading the blame for the plight of Palestinian children to the Israelis (who routinely risk the lives of their soldiers to avoid harming Palestinian women and children) and minimizing the responsibility of Hamas (the cowards who hide behind the children and by doing so put them in peril) he is succoring terror. He plays into their cynical game. He becomes a supporter and a participant in the slaughter. In legal parlance he is more than a bystander; he is an accessory.

It is the ultimate irony of Honor/Shame, that it so often results in unavoidable dishonor. In Moyers we see a man who has made the fatal error of staking his honor on a explaination of events that is fundamentally flawed and now cannot face the shame of admitting to his complicity in horrors beyond his intention. Now he'd rather see missiles "falling" on Israel forever rather than have to admit where the real responsibility lies for what he cynically calls the Israeli "onslaught" to stop them.

Picking Up Hats- Waiting for Chico

Seventy-five years ago in 1933, The world was three years into The Great Depression. Hitler became the dictator of Germany in 1933. FDR was inaugurated as President of the U.S.. Also in 1933, in the Soviet Union, the famine created by the collectivization of farms was into its second year. The Soviet famine, actually a political atrocity of genocidal proportions, is thought to have claimed as many as five million lives. 1933 was also the year that the new president Roosevelt broke the sixteen-year long impasse and granted U.S. diplomatic recognition for the Communist regime in the USSR.

I’m going to forgo the obvious observations. Those who have eyes to see the parallels and implications for today will surely have seen them already and those who don’t will only become agitated. Anyway I have something startling to show you from 1933
Take a look at this short video clip:


Its from the Marx Brother’s movie Duck Soup. This is one of the great classic scenes in entertainment history and I believe that it is so memorable because it says something universal and scathing about mirrors, human behavior and illusion. The pas de deux between Groucho and Harpo starts out looking like an earnest attempt by Chico to imitate Groucho’s actions exactly- as if to fool him into thinking that he is really looking into a mirror instead of at a spy who is on a mission against him. Now, this scenario has been imitated by other pairs of actors and lesser comedic talents always play it straight. That is to say that the one playing the “Groucho” role will assume an attitude of ominous suspicion or innocent credulity.

Groucho here is playing it coy and amused through the whole exercise. We see in his attitude and our acceptance of it that the autonomic mirror is not just an urge to mirror but a reciprocal urge to be mirrored as well. He feigns trick after trick to trip Harpo up and ignores every slip.

As the scene progresses, the gap between Groucho’s actions and Harpo’s imitations widens. They even circle each other and briefly switch sides without breaking the spell. When Harpo drops his hat Groucho even surprises us by picking it up and handing it back to him. All the while, Groucho remains no more than bemused while he plays along. The peculiar brilliance here is that even while we wonder why he does not just pull the plug on the charade, we also feel the elemental pleasure/pain of the dissonance created by the elemental power of the autonomic mirroring urge as it interacts with the mounting accumulation of evidence. Finally the appearance of Chico in the scene- dressed identically- breaks the tension and Groucho is compelled to break the illusion of “mirror” he has so willingly preserved.

What we witnessed in the video clip is theater but it its greatness derives from a deep resonance in human nature. It incorporates the mirror (in this case a purely fictional one) as a central character.

As humans we are mirrors for each other throughout our lives. Mirroring each other is the way in which we learn about life, form opinion and conceive desires. We learn about our place in the larger world by reading, listening and viewing the media which are the larger mirror on which we depend for news and point of view. Intellectual, cultural and social life is really mirrors within mirrors.

There is a an elemental conflict in this scene, as one man sets out to convince the other that he is merely the mirror image of the other. This is an eternal human dilemma. If everything we do, say and think is a kind of mirroring how do we know know what is real and what is reflection and, if it is reflection is it distorted? If our behavior, thoughts and desires are reflections of those of other people, how do we establish authenticity in our own behavior? How can we be sure we are not being manipulated? These are very disquieting thoughts and in order to maintain confidence in our own actions and reactions we need to keep the reflecting relationship secret from ourselves- or at least under control to the degree that we do not see our self as unoriginal – as a mere façade.

Is it possible, you ask, if this allegory, this uncritical acceptance of an obviously flawed mirror image, has an analog in reality?

Yes, in fact, our media study under the banner of Second Draft has turned this kind of thing up in many unexpected places. The one being played out in the presidential elections in the US at this moment is one of the most obvious, though, and it is also one of the very most dangerous. In this instance the part of Groucho is played by the Main Stream Media and Harpo is Barack Obama and his campaign.

The action between Groucho and Harpo evolves as a kind of pantomime of the way in which the media, having begun to mirror a character or story it has begun to “carry” will go to fantastic lengths, even to the equivalent of Groucho (in the mirror that is not there) picking up the “dropped hat” and handing it back to a public figure when he drops it.

Picking up the dropped hat can take many forms, these include:

• Ignoring or refusing to investigate important stories that contradict the theme being “carried”.
• “Reframing” information and “putting it in context” to minimize its impact.
• Making up rationalizations and excuses for behavior and situations.
• Refusing to identify connections between obvious gaps in information

I believe that time will show that the media’s participation in the pandemic infatuation of millions of people all over the world with Barack Obama is a very dramatic example of this kind of active distortion of the mirroring relationship. Obama intentionally presents us with an image of ourselves in that is calculated to make us feel is a reflection of the kind of world we desperately long to see. Because of that image, many people have made the commitment to ignore any thing negative that may come up about him and threaten the coherence of the image. This, as in the strange little mirror dance of Groucho and Harpoo ceases to be gullibility and becomes credulity. Even in the face of mounting evidence that he is not a man of good character, experience or, even, good will.

The enticement of the “change” he offers, begins with the image of a black man who behaves like a white man ascending to the presidency “proving” that we are not a racist country and that we put equality before reason and self-reliance and ends with a bland and rational-sounding but nebulous approach to bringing about a socialist “change” in America. He leads many to believe that racism will just disappear from people’s heart and minds and seems to imply that his policies are less socialist than they are benevolent- that they will take away all the “inequalities” and suffering of normal life.

A world without racism, inequality and suffering is called Utopia. Utopia always sounds nice but go try to implement one- entirely unrealistic- we know that from thousands of failed attempts. We know it too because an honest look around the world will tell us that the countries in which the socialist engineers of equality and benevolence have had their way are the greatest sources of new immigrants into the United States. But that does not stop his mirroring minions from cheerfully ignoring both the evidence and the surreal assumptions behind their cult. It does not stop them because they don't necessarily have to believe it is possible- they just want that narcissistic mirror image of themselves trying to do it. When an outsider to the cult offers even the most reasoned argument and clear evidence, it is met with some combination of taunting, insolence, blind denial, disproportionate rage, obfuscation or sneering- none of which actually address the arguments and evidence.

I will, at least for this post, keep my word and not make all of the obvious observations. Allow me, though, one more chilling bit of information about the movie from which the mirror clip came:
Here is part of the plot summary offered by the New York Times for the movie Duck Soup

“In this 1933 Marx Brothers film, the mythical country of Freedonia is broke and on the verge of revolution. Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont), Freedonia's principal benefactress, will lend the country 20 million dollars if the president withdraws and places the government in the hands of the "fearless, progressive" Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx). At his inauguration, Firefly shows up late, insults everyone in sight, and sings a song about how he intends to abuse his power. Naturally, the crowd cheers wildly.”

Next time you see film of an Obama rally or see video of chubby middle class children being coached in the singing of hymns to the wondrousness of The One. Like this:

Keep in mind that Soros and piles of illegal foreign money has funded him, he has lived off government grants and distributed millions to radicalized haters of our values and government. He has insulted “common” people- albeit not to their faces. His friends and associates have always intended on getting power for him so they can abuse it. Even now they are registering legions of dead people, incarcerated felons and illegal immigrants to put him in power. Every time the hat drops, the media dutifully pick it up.

They refuse to follow up on the money trails, ignore his associations, soft-peddle his connection with those who are committing the voter fraud, and draw the attention away from all of these things by virtually unfolding every crumpled piece of Kleenex in Sarah Palins trash barrels in search of manufactured scandal. And still, the crowd cheers wildly. Clearly, they will keep on doing it until the "mirror" is shattered. In the video it took the arrival of Chico.

If it seems to you that everything is backwards, well that’s probably just because that’s the way things look in a mirror. My question is "Where is Chico?"

How Stupid/Wrong/Evil Were They?-Part 1- The BBC

Is anyone else wondering where the media is? No, I know the newspapers are still grinding out the daily sausage and the anchor people are still hailing out to the reporters “at the scene”. I am talking about how deserted The Mohammed al Dura Affair that, once enticing and popular swimming pool of the media, has become. Where reporters, anchor people and foreign correspondents used to frolic, splash and gaily hold the gasping reputations of Israel and the Jewish people under water for hours at a time- and pull their bathing suits down and stab them repeatedly and mutilate their corpses? Now that the French courts have cleared Israel’s name and shown the whole thing to be a hoax, it is as quiet and desolate around the al Dura pool it is almost as though someone had floated a big ole economy sized Oh Henry bar out into the water.

Where are the defamers and slanderers now? How do they feel when they look back on that frenzy, when they were fairly quivering with orgiastic glee as they clattered out calumny on their keyboards or yodeled their voice-overs into the rising chorus of the media lynching of Israel in September and October of 2000.

This first and paradigmatic blood libel of the twenty-first century, the Muhammad al Dura affair was launched by the arch media megalomaniac and soulless dupe Charles Enderlin, but it was sustained and propagated by a legion of other egomaniacal progressive ax-grinders, a stampede of sincere but addled multiculturalists and a diverse assortment of media whores with a wider variety of unwholesome agendas than a naked antiwar street parade in Berkeley.

I’ve been going back to see what they were saying at the time and I will compile it here. Maybe some of the perpetrators will consider what they have done and take at least some of it back.
The byline-less article on the BBC website from October2, 2000 is where everyone else starts. You can always count of the BBC for the gold standard in snide, superior, “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths” anti-Semitism/Zionism.

It’s pathetic enough that the article uncritically uses the wildest accusations and the most damning language taken from Enderlin’s report. For instance they repeat his allegation that the gunfire was so unremitting for 45 minutes that all the father (Jamal) could do was try to shelter Mohammed, implying that in 45 minutes there was never an opportunity to get out of the line of fire. Forty-five minutes is an eternity when you are firing high-powered military rifles, never mind trying to weather the fusillade. Then they call the boy, “a new martyr for the Palestinian cause”.

The most telling stuff, though, is the two quotes from the boy’s parents.

Little Mohammed’s Mom is quoted as saying, and the BBC quotes the father (allegedly lying in the hospital with life-threatening wounds) as saying his son died for "the sake of Al-Aqsa Mosque" The BBC is not this stupid.

Did an actual BBC reporter hear them say those things? Or was is a Palestinian official that passed on the thoughts of the faux-bereft mother and father?

You cannot tell me that the pointy-headed dupes at BBC saw nothing about these two quotes that would arouse suspicions that there was something odd, some kind of stage-managing, and manipulation going on here. Mere hours after her son goes off for the day on errands with his father and is allegedly cut down unexpectedly but intentionally by Israeli gunfire the mother says, “This was his sacrifice for our homeland, for Palestine”? What exactly does she mean, “his sacrifice”? Only if they did something heroic to save others, has anyone ever spoken of any of the office workers on 9/11 as having made “a sacrifice”. The firefighters and policemen made sacrifices. Surely, people in the towers who stayed to help others made sacrifices. The passengers on flight 93 made a sacrifice in their courageous uprising because, even though they would have died anyway, there is no question that they traded the last few minutes of their lives to protect the safety of others on the ground.

No, but they probably did feel OK about ignoring that suspicion. How do they rationalize it? First of all, they are in a very competitive business. This stuff is big news and the world wants to see it.

Then there is the fact that they know that if they say anything that The Palestinians do not like, they will find their sources of news dry up very quickly. They can’t even send their most supine toadies for the “Palestinian Cause” there anymore without them being attacked, kidnapped and otherwise intimidated. So they, like Charles Enderlin, have become dependant on Palestinian and other Islamist operatives masquerading as journalists. They know that the honest, democratic Israelis are boring and not a source for sensational news so they are stuck with being tools of the Fatah and Hamas propaganda machines.

How do they disguise pathetic gaffes and inconsistencies for their Palestinian controllers? Well, look at this story. For one thing, if you went to the link above, you will notice that they isolated the two quotes out of the mainstream of the story. They do not comment or elaborate. They certainly do not tell you how they got the quotes. There is no phrase like “His mother told BBC’s Alan Johnston” or “Sources at the hospital told BBC that the father said,” as you would expect to see in a story that was giving you all the information you need to understand the situation.

Then too, they can always fall back on the soft-racism of lowered expectations. That is to say the filthy, ragged back edge of the multicultural sword is that minorities and other cultures are held to reduced standards of humanity- always low enough so that they cannot fail the test. Do they intentionally kill innocent civilians? Do they endanger their own children by putting them in front of gunmen and hiding their missile launchers in their elementary schools? Oh, ah, that’s understandable. Do they publicly and vehemently call for the death of everyone else in the world that they don’t agree with? Yes, well, I’m sure that’s just a “cultural” thing I’m sure they don’t mean it the way it sounds. Do they teach their children that everyone that does not worship the exact same God in the exact same way is not human- a pig- a monkey- a dog? Hmmm, okay, that’s not ideal but they have a history of treating their slaves and sub-humans with mercy- most of the time, uh well a lot of the time, well, alright… sometimes.

At any rate, it does not seem likely to me that the BBC got the quote directly from the parents. If they did, all the sadder for the parents. Clearly, if a mother and father say the exact same insensitive crap about the (faked and/or staged) death of their son with identical political bravado, it rings no alarm in the minds of anyone and the very politically correct and even more venal BBC.

Coming next: Cynthia Cotts- the least accurate sentence I have yet discovered in a written article about al Dura.

Loose Lips Sink Ships- Lessons from al Durah

Richard Landes has a speedily done translation of the court decision up at Augean Stables. This is an astonishing document. It is a glimmer of faithful justice- of Western honesty and courage in a sea of post-modern cynicism; a respite from the onslaught of relativism and moral cowardice.

Is it merely one of the last, flickering flashes of light from the bridge of a sinking ship or is it a signal that the once again the ideals and fairness of the enlightenment are back in charge and pumps will be turned on, at last, to try to save her?

The language is thick and legal and Richard warns that there could be corrections needed but there are a few things that are clear to The Court:
1. Enderlin reported on a staged event as if it was real.
2. The Israelis did not harm, much less target the boy and his father.
3. His report "drew in its wake unprecedented violence throughout the region"
4. In trying to defend his indefensible unprofessionalism he added serious lies and distortions to the original offense.

Two even more important revelations have come out of the al Durah affair. They were not articulated in the decision document but it are very much in the background throughout.

One is that It is now patent and part of the public record that Jihadists have taken the use of the media as a weapon of war to new and deadly standard. Richard Landes has invented a new word, "Pallywood", to describe the tactical practices they employ, the staging of news events, intimidation and manipulation of foreign journalists and the infiltration of the western mainstream media by local "stingers" (many of whom are nothing more than operatives of the palestinian propaganda ministries) This "weaponization" of our media can no longer be denied.

We have also, now derived a new and very clear cautionary tale that might serve as an inspiration (or, at least, a deterrent) for other western media to learn from.

Charles Enderlin, whether he lied intentionally or was duped, got caught. Instead of coming clean and helping to right the ship, he tried to save face by suing. Were it not for the terrible toll in blood and death he has caused, it would have been comical. He did the equivalent of drilling holes in the bottom of the boat to let the water out. I hope the lesson gets through to his fellow journalists. They are the ones most capable and in the best position to can pump the poison out of the bilges and save the ship.

Why We're in "A Lot of Trouble"

Blogging friend Neo-Neocon always brings both keen insight and a striking honesty about her personal experience to her posts. She has a post up that I just had to comment on. Now, I am usually so spent from The Day Job, The Kids, The Blog and The development of Second Draft that I don’t have the time or energy to comment on other blogs. That’s not a policy, but for the most part it works out that way. This post of Neo-Neocon’s, though, grabbed me. For one thing, it is part of her extended personal story of awakening- what might well be the longest, best written and most deeply considered of what I would call “First Encounter With The Beast” stories. First Encounter Stories are the reason I started Breath of the Beast, so she had me right there. But beyond that she was talking about what my Friend and Mentor (Hereinafter known as FaM) Richard Landes and I have identified as the greatest single obstacle that we all face in understanding the nature of the threats we face, The Mass Media and its warped, inaccurate presentation of events and ideas.

If you haven’t read her post I encourage you to.

She writes compellingly about how she, after all these years, has recently become aware that the two most compelling visual images from the Viet Nam war were not what they had been represented to be back in the seventies when they played a conspicuous part in changing the course of history. She feels betrayed. She describes the shock of learning that the summary execution of the forlorn looking man in the plaid shirt and the desperate fright and pain of the naked little girl were not proof of anything so simple and brutal as a bestial war prosecuted on an innocent people. The
background of the two pictures was much more complicated. They were presented and, therefore, perceived by most people in such a biased and essentially untruthful way as to have been pure propaganda published under the guise of “News”.



But this happens all the time history is filled with examples. I have been reading a book- Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting by Peter Brock Its a real eye-opener on how we were all manipulated to the point of tragedy in Yugoslavia. But then, the same charlatans are out there doing the same things to us today.

FaM Landes has been exposing specific examples of this for years. He started the Second Draft web site in order to have a platform to rebut the pernicious misuse of media power- to expose the media’s betrayal of their own best principals of honesty and responsibility.

And it’s not just quitting in Vietnam, or abandoning Israel to the bloody intentions of the Caliphatist Jihad, nor is it only the cover-up of the Media Pack’s betrayal of truth and responsibility in Yugoslavia, the Media Swarm of leftist activists led by the sacrosanct Public Broadcasting System always push their agenda. I heard this interview on PBS a week ago and couldn’t get it out of my mind.
Its a great example of NPR’s monster machine. It is a short interview in which a scientist teaches a reporter a lesson in objectivity and responsible reporting. Listen to it- If it wasn’t so pathetic it would be funny. Clearly the lefties want to make Myanmar into a pariah state just as they have tried to do with Israel on little to no evidence.

Here’s the crucial exchange between the “concerned” Alex Chadwick and tiger researcher Alan Rabinowitz:

CHADWICK: What did you think when you saw the recent demonstrations by the monks there in Myanmar, demonstrations that were put down quite severely by the military with the imprisonment of, well, reports of thousands?

Mr. RABINOWITZ: Well, I wasn’t there so I really didn’t see anything firsthand. How it was handled by the government is something I actually can’t speak to because I’ve heard different reports. My own people in Yangon tell me that the crowds were not nearly as large as the media reported, that the shooting was not nearly as intense. But I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true.

CHADWICK: You know, Alan, some people listening to this would say right there Alan Rabinowitz is crossing the line.

Mr. RABINOWITZ: I know. I thought that as I was saying it.
(Soundbite of laughter)

CHADWICK: He is saying I don’t know what’s going on there when we have reports and videotape of people being shot and we have many reports of people being imprisoned, and how can you not know?

Mr. RABINOWITZ: How can I not know - you do not have videotape of many people being shot. There’s no videotape of many people getting shot there. There’s videotape of a Japanese reporter getting shot. This is what I get very disturbed about, is that when it comes to Myanmar, people seem to want to deal in a lot of rhetoric, in a lot of pre-conceived notions rather than pure facts.
Yes, this government is not the nicest government in the world, but what I have seen in that country doesn’t match up with what the media tries to portray is happening in that country. And I don’t quite understand why people love to hate Myanmar. I’m not an apologist for them. If anybody reads my books, they see that I talk very strongly about some of the bad things which are occurring in that country. But I balance everything. We’re talking about what - what’s happening that’s good and what’s happening that’s bad. And the government seems to respect that kind of balanced honesty.

CHADWICK: Alan Rabinowitz of the Wildlife Conservation Society based in New York. He's the author of "Life in the Valley of Death."
Alan, thank you.

Mr. RABINOWITZ: Thank you, Alex.

I haven’t cut this or changed anything. This is clipped directly from NPR’s transcript of the interview. I’m just surprised that they still have it available online. I would not have been surprised if they had “disappeared” it the same way France 2 has disappeared several minutes of the rushes in the al Durah affair. Chadwick has no answers, no facts, and no further discussion. NPR wants you to believe that they are the ones who know The Truth but you have to just believe it. When his assertions fail to bully Rabinowitz into agreeing that Myanmar should be a pariah to the extent that even the tigers should suffer, the interview is over.

Some might argue, “What’s the difference?” we know that Myanmar’s government is a dictatorship, why should what Alex Chadwick says in this interview concern us?” To them I would say:
Look at the history of what this kind of journalism has done in recent years. Look at the one-sided lies, misrepresentations and hysteria whipped up against the Serbs (not that the Serbs were angels- but they were no worse than the KLA) and the resulting bombings and military actions.
Consider the abandonment of Vietnam and Cambodia to chaos and mass murder in the wake of the discrediting of the Vietnam War.
Most of all, think about the harm still being done today by the tidal wave of blood loosed by the al Durah affair.

These are all cases in which the media has sacrificed honesty and responsibility for activist aims. They have all ended in vastly increased suffering and tragedy.

Printing or broadcasting news that is not factual in pursuit of activist goals is a particular hallmark of the leftist media. Back in September I wrote this :
Yellow Press was born as an outgrowth of Joseph Pulitzer’s vision as a publisher that, in contrast to the generally accepted ideal of impartial journalistic integrity, journalism should be used to as a vehicle of social change. As Wikipedia has it “Pulitzer believed that newspapers were public institutions with a duty to improve society, and he put (his newspaper) The World in the service of social reform.” Of course social reform is one of the early code words for what we today call progressivism and which is, in reality prototypical socialism. Pulitzer was then, as the newspaper establishment in the U.S. is still (with some exceptions) a left-leaning, self-righteous band of socialistic sympathizers.

It is interesting that the film Network identified this danger but didn’t get the source of the threat quite right.

Here is a clip of the “other” (other than “I’m mad as hell..”, that is) great rant in that film.



It’s not the corporations that are the threat, it is the people who think they know the truth. The reporters and the faceless editors and directors who, when they “present” and repackage reality so that it will “improve society”, are presuming to help us. They are elitists and tyrants of the worst kind.

Neo ends her post with this:

“A bunch of unrelated pieces of information that had previously seemed disconnected and chaotic had suddenly fallen into place like the pieces of a puzzle and formed an image I could now read.
This image said: beware the press with an agenda. Some elements of the press seem to have had one then. Perhaps they had one now, as well.
And I found, to my surprise, that the agenda appeared to be substantially the same: to magnify our wrongdoings and those of our allies, to downplay those of the enemy, to simplify matters that were really complex, and to sensationalize.”

The bottom line is that when honesty and responsibility are sacrificed, only the worst elements win. It never serves the purposes of what is right to lie and deceive. Transparent, honest and responsible media would not behave this way.

If we can't have transparent media, we have to find a way to see through the media we have. The first step is to learn to see the way they bully and manipulate us as Neo has here- but there is more.

In my next post, I will go beyond this realization. We have to free our language of false politeness; we can no longer mince words. We have to unshackle our minds from the bonds of Political Correctness and find our voice and our defense before it is too late.

Are Liberals Less Liberal As Media Consumers?

Here’s something we need to investigate further. While researching a major post on Political Correctness, I have run across a study on the web site of the Pew Research for the People and the Press. This study, “sorts voters into homogeneous groups based on values, political beliefs, and party affiliation.” It then looks at various aspects of their behavior and, using survey results. presents statistical evidence and analysis. It’s a big study with a lot of interesting ideas threaded through it. I was enjoying reading through it and was thoroughly sidetracked for a day or so as I read it. One thing jumped out at me and I wanted to pass it on. Second Draft needs to take a hard look at this.

It is not specifically referred to in the written analysis of the article but there is a glaring (and I do mean red, purple and throbbing) anomaly in the data presented. On page 73 of the report, there is a table entitled “Typology Groups and Media Use”. This chart looks at the kinds of media that each political type relies on for their information. It immediately jumped out at me that the largest single political type had the smallest average use of television as an information source. This was no small artifact. The Liberal typology was almost 40% (37.54, to be exact) larger than the next largest group (Conservative Democrats) and their television usage was nearly 20 % (17.55%) lower than the next lowest group (Upbeats).

I decided to drill down into the numbers. Now, this is a little suspect because the numbers are already averaged out and it is not clear how some of them were derived from the research (for example it is not clear whether the break down of the television numbers into categories like network, local, CNN, etc…, reflect some sort of break down of anwers that were asked independently or is the television average was derived from aggregated usage numbers for all categories). But if the numbers are good to begin with, then my manipulations should not be too far out on a statistical limb.

I totaled up the percentages for each of the media cited as main sources of information by each political type. This should give a rough measure of how broad a range of information sources the average subject in each group is accustomed to using.

Here are the numbers I came up with:

Social Conservatives 269
Pro-Government Conservatives 264
Conservative Democrats 262
Upbeats 256
Disadvantaged Democrats 256
Enterprisers 253
Bystanders 242
Disaffecteds 239
Liberals 230

It may have meaning or not (certainly there are methodological questions that would have to be addressed) but the numbers are tantalizing. According to these numbers, Liberals are at the very bottom of the scale for media variety. This implies that, as a group, they tend to draw on a thinner variety of information sources.

On the other hand, the largest conservative typology (Social Conservatives) has a media variety index that is almost 20% (16.955) higher than that of the liberals.

It is also interesting that Liberals rank highest for Internet usage. Anyone reading this post knows very well that, between search engines and link sharing with friends and colleagues, when you read and explore on the internet you are mainly pursuing sources that you agree with.

So, it makes me wonder if what many of us think might be provable; that conservatives tend to look at more possibilities before making up their minds and liberals tend to stick their index fingers into their ears and shout “La, La, La, La” when they come up against information that does not confirm their preconceived ideas.

Useful Media Idiot of the Week Award

If I didn’t believe that I was doing something important, you could not pay me enough to read and think about treacle like this. No wonder papers like The Globe and The Times are shedding readers faster than Jake, my Labrador, is shedding fur.

The Boston Globe web site has a Reuters article that appeared in the Boston Globe newspaper a few days ago entitled Rice seeks Mideast peace deal while Bush in Office under the byline of one Sue Pleming.

In many ways the article is standard Reuters fare which is to say that Ms Pleming seems to go to great lengths to give the appearance that she is providing real information while she is actually carefully observing the Political Correctness Protocol by not saying anything about one side of the conflict that she would not say against the other. Since the Palestinian side wants to destroy Israel and is in the throes of a violent civil war and the Israelis only want to be allowed to live in peace, it makes for some foggy prose and some even more opaque logic. Just look at this couplet of sentence/paragraphs in which the concerns and positions of the Israelis are compared and presented as equivalent to those of the Palestinians. This is a gem of moral relativity.

“In an indication of difficulties ahead, Israel has also put the Palestinians on notice it would not implement an agreement until its security concerns, spelled out in a U.S.-backed peace "road map" formulated in 2003, were met.

The Palestinians have called on Israel to meet its commitments under that blueprint and halt settlement expansion and uproot outposts established in the occupied West Bank without Israeli government permission.”

Of course, the resolute refusal to face up to the hardest truths in the situation only serves the purposes of the worst element. This comparison almost sounds even-handed unless you happen to recall that Israel had already either fulfilled or made a sincere commitment to a majority of the requirements of the “road map” including ceding military and civil control of large portions of what was to become the Palestinian State, before the Palestinians froze the process with the latest intifada. Israel recognized the PA government, endorsed the “two state” solution and pulled out of Gaza altogether. Israel has made a practice of exhibiting remarkable (some say irresponsible) restraint in the face of a steady toll of death, injury and terror as an unrelenting stream of rockets and suicide bombers continue to be launched on Israel, and Abbas still can’t seem to bring himself to recognize the reality of Israel. It is, after all, a Jewish state.


Then again, the politics of access journalism means that she has to avoid saying anything that might damage her ability to get information from the government controlled and censored Palestinian News service. While Israel maintains a free media and allows any news organization equal access in Israel, Pleming knows that she would not have access to information or photos like this one with the story (note the credits: …picture released by the Palestinian Press Office (PPO). …, (REUTERS/Omar Rashidi/PPO/Handout)) if she didn’t represent the Palestinian view they way they want it.


Condoleezza Rice and "The Palestinian Martin Luther King" Mahmoud Abbas

The Israelis, of course, will not punish her (or even make her or her employer the least bit uncomfortable) for her choice. She knows that and so does her boss at Reuters. It makes it easy to choose who to offend when the Palestinians even kidnap and kill reporters they consider their active supporters.


But let that go. That is Garden variety propaganda that can be seen for what it is and debated. It pales alongside this single sentence.

“Bush, who proposed the gathering, is searching for a better legacy than the invasion of Iraq and its chaotic aftermath.”

It may seem innocuous at first glance but this is important. This is press hubris and fictionalizing in its most naked form. It betrays the total lack of discipline that is endemic to a media that is so smug and self-important that it feels empowered to read thoughts into President Bush’s mind without even the pretense of attribution or qualification. Does the author say “some sources speculate…” or “It is thought…” or even “It is my theory that…”? No, She states this pure fabrication as if it were something that everyone knows and acknowledges.

The implication, of course is that President Bush thinks Iraq is a failure ad a lost cause and is trying to cover for “his mistake”. A fair presentation would at least acknowledge that President Bush has been able to point to remarkable progress in Iraq in the past few months and has never said that he feels his legacy to be sullied by Iraq. The implication is pure propaganda and has no place in an honest media.

Now set it alongside of the resolute refusal to see that the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state means that they do not accept its right to exist. How does Sue Pleming penetrate so cynically and deeply into the mind of President Bush while remaining so absolutely blind, so intentionally ignorant about what the Palestinians are happy to tell her right to her face?

Obviously the face is unwilling to hear and understand.

I am at pains to expose this little sentence from a relatively insignificant article not because it is in any way earthshaking but, precisely because is so insignificant as to be both barely noticeable and powerfully subliminal in its effect. The smugness it represents, the Politically Correct instinct to make information that does not conform to the model of reality that must be defended are the most insidious and deadly sins of the media. The bland and inert Trojan Horse of an article in which they are wrapped only make them a more deadly.

Update:
We are accepting your opinions and nominations for a Lifetime Acheivement Awards post - There will be catagories and commentary. Either add a comment below with your thoughts or email [yaacovbenmoshe(at)comcast(dot)net] me.

Join the Fight for an Honest Media

Sorry I’ve been away.
It’s been nearly three weeks since my father’s passing and I am beginning to rub my eyes and take notice of the world again. Those of you have read my last post will have an idea of how profoundly I have felt this loss. The truth is that for the past three weeks I have been unable (with the exception of that obit/eulogy immediately below this) to write. This has not been so much a paralysis as a respite. There is certainly sadness and pain but there is no depression or despair- it’s just that a rather devastating hole has been torn in my life and I have had to retreat and reflect for a while.

That’s done.
My pause for reflection has renewed my energy, reinforced my courage to continue and confirmed my confidence in what I am doing.

I’m back.
Not only that, I have big news. I have alluded in past posts to an announcement that I would soon be making. Here it is:

The announcement.
I have, over the past four months or so, been talking about forming a new non-profit organization with a fellow blogger whom I admire immensely. Richard Landes of Augean Stables and Second Draft. Richard is not only a blogger, he is also an associate professor of history at Boston University. We began working together in earnest when I helped him pull together the petition initiative to support Philipe Karsenty. Karsenty was found guilty of libeling France2 and Charles Enderlin by pointing out that the televised report of what Enderlin claimed to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al Durah by Israeli gunfire really appeared to have been a staged scene in which nobody died.

Rather than admit that his report, which slandered the Jewish state and provoked a wave of violence, anti-Semitism and terror that is still propagating today, was either a grotesque mistake or an obvious fake, Enderlin and France2 sued Kasenty.

Landes, has, for the last four years, (Summary of activity is here) been a lone and courageous voice in exposing this blood libel and showing how destructive and pervasive the sort of manipulation of a compliant mass media by anti-western and anti-Semitic Islamists it represents is. Even more importantly, he has been able, in a scholarly and non-politicized way, to show that one of the best defenses for Israel, The United States of America and (by extension) Western Civilization lies in first isolating and inoculating against the pernicious auto-immune disease that the western media has come to be.


The outline of our partnership was already well defined before my father began his last steep decline five weeks ago. We will be combining our efforts under the banner of a new non-profit organization which is now filed for under the U.S. tax code. The name of our new organization, Second Draft (shared by one of Landes’ pre-established websites) plays upon the adage that “journalism is the first draft of history”. Second Draft will undertake to study the media, its behavior and its power. We take an entirely new approach to producing our second draft of history. We will go deeper than the usual correction of individual inaccuracies and sorting out the bias in various of stories. Our ultimate goal will be to use certain key dossiers (like the one already compiled on the al Durah affair) that at once illuminate a particular case, but at the same time permit an exploration of the key reasons for our media's vulnerability to manipulation and its reflexively anti-Western tenor. We aim to provide not just analysis but a new strategy for combating the ways in which the Western media gets exploited by the information warfare of the weaker side in the asymmetrical warfare between Western Civilization and its enemies: The global Jihad of Caliphate Islam, the infantile nihilism of the radical left, the ignorant neo-Nazi white supremacists and any other unsavory, regressive ideology that seems to need their sympathy and “tolerance”.

Permit me give you an analogy that comes out of my recent contemplations. As I mentioned below, my dad was a shipboard radio operator during WWII. His telegraph key was the conduit for the information that animated his whole ship and kept it safe within the convoy. He had to be careful that the information he decoded from his telegraph key was both accurate and complete and that the source of it was authentic and secure. If an enemy had been able to infiltrate bad information, or even to limit the use of some important information, it would have been very dangerous indeed.

Until very recently, our mass media have, like that old telegraph operator with his trusty key on the ship, been our only source of information about the world. If he were to decide not to decode and pass on warnings of a submarine wolf pack operating nearby because that would be bad for morale (as the msm did by not reporting on the the threat of Islamic extremists- until 09/11 ) or fail to inform the captain of a planned convoy maneuver because he didn’t think it was important (as the mainstream often does when they use euphemisms like “youth” or “structured groups” when they have to report about Muslim Violence); or if he decided to make up reports about things that never happened because he felt sure that such manipulations were so true to life that even if they are not true they are an accurate representation of things that happen “all the time” (which is exactly what Enderlin and his supporters have said about the al Durah affair. The internet (especially, the “blogosphere”) has begun to eat away at the hegemony of the main stream media. Through the blogosphere, many critical omissions and misrepresentations have been exposed.

Richard Landes recognized the power of the blogosphere to transform the scene when, after a year of fruitlessly knocking at the door of the MSM with material on Pallywood and the al Durah affair, he witnessed Rathergate, that "Gutenberg moment" when a new medium of communication crashed the party despite the efforts of the older media, gate keepers of the public sphere.

Landes’ work on the al Durah affair has exposed a critical flaw in the information pipeline. It has become obvious that much of the mainstream media is subject to either not reporting aspects of the world that they find politically incorrect or accepting bad information uncritically or passing it along to an unsuspecting public as “News”.

In a ground-breaking book on the media’s ignoble role in the tragedy of the Yugoslavia, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Peter Brock quoted a long section of an article from The New Republic in which Tom Rosenstiel pointed out that the major news outlets and agencies (with CNN leading the way) have reduced their correspondents and staffs to such a degree that in order to find enough content to fill the existing news paper, glossy magazine stock and broadcast time, they resort to buying prepackaged reports. This means that much of the information we wind up with is public relations materials and propaganda that have been supplied to our networks by national news agencies from around the world that are really nothing more than extensions of the foreign ministries of the governments many of which are often very hostile to U.S. and Western interests.

Central to our reasons for starting Second Draft is a belief that even if a totally objective media is impossible, an honest media that will:

1. report as accurately and relevantly as possible
2. reveal sources
3. check facts
and
4. be open about their biases and prejudices,
is the only acceptable source of information for a free society.

It is not enough to “keep the media honest” by reacting to abuses we also have to raise the awareness and sharpen the powers of discrimination in the public. We have great plans to do both of these things. We’ll be running conferences, making more films and creating some exciting web initiatives.

As soon as we are up and running I'll be leaving my "day job" and moving to Second Draft full time. Through it all I'll still be posting here on Breath of the Beast- we are commited to our "web roots".

The blogosphere is a new and valuable way to keep a running monitor on how well the media supports all of these requirements. It has awakened millions to the problem and the awakening is spreading.

The Awakening
This awakening reminds me of a dream I have had a couple of times in the past year.
In the dream I am walking alone, as night is beginning to fall, in a tropical forest. A feeling of disembodied dread fills me as I shoulder my way through a profusion of underbrush under a high canopy of palms. The sun is low in the sky still and the evening air is still bright- but just beginning to lose the daytime heat.. As I come to a break in a wall of vegetation, I see that I am on the edge of someone’s manicured backyard. There are two chaises lounge lawn chairs side by side with a man sleeping on one and a woman on the other. My feelings of foreboding continue to build.

As I watch, they begin to stir and rub their eyes. They look around with a vague air of alarm. Suddenly he points to the horizon. There is a great fire raging just over the horizon. It has made no noise and the heat from it was easy enough to ignore during the tropical day. You would never know it was there if you didn’t look right at it. Its glow suffuses that quarter of the sky with an angry red glow and a great plume of black smoke is rising above it.

The riots in the streets of Europe, the bloodthirsty beheading of Daniel Pearl, the Beslan massacre, the constant bombardment of Israel by Arab and Iranian client terror groups, the Iranian atomic threat, and, of course, 9/11 have merely been a silent fire just over the horizon for most of us, not because it is harmless but because the media has not been doing an honest job of informing us of the common aspects of those crimes. An honest media, one that may not be totally objective but will yet be honest enough to acknowledge that fact and apply and maintain a strict discipline over its own subjectivity.


Commercial:
Second Draft is in its infancy, we have secured a small start-up stake of funding but we need all the help you can spare for this crucial effort. If you would like to help us with your donation (we have filed for tax-free status!), you can click on the donation page here at Breath of the Beast or send a check to:
Second Draft
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All gifts will be gratefully acknowledged.

The Queen of the Toads

A month ago I began my post about how we in the west are locked in deadly denial about the oil money that is the means by which the Caliphate Islamists keep their dreams of world Shari’a domination going with an image from my childhood. The snake devouring the toad left a very powerful impression on me. I described it this way:

I crouched down and watched for a while until the snake, with a subtle but urgent, peristaltic motion relaxed its hold instantaneously and inched up its teeth on the toad’s body- engulfing another three percent or so of its length. That gulp filled me with a claustrophobia and dread so deep that I couldn’t stand to see any more. I walked away- leaving them to their fates- one the devourer and the other the acquiescent devoured.

I’ll never forget the way the toad looked at me. It comes back to me time and again Even now, forty years later; the blank, blinking eye of the toad haunts me. Of course it is ridiculous to speculate on the motives, behavior and emotions of the toad. I don’t know why toads behave the way they do when snakes begin to swallow them. I do know that I am reminded of it very often by the behavior of my fellow human beings.

It is the look you get from people who are prepared to ignore any fact, accept any contradiction and succumb to any peril in order to support their current state of belief and comfort.

The Mainstream Media too remind me of a legion of toads. Claiming “evenhandedness” they write their niggling articles about “disproportionate responses” and “humiliation” as the teeth inch their way up the body of western civilization. Their blank refusal to report the actual content of the two warring sides, even in issues of life and death import for their own civilization, (the culture that gave them their life and the words with which they dismiss it) is so much worse than the surrender of the toad to the embrace of the snake that it beggars comparison. These people are supposed to be our eyes and ears- our warning system. Instead they are lulling and placating us even as they encourage our avowed killers.

Even in Israel, on the very most exposed outpost of the west, the place where the teeth have sunk in first, there are toads. A perfect illustration of how even a toad who is swallowed all the way up to her eyes can remain placidly, calm and self-assuredly sanguine is this interview with Amira Hass in which she tells a South American journalist:

“My hope is that my fellow countrymen Israel become aware, before it is too late, that military superiority doesn’t guarantee security or normal life in the region. Peace and Justice are not incompatible. It will be easy to establish peace in the region from the moment we abandon the policy of exclusion imposed on Palestinians ever since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. “

This blindness must, officially, make Hass the Queen of the Toads. The monumental absurdity of it has to be obvious to anyone with wit or will. It was never the policy of Israel, especially at her inception to exclude anyone. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel. They vote and are represented in the government more freely than in any Arab-ruled country in the world. Arab Israelis who are not blinded by religious hatred and genocidal rage, prefer “living in the “Israeli hell” to “the PA’s heaven” by a large majority.

The Arab armies that assaulted Israel in the moment of her birth did not do so because of settlements, or exclusion, or right of return, they attacked because the entire Arab/Islamic world viewed itself as shamed because The Jews (who for centuries they had subjugated, murdered at will and viewed as subhuman) were being allowed to have sovereignty of a miniscule, poverty stricken strip of land that some Arabs lived on also.

In spite of the fact that Israel intended to (and did in fact) respect the property and rights of those Arab citizens who stayed, the Arab nations and local leadership insisted upon feeling humiliated. The Arabs living in Israel today have a higher standard of living than any Arabs living in the “Arab World”. They view this as a humiliation too- and it is- but not in the way they conciev it. They should be humiliated that Israel, as small and bereft of oil wealth as she is, is a far better place to live than any Arab country on earth. Hass’ sympathy with their provocative rage and humiliation tells us far more about Hass and her dear old Arabs than it does about Israel.

But the thorny crown atop Hass’s “Queen of the Toads” regalia is her absolute insistence in the equivalency of the Arab and the Israeli cause. This is how the toad pretends that everything is comparable- How it rationalizes not fighting the progress of the snake. After all if neither side is better or worse what difference does it make?

“Our particular ethnic condition, on the other hand, cannot lead us to a mass behavior that inflicts pain and sufferance to others. Self-criticism and the criticism to oppressive regimes are ancestral Jewish values of which I am proud.”

Freedom of speech is essential but it carries a grave responsibility to pursue it with discrimination and judgment. Of course, Hass is a professional critic and when she equates the Palestinian aspiration to eliminate Israel with the dream of Israel to live in peace and security, when she suggests that Israel is oppressive on anything resembling the scale of her Arab neighbors, she gives us an important insight into the paralysis of the cultural death wish.

Hass’ ideology prevents her from seeing how things really are. She thinks deeply about things but because she is a leftist, in the grip of kitsch emotionalism, relativism and cultural anomie, there are certain things she must not think. For example, she cannot even entertain the possibility that one culture is any better than the other- this would run the risk of cultural imperialism. She is prohibited from advocating for her own people for fear of chauvinism. There is a myriad of “no think” zones like these in the progressive mind. They set a whole universe of important facts off-limits to the thought process. It is a particularly dangerous form of selective blindness.

Whatever it was that so anesthetized the toad that it never struggled or panicked, is a mystery to me. Since we cannot converse with the toad, it is an “animal behavior” that can only be explained or explored to a certain degree of imprecision. The cultural paralysis of the west today, however can and must be understood.

Slowly, but in inexorable increments, a disaster is engulfing the outlying precincts of the west. The atrocity of 9/11, the car fires of France, the transit bombs of Britain and the street murders of Van Gough and Fortuyn in the Netherlands are only the most obvious signs of an agonizingly slow but apparently irresistable process, and even these are explained and excused as the blinking toads prattle about “Why they hate us” and how we are “cultural imperialists”, focusing on our small faults and equating them with the horrific intentions of our enemy.

Those few of us who have begun to awaken, to fight and to raise the alarm meet with the same blank stares and uncomprehending placidity. Often it seems the only unease we are able to raise rebounds on us. We become objects of horror- just as the toad looked at me and tried to obey its instinct to flee from its only hope to live.

I pray that it is not too late for the entire west. I know that America has a fair chance. I have the sense that Australia is waking up and has the vitality to survive. But Europe, old Europe, with her vitality crippled by her heavy, useless guilt and anger about the Holocaust and her moral energy sapped by her post-Christian relativism seems unable to see or respond to her own danger. Time is clearly short- most of Europe sits and blinks with its haunches firmly in the maw of the serpent. Some hopeful signs emerge; the election of Sarkozy, and this incident but for each one of these there are a hundred small gulps by the snake and vacant blinks by the toad. But it is Israel, on the front-line for so long, bombarded daily, weighed down by ineffective, self-absorbed leadership and lulled by the likes of Hass the Toad Queen that I fear for the most.

Why the Liberal Media Whores Out for Terror

As I have said for the past few weeks, I have a major piece on the way- It is almost done but here is an out-take from it that will give you a hint about what it is about.

It is no coincidence that the ascendance of emotion over logic is a particular characteristic of fascist Islam. But it also runs through the entirety of the left from “the center” out to the farthest radical left wing. The emotional objection creeps up on logic and warns it off many subjects and points of views. There is always a point at which “how can such a thing be allowed to happen in our country” slides into “It makes me uncomfortable when you say that,” and that turns in to, “You just can’t say that kind of thing” and then metamorphoses into the overriding taboo of multiculturalism- “You can’t apply western standards to other cultures…” No matter how much evidence they are presented with, they are unable to understand facts and ideas because of their commitment to their emotions about the situation.

Under the equivocal spell of multiculturalism, the rage, humiliation and vengeance of the Caliphate Muslims becomes so enthralling as to be irresistible to a mass media that thrives only on mass appeal. It’s maudlin emotions and simplistic logic suffice as a vehicle for the bloody spectacle.

Milan Kundera would call this constriction and strangulation of debate by the incremental advance of emotional reactions “Kitsch”.

It is the ultimate indictment of the Main Stream Media and he wrote it in 1985!

Here is Kundera on Kitsch:
“The word "kitsch" describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel…Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as mass media come to embrace and infiltrate more and more of our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code.” The Art of the Novel, Jerusalem Address: The Novel and Europe, Milan Kundera, 1986, Harper & Row