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.

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:
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All gifts will be gratefully acknowledged.

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

The Media - Like Stink on Gaza

Once again Richard Landes finds the story no one in the mainstream media will tell and few in the west have the courage to hear. A huge, open cesspool, part of an immense network of festering waste products has burst this past week and swept away an entire village of 25 houses. At least four people were killed and an unspecified number are still missing. Here’s the BBC story about it.

Note that, in the article cited, the Palestinian leaders immediately attempted to blame Israel and the west for the problem but were cut off at the knees when, “Stuart Shepherd, the UN's humanitarian aid officer in Gaza, said the Umm al-Naser plant had not been affected by the aid boycott, noting there had long been warnings about the plant.” This is especially damning as most UN officials are quick to unfairly accuse Israel and excuse Palestinian incompetence.

This is not anything to gloat or make smug about, this is a tragedy but it is also a crucial opportunity to learn a lesson about the Palestinian plight and the reasons for it. It is the very epitome of the problem with the Arab world.

My Father served in the Merchant Marine during WWII. He told me that at every North African or Eastern Mediterranean port he sailed into, he could smell it from 25 miles out at sea. That smell was the palpable odor of a people trying to live in the modern world with a governmental organization that was not up to the task of providing the services required. The stink that must be emanating from Gaza now is just more of the same.

As Landes puts it:
”The Palestinians still have an insane war to conduct, so they continue to do what little damage they can, while in an Israeli headlock. But rather than say uncle and get on with their (potentially, powerful lives as the cutting edge of an Arab/Muslim entry into the world of modern productivity), they prefer to struggle till they sprain their muscles, as in this sewage spill."

My only Quibble with Landes is that this is much more than a “muscle sprain”. If they thought they felt humiliated by Israel and the west before this, how must they feel now? Unable to make the rational choice of taking some small part of their assets and energy that they continually put into acquiring, stockpiling and discharging weapons toward Israel, they have created a colossal mess. They have ignored the third (food, shelter, sanitation, etc…)most basic need of human life to such a degree that they are now literally awash in their own excrement.

It seems insane, and it is. Here is a people who, along with the Lebanese, once were thought of as the most modern, secular and sophisticated Arabs in the world. The Caliphists and the despotic Palestinian ruling class have them and much of the western media and left wing convinced that they are reduced to wallowing in their own excrement because of Israel. Israel is no more the cause of Palestinian misery than it is the Syrian-led destruction of Lebanese civil society. How much longer can their leaders divert their attention from this insanity by blaming Israel and America? How much longer will they allow the dark forces of Caliphist Islam and the ruling elite of the Arab world to use those excuses for their venality and incompetence? How could this people have allowed their leaders to stunt the growing financial prosperity, social progress and modernization?

Once upon a time, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Then Syria moved in and for the past thirty years it has been a terrorist haven and a place of religious intolerance, sectarian violence and fear. It is a terrible irony that now that tired old metaphor has been turned inside out under the same Caliphist pressure. These days, Paris is fast becoming the Beirut of Europe.

The leadership of the Caliphate movement and the presidents and dictators of the despot states of Arabia knew that they would not stay in power long if they allowed the freedom and modernity that was growing in Lebanon to survive. This is why they forced the Palestinian refugees to remain in camps in Lebanon and fed them guns and Islamic mind control. They knew if they kept the Palestinians in poverty and strife and pitted them against the free Lebanese state, there would be trouble.

It was no accident that the nephew of the Mufti of Jerusalem (that infamous ally of Hitler and the man who, more than anyone else, succeeded in encouraging the Arabs living in the land when Israel was created to rise and flee, creating the refugee problem to begin with) rose to become the leader of the Palestinian people. That unprepossessing, grimy little man with his receding chin and irritating speaking voice rose to power not on charisma but on power-broking, outside financing and murder. The Arabs put him in place and set up the Palestinians to be eternal refugees because they knew that this formerly secular, better educated people, like their neighbors the Lebanese, left alone to find better leaders on their own, would settle in (as the Lebanese did after WWII and the “Nakba“) and create a new, more modern and greater Arab entity than the oil-rich, culture poor majority can even dream of.

The despots, ruling families and clerical elites of the Arab world would sacrifice anything to maintain their positions of power. They foment eternal war, poison the minds of their children, starve their people to buy weapons, murder millions of innocents - their own and ours, they would even see their people literally drown in excrement rather than help them to live better lives.

This is why they raped and ruined Lebanon.

And it is also why they backed and financed the terror stooge Arafat to keep the war against the Israelis alive. Arafat knew nothing about making a state work; he didn’t even know how to stop making war when he had an opportunity to make a state, but he certainly know how to secure arms and siphon billions off for his own fortune. This is his legacy, a people helplessly awash in their own excrement- not because they are stupid or dirty but because their leaders have been both for too long.

Even now, our media does not inform us about the stench of mismanagement, repression and corruption. Could it be that they are so dumb they can't even identify the smell of shit? No, they smell it all right and when they encounter any whiff of it here in the U.S. they revel in it. They roast the Mayors, Governors, Representatives, Senators and Presidents responsible. They blow the small ones out of proportion and the make careers out of the big ones. Look at the two years of bathos in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. As bad as Katrina was, it is not a hair on a flea in comparison with the ongoing, rolling human tragedy that is the entire Arab world. Oh, but it would be racist and ethnocentric to mention that- wouldn’t it?

By exaggerating the peccadilloes of the open, self-policing west on one hand and not reporting the utter catastrophe that is life in the Arab/Islamic world, our own western media is playing a critical role in excusing and enabling the Caliphists. Only holding the responsible people to account will make the situation better. The media has to stop shrinking from reminding the “Poor Palestinians” (and us) that their leaders have betrayed them and that the priority they place on struggle is not just unsanitary but suicidal as well. They need to understand that their behavior does nothing but deepen their humiliation.

Shame on the Arab leadership, shame on the Arab people for suffering such leaders and, most of all, shame on the western media, for failing to inform us of the stink.

The Hammy Awards- A Proposal

Here is an idea I have been toying with for some time- I posted as a comment at Augean Stables yesterday. What do you think?

The “Hammy” Awards

The name of the awards derives from MoHAMed the first name of the 9-year-old boy whose faked death scene was the defining image that led up to the "Al Aqsa" intifada. It also has the added implication that comes along with the practice of calling hack actors "Hams".

It is high time we step back and admit that we have to hand it to the the Islamists, the left and, in particular, the Palestinians. When the staged film clip of Mohamed al-Dura’s faked death was allowed to burn itself into the consciousness of the world, it was the crowning triumph of many long years of an increasingly bold-faced effort that uses the mainstream news media to slander and libel the Jewish State. It should have then been apparent to Jews all over the world that we are losing the media war. The more we are confronted with lies and rage from the “Arab Street” the more we stiffen up and try to be reasonable. The result is that we look like the poor dumb kid in the schoolyard whose only answers are “I didn’t do it” or “He hit me first”. It doesn’t matter that we are telling the truth- those answers don’t fly in the schoolyard and they don’t fly in the mass media either.

As American Jews and Israelis we have to admit that we are not “good copy. We Jews in general and Israelis in particular, grimly pursue ethics and truthfulness. We are dogged researchers and careful about our language. We have a touching but boring faith that being right and dignified will “win out”. We have been repeatedly dumbfounded that we are ignored and even ridiculed.

Its not just Jews who don’t get it. Michael Moore has been able to get away with all kinds of fraud disguised as documentary for decades. He is just beginning to get a little of his own treatment.

We just don’t get it. Most westerners and, especially, Jews don’t think intimidation and deception are the way to win arguments. We despise those who threaten people’s lives (let alone kill them) or riot in the streets when someone says something we don’t like, we answer them with reason, logic and a sincere expectation that if we do a good enough job at investigating and explaining the situation, the truth will win out. Dull, dull, dull. It just doesn’t play well for the news cameras. Apparently, while we weren’t paying attention, the court of world opinion has become the equivalent of the audience of the Jerry Springer Show where the crowd cheers most for the loudest, most obscene threats, the most violent lunges and the wildest haymakers.

That’s why we need to take a moment to recognize how out-classed we have been in the battle for world opinion. It’s not that we are going to abandon our love of truth and the pursuit of justice, it’s just that we have to find a way to make our side of the story both appealing and understandable. We need to repackage it in a “sound bite”.

By acknowledging the success of the other side’s tactics by instituting the Hammy Awards we:

1. Condense our message into a bumper sticker that is more attractive and eloquent than “they are liars and fakers”.

2. Put them on the defensive- for once the will not be “taking credit” for attacks on civilians or accusing anybody of anything.

3. Put aside our serious faces and our dogged pursuit of justice aside for one day and showcase the Jewish sense of humor that the world has loved in so many Jewish comedians, artists and writers. This is a lot more appealing than the usual humorless Israeli generals and politicians who are the traditional spokespeople. It would be great if we could get some well-known Jewish comedians to host the presentations- that would assure media coverage.

4. Embarrass the News Agencies and Media outlets and put them on notice that we can do more than just complain. We can convincingly impugn their reputations in a way the world will pay attention to if they allow the propaganda machine to use them.
5. Raise the indignation of the intelligent News Consumer who will, no matter what their feelings about Israel will be angry at having been fooled by the media’s carelessness and propagation of such transparent fakery.

The awards could be given in various categories of false news. Possible categories might include: Spurious Massacres, Faked Civilian Target Damage, Photoshop Tampering and “Trick Photography”, Untrue War Crime Accusations and Stage Managed Media Events.

Each award could be given to recipients in two divisions one for the originators (be they Islamic agents or biased Nongovernmental Agencies) and one for the complicit media stooges. So, for instance, in the Spurious Massacre category there will be two recipients, one for the fabricator or Non-Governmental Organization official who did the most to create the impression that it existed and the other for the Mainstream Media stooge who was most responsible for it becoming a reality in the eyes of World Opinion.

How about it? Anybody out there have any muscle or lucre to put behind this idea?