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On the refusal to recognize Palestine

By Matthew Graber  | Mondoweiss | August 15, 2011

I’ve been reading Judith Butler and Edward Said a lot lately. I’m interested in power dynamics and what it is that drives people to do terrible things in this world.  When I came to Said’s commentary (The Question of Palestine, p.9) on the Zionist slogan of Israel Zangwill for Palestine – “A land without people for a people without land” – I was stirred. Suddenly I had flashes to all of those comments that I see posted all over the internet, on Youtube and Mondo. It was a very visceral reaction to Said’s words.

Some people argue that there has never been a land known as Palestine. Some of these people may point out that, within the Western construct of nation-states, the term “Palestine” has been used to denote a land in the Middle East only as an administrative term during the Roman Empire and then under British mandate in 1922 following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

And I wanted to verbalize to some of my friends and acquaintances why I am ever frustrated by the refusal of Palestine, and to explain how this refusal constitutes racism and allows for continuing violence against the Palestinian people to this day.

An Arab people living, as they referred to it, in a land known as Palestine is documented back to at least the 7th century (Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from A.D. 650 to 1500 Translated from the Works of the Medieval Arab Geographers).

But we needn’t consult a geographer or historian to recognize this as true. We just need to listen to a Palestinian.

And herein lies the problem that I have.

In order to listen to a Palestinian, one must be able to hear their voice, and to give that voice consideration and legitimation. The refusal to recognize a land known as Palestine coincides with the refusal to consider the Arab people who live there – to refuse to recognize their existence, their humanity, their mortality, and their voices.

And so refusing to recognize a land as Palestine and a people known as Palestinian actually is to refuse to recognize the violence that the Zionist project of Israel has inflicted upon the Arab people of Palestine, and to refuse to recognize the continuing violence of that project today.

Just earlier this week Israel authorized the construction of 1,600 homes in East Jerusalem – constituting even more land stolen from Palestinians for the state of Israel. The apartheid wall being built by Israel continues to confiscate Palestinian land for the exclusive use of Israelis. Farmers across the West Bank have their farmland taken and their crops destroyed. The blockade of Gaza at all ports of entry – land, sea, and air – does not allow for enough food or medical supplies to reach the 1.5 million people living there. The Palestinian people in the West Bank are allowed 50 gallons of water a day per household (the UN says that people need at least 75 gallons to survive) while the Israelis in the settlements of the West Bank use 250 gallons of water a day per household. Palestinian children are abducted and coerced by Israeli soldiers. Palestinians are harrassed at the over 200 Israeli checkpoints throughout the West Bank. Thousands of Palestinians linger in Israeli jails.

This is not historical violence. This is what is happening today, August 15th, 2011, in the Middle East.

And so, I want you to consider who it is that considers Palestinian voices. Why doesn’t the press talk about this violence inflicted upon the Palestinian people? Why don’t people – you, me, people the world over – protest this violence? What happens during the daily protests of Palestinians?

So every time you hear somebody say, “There has never been a country called Palestine,” I want you to consider this note. And I want you to say, “Hey! That’s racism” And then consider how that racism pervades our society. And fight back.

August 15, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

French journal of record peddles Zionist propaganda

By David Cronin – The Electronic Intifada – 08/14/2011

Is it impossible to escape from Israel-related propaganda?

Yesterday, I was in a Brussels coffee shop, where I picked up a copy of Le Monde. In a section marked “The laboratories of the future”, the French daily had a full-page feature about the Israeli Institute for Technology in Haifa, which is better known as the Technion.

Described by the paper’s headline writer as a “high-tech Eden”, the university was lavished with praise for its innovative work on treating Parkinson’s disease and sending microsatellites into Space. Peretz Lavie, the university’s president, was quoted as arguing that the Technion was a model for coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian students and that there would be peace in the Middle East if everyone else could follow the Technion’s example. Indeed, the only hint that the region’s problems may encroach on the campus was in a paragraph about how students sometimes have to drop their books to fight Israel’s wars (such as the attack on Lebanon in 2006).

It seems clear that Laurent Zecchini, the author of this piece, either relied entirely on the university’s authorities for information or had no interest in exploring its military links further. For if he did a little googling, he should have easily found a comprehensive study on the Technion by Tadamon!, a Palestine solidarity organization based in Canada.

Harmony in Haifa?

That study confronts the Technion’s official drivel. Far from being a place of harmony, Palestinian students in Haifa have been treated in an overtly racist manner. Last year, 10 such students were arrested when they staged a protest against Israel’s murder of nine activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Yet there were no arrests of Zionist students who organized a larger counter-demonstration, which unlike the Palestinian one, was not authorized by the police.

Furthermore, the Technion has a history of close cooperation with the Israeli arms companies Rafael and Elbit, both of which supplied weapons used in the offensive against Gaza in 2008 and 2009. Technion has even joined forces with Rafael to run a business administration course specifically geared for that company’s managers.

Had Zecchini felt inclined to do a little more homework, he might also have got in touch with the Alternative Information Center, a campaign group working in Jerusalem and the West Bank. It has drawn attention to how Technion’s inventions include a remote-controlled bulldozer, designed to help the Israeli military demolish Palestinian homes.

The Technion, incidentally, is taking part in numerous EU-financed scientific research activities. And these activities have been enjoying some uncritical media attention of their own lately.

Mesmerized by murder

Home in Dublin last month, I saw an article in The Irish Times celebrating how the EU will be devoting a mammoth €7 billion to research in 2012. As the author of the article, Conor O’Carroll from the Irish Universities Association, didn’t acknowledge that Israel (including its arms industry) will be among the beneficiaries of this largesse, I contacted the paper’s editors asking if I could write an opinion piece rectifying this omission. Not a chance, I was told; the news agenda is way too crowded at the moment.

Somehow, though, The Irish Times has been able to find space in the not-too-distant past to promote Israel’s scientific triumphs. In May, it ran a puff piece about how Israel has “the highest density of start-ups in the world” and how it has been able to turn its “intermittent wars” to its advantage. “Military units often act as incubators for tech start-ups,” journalist Ian Campbell wrote. Mesmerized by this success story, Campbell forgot to trace how the products of this enterprising culture end up as tools of oppression.

Both Le Monde and The Irish Times are considered journals of record in their respective countries. It is a measure of how amenable they are to Israeli spin, that they are happy to present Zionist canards as undisputed facts.

Reading them often reminds me of my favorite comment from George Orwell: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

August 14, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

State Department Grants $200K To Discredited Neocon-Aligned Middle East Media Watchdog

MEMRI was cited 16 times in the so-called manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik

By Ali Gharib | Think Progress | August 12, 2011

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department announced a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Middle East media watchdog closely aligned with U.S. neoconservatives and Israel’s hawkish security establishment and rightist Likud Party. The grant was awarded “to conduct a project that documents anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East.” The announcement continues:

This grant will enable MEMRI to expand its efforts to monitor the media, translate materials into ten languages, analyze trends in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and glorification, and increase distribution of materials through its website and other outlets.

Finding examples of anti-Semitism is already a robust MEMRI project and one wonders why exactly they needed the cash: According to publicly available tax filings, MEMRI had nearly $5 million in revenue in 2007 and more than $4.5 million in revenue in 2008.

What’s more troubling, MEMRI has faced accusations of mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources to portray regional media and attitudes in an overly-negative fashion. One of the most common issues has been with MEMRI’s mistranslations which appear to show anti-Semitism on thin evidence. In 2007, CNN correspondent Atika Shubert checked MEMRI’s translations of a Palestinian children’s program against those provided by the cable news channel’s own interpreters:

Media watchdog MEMRI translates one caller as saying – quote – ‘We will annihilate the Jews.’ But, according to several Arabic speakers used by CNN, the caller actually says ‘The Jews are killing us.’ MEMRI told us it stood by its translation.

In other instances, MEMRI has been accused of twisting translations to portray criticisms of Israel and its driving ideology, Zionism, as anti-Semitic. In 2006, Rima Barakat, a Palestinian and Muslim activist and one-time Republican candidate for the Colorado state assembly, wrote in the Rocky Mountain News:

Halim Barakat (no relation), a professor at Georgetown University, published an article in Al-Hayat Daily of London titled “The wild beast that Zionism created: Self-destruction.” By the time MEMRI “translated” it, the title was distorted to “Jews have lost their humanity.” Barakat objected, “Every time I wrote Zionism, MEMRI replaced the word by Jew or Judaism. They want to give the impression that I’m not criticizing Israeli policy, but that what I’m saying is anti-Semitic.” It seems obvious that MEMRI is adamant on stigmatizing anyone who criticizes Israel and/or Zionism as being anti Jewish.

In a 2002 article, then-Middle East editor of the British Guardian newspaper Brian Whitaker criticized MEMRI for inaccuracies that reflected an agenda:

As far as relations between the west and the Arab world are concerned, language is a barrier that perpetuates ignorance and can easily foster misunderstanding.

All it takes is a small but active group of Israelis to exploit that barrier for their own ends and start changing western perceptions of Arabs for the worse.

The organization was founded as a U.S. tax-exempt non-profit in 1998 by now-Hudson Institute Mideast policy chief Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American, and current MEMRI president, Israeli Yigal Carmon, a 20-year veteran of the Israel Defense Forces (where he spent five years running Israel’s occupation of the West Bank) and top adviser to two Likud governments. An early archived version of the “about page” of MEMRI’s website lists five staff members, three of whom (including Carmon) have backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence. The same page lists one of MEMRI’s missions as “emphasiz(ing) the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel” — though the line has since disappeared from the website.

In addition to providing journalists and the public with translations, the media watchdog has attracted the attention of burgeoning (and closely linked) European and American anti-Muslim movements. MEMRI was cited 16 times in the so-called manifesto of anti-Muslim right-wing Norwegian terrorist Anders Brevik, showing up even more when MEMRITV was included.

MEMRI’s board of directors and board of advisers read as a veritable who’s who of right-wing supporters of Israel — including many neoconservative figues and their close allies — such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Steve Emerson, Norman Podhoretz and Alan Dershowitz.

August 12, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Syria: TIME Magazine’s Desperate Lies

TIME claims to “sneak” into Syria, still bases entire report on “witness” accounts.

Tony Cartalucci | Activist Post | August 11, 2011

Claiming to be written in Hama, Syria, TIME’s latest article “Exclusive: A Visit to Hama, the Rebel Syrian City that Refused to Die” attempts to reestablish the US State Department’s sagging narrative regarding unrest they themselves funded, organized and are now openly promoting, this time, (allegedly) directly on the ground at the epicenter of the unrest. TIME’s report runs immediately into convenient obstacles preventing them from accessing anything remotely resembling evidence and, instead, defers once again to eyewitness accounts by admitted members of the opposition.

TIME first describes two of Hama’s hospitals guarded by the Syrian army which our intrepid reporter is unable to approach. Acknowledging the impossibility of verifying opposition claims, TIME decides to air them anyway stating, “by some accounts, security forces were killing wounded protesters in the hospitals,” echoing the now verified lies used to initiate war with Libya. TIME continues making a mockery out of journalism by citing “residents” who “speak of being unable to reach bodies in the streets, of snipers targeting people in their homes, of house-to-house searches, mass indiscriminate detentions, looting and even rape.” Of course, despite TIME being on the ground in Hama, they are unable to provide a single shred of evidence to confirm any of these claims.

TIME continues with a tale of an anonymous man who brings them a bag of spent anti-aircraft shells which TIME solemnly reminds readers are “not supposed to be used on civilians,” despite providing no proof that they were. TIME describes residents as supposedly not angry with Syrian troops despite just claiming they pillaged and raped their city, but are instead resolved to only bring down Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

In fact everything in TIME’s “hard hitting” “on the ground” report is based only on witness accounts; the same dubious unverified reports that preceded the current ongoing NATO war crimes in Libya, and the same unverified reports that have been filtering out of London-based Syrian “human rights groups” for months now. The only “evidence” TIME seems to have provided in their daring “clandestine” reporting is graffiti allegedly left on Hama’s streets which TIME claims is “deeply offensive” to Hama’s “religiously conservative majority.”

The Rest of the Story

What is absent in TIME’s reporting, and what is now beginning to appear even in the corporate media are reports that these “pro-democracy” protesters are in fact armed militants, the resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood (known to be “religiously conservative”) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s waged armed insurrection against the Syrian government. A recent CBS article, “No revolution in Syria’s 2 biggest cities, yet” notes what genuine geopolitical analysts have been saying for months now, that Damascus and Aleppo are devoid of anti-government “protests” and that the majority of the unrest is split along ethnic, not political lines. […]

TIME Conveniently Omits US Role in Unrest

TIME also conveniently forgot to mention that the ochlocratic armed mobs it was covering in Hama are on record the recipients of millions of dollars from the US State Department to train, organize, and equip them to rise up against the Syrian government. An April 2011 AFP report cited the US State Department who admitted to budgeting 50 million dollars over the course of two years to develop and equip activists with technology to use against their governments. The report also mentioned that over 5,000 activists from around the world, including from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and of course Syria were trained by the US State Department to then return home and topple their respective governments.

This State Department statement came after a Washington Post article claimed the US was secretly backing Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005. The State Department would also claim this funding was not meant to foster the US’s long expressed goals of regime change throughout the region, but rather to “build the kind of democratic institutions,” the US is trying to build “in countries around the globe.” The US State Department doesn’t seem fazed at all by the implications of one nation imposing its political order unto another and how it without a doubt constitutes an act of war. And while some might claim the United States’ model of liberal democracy is a superior one that should be imposed upon others, many at Nuremberg made the same tenuous argument in favor of the Third Reich and were hung from the gallows just the same. … Full article

August 11, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

“The Insurgents Are Losing”

Moon of Alabama | August 11, 2011

Reading through the comments on various news sites not one person seems to believe this Washington Post story:

A group of “less than 10” insurgents, including the fighter who allegedly shot the Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade, were tracked down at a compound in eastern Afghanistan early Monday and killed in airstrikes by F-16 fighter planes, according to Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, and other military officials.

One wonders why the military felt the need to come out with this obvious fairytale.

It hurts its own credibility with such a story.

The Taliban deny it and claim that the fighters had immediately left Wardak province after trapping the helicopter. That story actually makes a lot of sense.

But there is even more unbelievable U.S. propaganda further down in the Washington Post piece:

“All across Afghanistan, the insurgents are losing. They’re losing territory, they’re losing leadership, they’re losing weapons and supplies, they’re losing public support,” [General Allen] said. “More and more, the insurgents are losing resolve and the will to fight.”

We know that the number of districts with Taliban activity is up, the number of IEDs is at a record high, the number of assassinations by the Taliban is up, the number of U.S. and Afghan security forces’ casualties is the highest ever and the number of civilian casualties is up sharply. But all that does not count. The insurgents are losing – the General says so, so they must be.

But who does he think will actually believe him?

August 11, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Israel Lobby Dominates Congress, Media Covers it Up

By ALISON WEIR | August 11, 2011

You might think that twenty percent of the American Congress going on all-expense-paid, week-long junkets to a foreign country – paid for by a lobby for that country – would be considered newsworthy. Especially when the top Congressional leaders of both parties are leading the trips.

You would be wrong.

81 Congressional representatives from all over the country, led by Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, are traveling to Israel this month. Most are freshmen Congressmen and include half of all the freshmen Republicans voted into office in 2010.

The week-long trips are being paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), which was created in 1990 as a supporting organization of AIPAC, America’s major pro-Israel lobbying organization, and is located in the same building (AIEF, which is only one of numerous organizations pushing pro-Israel policies, has an annual budget of over $24 million with an even larger endowment.

This is an extraordinary situation. No other lobby on behalf of a foreign country comes anywhere near to controlling such wealth or taking so many of America’s elected representatives on a propaganda trip to their favorite country.

Not all those going on these trips are enthusiastic. The wife of one Congressman who made a similar trip some years ago said that she and her husband had never been exposed to such pressure in all their lives. She said that at one point on their trip, her husband – a normally extremely tough man – was curled up in a fetal position.

A staff member of one representative participating in this month’s junkets said the representative had no choice. If the Congressional rep didn’t go on the trip, the rep would be targeted by AIPAC, large quantities of money, including massive out-of-state money, would be raised for the opponent in the next election, and quite likely the representative would be defeated. The staffer said that the Israel Lobby is far too powerful to ignore and that American voters have no knowledge of what’s going on.

It’s no surprise that voters are unaware that their Congress people are being propagandized and pressured by a foreign lobby. Their news media almost never tell them.

The Associated Press, America’s number one news service, has decided not to report on a lobbying group taking 81 representatives to a foreign country in order to influence their votes.

Even though the trips are being reported by news media in Britain, Iran, India, Israel, Lebanon, and elsewhere, AP has decided to give it a pass. When contacted about this, an AP editor in Washington DC said they knew about the trips and were “looking into it.”

Taking a similar tack, the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, CNN, ABC, et al, failed to inform Americans about the trips. (The Washington Post, after the story was posted throughout the blogosphere, finally covered it belatedly on page 13. The CBS website had a story on the situation, but CBS news made no mention of the junkets on-air.)

The only AP stories on the subject are scattered local stories about individual Congress people. For example, AP’s Chicago bureau reported that Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. is taking part, without reporting that he was one of 81 representatives accepting these all-expense-paid junkets, and that his trip was being paid for by the pro-Israel lobby.

A few other American media reported the story in interestingly diverse ways:

Washington DC’s Politico covered it twice; the Atlantic’s AtlanticWire posted a story on people who were “kvetching” about the one-sided nature of the junkets, while emphasizing that some of the reps were also going to meet with some Palestinian leaders, but failed to report that this will apparently account for only a few hours out of the 7-day trip. LA’s Jewish Journal was remarkably forthright, reporting that “the congressional reps will be getting the dog and pony show,” and Commentary gloated at the “astonishing” number of representatives going on the trip, noting that “Congress is the backstop that gives Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu the ability to say ‘no’” to the President of the United States.

While Commentary claims that the willingness of Congressional representatives to go on all-expense-paid trips by one of the country’s most powerful lobbies “is a good reflection of American public opinion on the Middle East,” this is actually not accurate.

Surveys find that an extraordinarily strong majority of Americans – typically between two-thirds to three-quarters – do not wish the U.S. to take sides on Israel-Palestine.* Such widespread desire for neutrality is particularly noteworthy given that U.S. news media across the political spectrum are consistently highly Israeli-centric in their reporting.

It is quite likely that such voters would be unhappy to learn that a foreign lobby has such power over their elected representatives, leading them to give the favored nation, one of the smallest and wealthiest countries on the planet, over $8 million per day of American tax money when the U.S. is in the middle of a financial crisis.

Perhaps that’s why AP and others don’t tell them.

* * *

* Two thirds want the United States to “lean toward neither side” – Brookings: “Attitudes Toward the Middle East Peace Process: Surveys of Arab and Jewish Opinion in Israel and Public Opinion in the United States”.

71 percent favor not taking a side – World Public Opinion: “International Poll: Most Publics–including Americans–Oppose Taking Sides in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”.

65 percent favor not taking either side – CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. May 24-26, 2011. Adults nationwide.

“Although more Americans show sympathy for Israel than for the Palestinians, a strong majority has consistently felt that the US should play an even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since December 1998, Gallup and other organizations have asked respondents many times whether the US “should take Israel’s side, take the Palestinians’ side, or not take either side.” Strong majorities have consistently said the US should take neither side. In July 2000, 74% endorsed this position. Shortly after September 11th, 2001, this number dropped to 63% (Israel’s side rising to 27%) then recovered to 70% in early November (Israel’s side 20%). Israel’s military actions of April 2002 had little impact on this majority view. CNN/USA Today/Gallup found 71% in April for the US taking neither side” – World Public Opnion: “Israel and Palestine”.

~

Alison Weir is president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew. She can be reached at contact@cnionline.org.

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August 11, 2011 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Robert Fisk, Amnesty International and ‘progressive’ shrieking sacks of emotion

Liberal imperialism and the refusal to learn

By Maximilian C. Forte | Monthly Review | August 10, 2011

Two of my favorite quotes come into play here, one by the English poet, Alexander Pope, who explained that “some people will never learn anything . . . because they understand everything too soon,” and George Bernard Shaw, much more resigned and ironic in stating that “we learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”  From various misguided and superficial “open letters” to “the left” on Libya, to the recent renewal of righteous interventionism with respect to Syria, it seems that the greatest deficit in Western thinking about these unruly and barbarous others is not a deficit in sincerity, as I once mistakenly thought, but a learning deficit.  One detects a strong tendency among liberal imperialists and assorted self-designated “progressives” to think of their actions and thoughts as being above history, as if residing in some altostratus of unimpeachable rectitude.  If they pretend to act and think as if they were gods, it is not an historical accident.  At the end of their day, as believers in Western progress, they remain convinced that they are at the high point of evolutionary teleology.  At the last stage of a dying empire, imperial advocates (not confined to any one ideology) are still gripped by the conviction that theirs is the highest stage of human achievement.  They resent history (inevitable imperial decline) as much as they resent particularity (difference they can never tolerate).  High up in the clouds, perched on the wings of various stealth bombers, they preach the ideology of universal, individual human rights.  Blinded by their own wind, they lose the ability to see that even their own “universal declaration of human rights” contained distinct concerns for social and economic rights — though buried at the end, past the point of the current imperial attention deficit disorder (Arts. 21-27).  If people have the right to eat, but not the right to tweet, then they are judged to be living under tyranny.  This is shallow humanitarianism, callous in its disregard for the materialities that make human life possible, a humanitarianism at the end of empire and as bankrupt as the state powers whose authority the humanitarians invoke.

Here are two recent examples, both involving Syria, but really much more about us than about Syria.  In fact, Syria really does not exist — you could insert the name of any nation-state outside of Greater Europe (Europe and its settler states), or even a fictitious name the way that NATO and the Pentagon do — let’s say Southland.  First, there is Robert Fisk.  Some fancy Fisk to be a radical reporter, a courageous speaker of truth.  He fancies himself as such too, declaring himself “in favour of the suffering.”  I regard him as a little old Englishman, prone to betraying the prejudices of his dominant class.  He finds radical difference rather distasteful, as his comments on Hamas tell us, and wishes everyone could stand in single file behind his preferred world order.  He has now taken to snapping at NATO, not for what it has done and is doing to Libya, but for what it failed to do to Syria.  “The trouble is,” Fisk informs us, “that everyone has been running out of patience with Syria since the spring.”  Everyone.  Patience.  We are uniform, and we have certain demands.  “Had Messrs Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama stopped short after they saved Benghazi” (they saved Benghazi?), Fisk adds, “they may have had the spittle . . . and the munitions to destroy some of Assad’s 8,000 tanks.”  An American militarist might have worded this slightly differently, preserving the same meaning: “they lack the cojones to royally kick some Syrian ass.”  Fisk objects to UK Foreign Secretary William Hague for “waffling on about how little the West can do to stop Assad” — the West, I did not insert that.  “This is rubbish,” Fisk of Arabia adds, before proceeding to give some military advice: “Britain’s RAF bases in Cyprus are infinitely closer to Syria than to Libya.”  He is quite clear that he wants regime change, and for the West to carry out that regime change — though again, and as always, it violates international law (not that it matters, that is the law of the strong against the weak).  Fisk writes, “The Israelis don’t want regime change in Damascus.  Do the Americans?”  But then he ends: “Assad is almost certainly doomed” — well alright then, so do you want/need Western intervention to fulfill your goals, or not?  Perhaps he is uncertain about the certainty, or just not thinking . . . historically.  All regimes are always doomed: not a single Egyptian pharaoh, Inca or Roman emperor is alive to disagree.  The question is when, how soon, and here Fisk would like to see more Western agency in taking over from Syrian protesters, even after they repeatedly proclaimed that it is precisely Western intervention of Fisk’s liking that they do not want.  Come to think of it, theirs are the only voices absent from Fisk’s call to Western arms.

However, even less sensitive than Fisk to the irony of Saudi tyrants calling for human rights to be respected in Syria is Amnesty International.  Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, in “UN Security Council Must Act to End Repression in Syria” begins, with the very title, by admitting to basic, ahistorical naïveté.  The UN Security Council has never acted to end oppression anywhere, it is a tool of the most oppressive powers on earth, and if they act to end anyone else’s oppression it is only to superimpose their far greater oppression.  Sucking up to imperial powers, as if these were the guarantors of human rights, says a lot about Amnesty’s Eurocentric agenda.  It is an agenda as bankrupt as the powers to which it pleads.  Like Fisk, Shetty (as well as those in Amnesty behind him, I assume) finds that “the UN Security Council’s continuing inability to react adequately to the carnage is deeply frustrating and dispiriting.”  Shetty condemns the UN’s presidential statement: “it falls far short of what is really needed.”  And what really is needed?  Shetty never actually gets to articulating that — “something must be done — and done now” — so he leaves it to be understood by reading between the lines.  Like Fisk he writes: “The Council’s impotence in relation to Syria stands in stark contrast with the quick and decisive action it took in the case of Libya.  But, in fact, it is the aftermath of its resolution on Libya that has paralyzed the Council.”  The “quick and decisive” action against Libya — when he could have said the foolish rush to regime change that has prolonged war and violated the human rights of many more Libyans than were at stake back in February.  At any rate, Libya is now made to stand as the benchmark for good action.  (It’s a wonder that these people do not invoke the good old days of the genocidal “oil for food” program applied by the UN, among its other sanctions, against the people of Iraq.)  Shetty wants Brazil, South Africa, and India to prevail upon the Security Council to get beyond political disagreement and do “something” about Syria.  Having posited military action in Libya as the starting point of discussion, his lament about lack of action on Syria at least implies a desire for military action: then Syria and Libya would be equal in their reception of the generous care and loving attention of NATO.  Shetty, who is from India, and so should know better (if anything, just from reading past and current Amnesty documents on India), hails India as a “vibrant democracy” and as a “free and open democracy” in spite of the continuing reality of a brutal counterinsurgency war, discrimination against tribal peoples, land grabs, and vast inequalities maintained by force.  He says that a “free and open democracy” like Brazil cannot be accused of “neo-colonialist ambitions” — oh no?  Just ask countless Indigenous Amazonians about that, or, if too lazy, at least consult with Survival International.  Would Brazil, India, and South Africa be the ones to carry out actions against the Syrian government — because if not, why bother with all the flattery?  Or is it that they are the best window dressing for NATO warfare?  More than unbelievable is that Shetty invokes the moral authority to speak of Syria’s Arab neighbors: “such key players as the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council and now the Saudi Arabian government have spoken out against the killings there [in Syria].”  Fisk was neither as funny, nor as incompetent.  This is Amnesty International, invoking Saudi opinion on human rights, invoking the voices of Gulf state tyrants, an Arab League of dictators.  “Now is the time. . .” says Shetty, mimicking the sentence construction currently en vogue in Obama’s Washington, “to stand and be counted.”  Stand up, and do what?  Be counted . . . by whom?  “They should not fail the Syria test,” he ends, and not too soon.

In the name of democracy, freedom, human rights, and openness, Amnesty deleted the comment I posted in disagreement with them.  Perhaps they thought being called “shameless and irresponsible” was too much to openly bear, democratically, or the persistent pointing out of the absurd irrationality of Shetty’s argument for “something.”

These are people who would train us not to think, not to learn, but to simply react.  Always Be Reacting.  Like NATO’s propaganda outfit for the war against Libya, operated by the likes of Tim Kilbride of the Rendon Group, the vision of our humanity that liberal imperialists entertain is one which constructs us as shrieking sacks of emotion.  This is the elites’ anthropology, one that views us as bags of nerve and muscle: throbbing with outrage, contracting with every story of “incubator babies” (in Iraq, now Syria), bulging up with animus at the arrest of Gay Girl in Damascus, recoiling at the sound of Viagra-fueled mass rape.  From Twitter, to Avaaz, we turn to NATO.  And this is NATO’s sociology: societies can be remade through a course of high-altitude bombings and drone strikes.  It can be heard in the words of the Manchester police: “We want to make it absolutely clear . . . there has been no spark that has led to this” — we are animate, but headless.  Bags.  Absolutely clear.

In our “social media”-induced state of psychotic frenzy, we scream for action.  Which action?  Whatever, any action, “do something . . . stand up and be counted,” no time to think, just act.  Libya — lather, rinse, repeat — Syria.

~

Maximilian C. Forte is an associate professor in anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.  His website is at www.openanthropology.org.

August 11, 2011 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Meet Debbie Schlussel, who says Norway’s ‘HAMAS Youth’ got what was coming to them

By Paul Mutter | Mondoweiss | August 5, 2011

One of Pamela Geller’s cohorts, Debbie Schlussel, has explicitly stated that those killed at Utoya got what was coming to them because they were “HAMAS Youth” and (at the same time) “Fatah PLO” terrorists.

Schlussel may not be as well-known as Geller (perhaps because Schlussel has not exercised a leading role in anything as prominent as the “Ground Zero Mosque” furor), but she is a politically active Republican and more mainstream than Geller because she is also a culture writer with a strong media presence. (Not that she separates this work from her anti-Islamic campaign – she has criticized the film industry for not doing enough to portray Islam “correctly”).

Her opinion on the Norway terror attacks can be summed up with these quotes taken from her ongoing screeds against the terror victims:

“Based on these pics, seems like he’s [Glenn Beck’s] spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers.

But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support . . . .

Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik . . . .

I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.”

Far stronger words than Geller was willing to use. But they are par for the course as far as Schlussel is concerned.

Her prominence derives from her utility to the male conservative-dominated anti-Islamic movement. The fact that she is a woman (and also the daughter of Holocaust survivors) speaking out against Islam gives greater credence to an ideological group whose most well-known speakers are white Christian males like Newt Gingrich, Geert Wilders and Pat Robertson (the movement is, as a whole, dominated by sociopolitically conservative men, although many are not Christians).

Gingrich and Robertson, for instance, denounce Islamic attitudes towards women, while still being hostile to “feminism” under the cloak of “family values.” Having women on their anti-Islamic bandwagon helps prove their “point” about Islamic backwardness and their moral righteousness, which is a combination of faux-progressivism (treating Geller and Schlussel as intellectual co-equals) and paternalism (evoking Orientalist images of rapacious Muslim brutes). A similar logic animates the GOP embrace of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Michele Bachmann. Schlussel and Geller, among others, are useful for the right (while at the same time, they castigate individuals on the left for being Islam’s “useful idiots”).

But back to Schlussel’s own anti-Islamic agenda. Before this most recent denunciation of insufficiently Zionist individuals, she famously responded to Osama bin Laden’s death by quipping “1 down, 1.8 billion to go.” When a family of West Bank settlers were murdered earlier this year, she approvingly quoted PM Netanyahu’s son’s remarks that “terror has a religion and it is Islam” and “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Exactly How Big Is This So-Called Al Qaeda?

Sibel Edmonds | Boiling Frogs | August 5, 2011
tankcamel
Massive Perpetual Wars against Fantastical Terrorists

For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, billions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

IRAN AND AL-QA’IDA: CAN THE CHARGES BE SUBSTANTIATED?

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | The Race for Iran | August 1st, 2011

Last week, the Obama Administration formally charged the Islamic Republic of working with al-Qa’ida.  The charge was presented as part of the Treasury Department’s announcement that it was designating six alleged al-Qa’ida operatives for terrorism-related financial sanctions, see here.  The six are being designated, according to Treasury, because of their involvement in transiting money and operatives for al-Qa’ida to Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The announcement claims that part of this scheme was a “secret deal” between the Iranian government and al-Qa’ida, whereby Tehran allowed the terrorist group to use Iranian territory in the course of moving money and personnel.

For the most part, major media outlets uncritically transmitted the Obama Administration’s charge, without much manifestation of serious effort to verify it, find out more about the sourcing upon which it was based, or place it in any sort of detailed and nuanced historical context.  Stories by Joby Warrick, see here, in the Washington Post and Helene Cooper, see here, in The New York Times exemplify this kind of “reporting”.

For nearly ten years, a cadre of hawkish analysts, politicians, and some Iranian expatriates have pushed their insistent but unsubstantiated claims of extensive collaboration between the Islamic Republic and al-Qa’ida.  Some even charged that Osama bin Ladin was “living in luxury” in Iran, an assertion later elaborated in a 2010 “documentary” film that was extensively “covered” on Fox News.

During her service at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and at the National Security Council in 2001-2003, Hillary was one of a handful of U.S. officials who participated in nearly two years of substantive talks with Iranian counterparts about Afghanistan and al-Qa’ida.

–Since leaving government, we—and other former U.S. officials knowledgeable about the U.S.-Iranian dialogue over these matters—have related how the Iranians raised, almost immediately after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the problem of al-Qa’ida personnel trying to make their way from Afghanistan into Iran, consistently warning about the difficulties of securing Iran’s 936 kilometer-long border with Afghanistan (as well as its 700 kilometer-long border with Pakistan).

–We and others have also related how Tehran documented its detention of literally hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives, repatriated as many of these detainees to their countries of origin as it could, and requested U.S. assistance in facilitating repatriations of detainees whose governments did not want to cooperate (a request the Bush Administration denied).

–Furthermore, we described how, over the course of 2002 and early 2003, Bush Administration hardliners made substantive discussion and coordination with Iran over Iraq dependent on Tehran finding, arresting, and deporting a small number of specific al-Qa’ida figures—beyond the hundreds of suspected al-Qa’ida operatives the Islamic Republic had already apprehended—that Washington suspected had sought refuge in Iran’s lawless Sistan-Balochistan province.  Although Tehran deployed additional security forces to its eastern borders, Iranian officials acknowledged that a small group of al-Qa’ida figures had managed to avoid capture and enter Iranian territory, most likely through Sistan-Balochistan, in 2002.  The Iranian government located and took some of these individuals into custody and said that others identified by the United States were either dead or not in Iran.  At the beginning of May 2003, after Baghdad had fallen, Tehran offered to exchange the remaining al-Qa’ida figures in Iran for a small group of MEK commanders in Iraq, with the treatment of those repatriated to Iran monitored by the International Committee for the Red Cross and a commitment not to apply the death penalty to anyone prosecuted on their return.  But the Bush Administration rejected any deal.

Today, much of the American media unquestioningly “reports” information provided by the U.S. government about Iran’s supposed links to al-Qa’ida, noting, as Helene Cooper does in her story, that U.S. “officials admit that they are largely in the dark about what is going on with the Qaeda operatives believed to be in Iran.”   But the only reason why the United States does not know more or have a cooperative relationship with the Islamic Republic over al-Qa’ida is that Washington cut off talks with Tehran over al-Qa’ida and Afghanistan in late May 2003.  This decision was supposedly taken because the Defense Department claimed to have a communications intercept indicating that an al-Qa’ida figure inside Iran might have been involved in the May 12, 2003 Riyadh terrorist bombings.  But the claim was never substantiated and was disputed by much of the U.S. Intelligence Community; by 2007, the Bush Administration was reduced to telling the Washington Post that “there are suspicions, but no proof” that an al-Qa’ida figures in Iran “may have been involved from afar in planning” the May 2003 attacks, see here.

Not even the George W. Bush Administration was prepared to make concrete accusations that the Islamic Republic was deliberately facilitating al-Qa’ida’s terrorist activities.  Now, however, the Obama Administration is advancing specific, on-the-record charges that Iran is helping al-Qa’ida.  There is no reason for anyone to have any confidence that official Washington “knows”, in any empirically serious way, that Tehran is cooperating with al-Qa’ida in the ways that are alleged.

Of the six al-Qa’ida operatives sanctioned by the Treasury Department last week, only one is alleged to be physically present in Iran—and, by Treasury’s own account, he is there primarily to get al-Qa’ida prisoners out of Iranian jails.  Moreover, the United States apparently has no hard evidence that the Iranian government is supportive of or even knowledgeable about the alleged al-Qa’ida network in the Islamic Republic.  In her story, Helene Cooper writes that a “senior Administration official” said “in a conference call for reporters” (which means that the White House wanted everyone to hear this, and Helene did not have to leave her office to hear it), that “our sense is this network is operating through Iranian territory with the knowledge and at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities”.  A “sense” that al-Qa’ida is operating in Iran with “at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities” now apparently amounts to proof of a “secret deal” that can be authoritatively referenced in the announcement of a legally and politically significant action by the Treasury Department.

This is all strongly reminiscent of the way in which the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations prepared the way for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.  And much of the mainstream media seems content to reprise the dishonorable role they played in making that war possible.  As her pre-war reporting on Saddam Husayn’s weapons of mass destruction programs unraveled in the war’s aftermath, Judy Miller of The New York Times sought to defend herself by arguing that “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself.”  Ms. Miller may no longer be at The New York Times.  But it seems that her spirit lives on there, at the Washington Post, and in too many other journalistic venues.

August 3, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

To Post Ombud, Critics of ‘Muslims Did It’ Blogger Are the Real Monsters

By Peter Hart – FAIR – 08/01/2011

Washington Post ombud Patrick Pexton weighed in yesterday (7/31/11) on the criticisms of right-wing Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. She was among a handful of media personalities who declared the Norway terror attacks to be the work of Muslim jihadists. As she put it (7/22/11): “In all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra…. As the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of Al-Qaeda allies still operating.”

This would seem to be an easy call for an ombud — news outlets should try to shy away from baseless, bigoted speculation. But that’s not Pexton’s point; right from the start, he expressed sympathy with Rubin:

When I received my Post e-mail alert about the bombing in Norway, my first thought was that it was Al-Qaeda.

Pexton wonders why he got so much mail about Rubin, attributing that fact to “her style, her faith, how the liberal and conservative blogospheres work on the news cycle, and, finally, a certain American insensitivity toward mass casualties in other lands.”

Well, maybe. Or perhaps some people are bothered by outlets that publish vicious, baseless  innuendo.

In discussing why Rubin didn’t modify her post after the news that the suspect Anders Breivik was not a Muslim terrorist at all, Pexton explains:

Rubin has a good defense. She is Jewish. She generally observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday; she doesn’t blog, doesn’t tweet, doesn’t respond to reader e-mails.

OK. But then it’s hard to fathom what she wrote when she did check in — one of the only criticisms Pexton seems to think is legitimate:

When she went online at 8 p.m. Saturday, her mea culpa post on Norway was the first thing she posted, although its tone also hurt her, particularly this sentence, which struck many readers as borderline racist: “There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.”

Pexton goes on and offers some mush about the ideological divide:

Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore…. If your politics are liberal and you don’t generally read Rubin, but you read her Norway posts, you probably would be pretty offended. But if you are a conservative, or someone who reads Rubin regularly, you’ll know that this is what she does and who she is.

Is that supposed to be a defense of her writing — that she regularly publishes ill-informed speculation?  Pexton had a chat with Rubin and decided that

she is not an ogre or a racist. And she does not deserve some of the calumny she got. Some of the e-mail she received was way over the line–ugly, obscene, vile and, worst, containing threats of physical harm.

You can sense that Pexton’s conclusion is drifting in that direction — the real problem is her critics. But I was surprised at how far he went:

This brings us back to the shootings in Norway, an act committed by a disturbed man who drew some of his inspiration from extremist websites. A blogosphere given to vitriol and hasty judgments ought to consider the possible consequences of its own online attacks.

Pexton’s point seems to be that liberal-left critics of Rubin are like the Islamophobic blogs which were cited in the manifesto Breivik wrote to explain his murderous terrorism; it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that Rubin’s original post resembled Breivik’s actual inspirations, not only in tone but in content.

So, according to the Post ombud, the writers who pointed out the inaccurate, bigoted punditry of someone with a perch on a major newspaper’s website are like hatemongers, and may just inspire a killing spree. Wow.

August 2, 2011 Posted by | Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

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