Entries from March 2006 ↓

Unfortunately, Donald Rumsfeld was right when he said that we are losing the information war. A partial transcript of an interview with Jill Carroll conducted by her captors before they released her indicates that she most definitely is not all right–she enthusiastically praises the mujahideen:

Voice in tape: How did the Mujahedeen treat you?

Jill Carroll: They treated me very well. They treated me very well, like a guest. I was given very good food, kept very safe, treated very, very well.

Voice in tape: Did you think the American Army or the CIA would save you in any time?

Carroll: I thought maybe they might. Sometimes I thought that they might come, that they might find me. They might (sic) a way to know where I am and come get me. I did think maybe they might.

Voice: Why didn’t they save you?

Carroll: Well, I think the Mujahedeen are very smart and even with all the technology and all the people the American Army has here, they still are better at knowing how to live and work here and more clever, despite all the technology of the American Army, still more clever and better at being here than the American Army, still better at what they do.

Voice: Does this mean anything?

Carroll: I think it makes it very clear, it makes very clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones who will win in the end in this war, I think it makes very clear that even with thousands of troops and airplanes and tanks and guns that that doesn’t mean anything here on the ground in Iraq as it shows over time, maybe how many months over time or however (sic) months are left in the occupation that it’s pretty clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones that will have the victory left at the end of the day. It shows that no matter no matter what Americans try to say is happening here or try to do with all their weapons, they aren’t going to be able to stay here, they’re not going to be able to stop the Mujahedeen and that’s for sure.

There’s more, if you have the stomach for what those beasts did to that young woman.

It’s unclear when the “interview” was conducted. It surface on a videotape on the Internet. The facts are murky.

It is a terrible reality of this war that the enemy has the advantage in the propaganda war. However, I certainly wasn’t the only one who became suspicious when Carroll was shown in full hijab this morning on television.

Here’s what one participant asked in a Washington Post online chat this morning:

“Regarding the dress of Ms. Carroll, is she just respectful of Muslim culture, or has she “gone native”?.

A study conducted at Ohio State University explains a lot about the media diets we choose for ourselves.

Researchers found that when men were angered and anticipated the chance to retaliate, they chose to read negative online news stories, presumably to sustain their anger until their opportunity to get even.

Women faced with the same situation, however, chose to read more positive news to help dissipate their anger before a possible confrontation.

The only thing I want to know is why I fall into the guys’ camp…

Like everyone, I am enormously relieved that abducted reporter Jill Carroll has been released in Iraq after nearly three months of captivity. I am especially glad that she was not mistreated or threatened with violence (unless you consider kidnapping and abduction mistreatment and a threat of violence). I would, however, like to know why she’s wearing a headscarf during her post-release interview.

More important, I’d like to know why no American reporter or anchorperson I saw on television this morning has even mentioned the glaringly obvious fact that she’s wearing it.

She was just presented with the Holy Koran by an Iraqi during a post-release ceremony of sorts.

The only logical assumption is that her release was negotiated, with certain conditions–including that the video footage of her include obvious signs of her respect for Islam.

All media reports three months ago said that as a reporter, Carroll was above all concerned with being respectful of Iraqis and their culture. I applaud that.
Anchors of American news broadcasts do not, however, have to show the same respect.

Where is their skepticism?

I mean that figuratively and literally.

Christopher Hitchens, in a virtuoso performance, demolished the good professors (and landed a glancing blow on Harvard while he was at it) in a Slate piece a couple of days ago. It’s the fisking the professors deserve, as I mentioned here, and it comes from a longtime pro-Palestinian critic of Israel, although Hitchens has been labeled (not to say smeared) as a neocon fellow traveler (at the least) and thus his opinions on everything are looked upon with suspicion and distaste in the cohort…when they are not disregarded.

Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total, perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass….

However, Mearsheimer and Walt present the situation as one where the Jewish tail wags the American dog, and where the United States has gone to war in Iraq to gratify Ariel Sharon, and where the alliance between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of Osama Bin Laden. This is partly misleading and partly creepy.

It’s worth a read.

What I particularly appreciate about it–apart from how Hitchens builds, unifies, and makes his argument (amazing what a consistent worldview can do for a person–a person who also happens to write like a dream)–is the fact that he gives a context to the “controversial” comments.

First, he states where Mearsheimer and Walt sit on the political spectrum (among the realists and centrists–is there such a thing?); this is important to explain to readers precisely because the professors’ argument is so discordant with the long-held American notion that Israel is our ally, and a valuable one. Then Hitchens clarifies that the only reason anyone paid attention to these otherwise disembodied opinions (by two people no one had ever heard of outside academia) was the Harvard imprimatur. (Which was withdrawn shortly after controversy erupted over the paper.)

In other words, he explained why the stir over an academic paper might be considered “news.”

Sad when the most elementary rule of journalism–to explain who, what, why, where, and when up front in your piece–warrants a round of applause. But kudos to Hitchens.

It’s always interesting to get a different perspective on the issues we froth about among ourselves in America.

Here’s someone who thinks we’re going the way of the Roman empire…because we get all hot under the collar when the FCC decides unilaterally that the word “bullshit” isn’t allowed on television (the debate is currently raging on BuzzMachine):

You Americans are wonderful, generous people as individuals. But the double standards of your increasingly paranoiac society never ceases to amaze me.

On the one hand, you champion personal “freedoms” that allow just about every crazy person to own a gun. Your television programs are full of violence. But then you baulk at the use of a quaint, and very effective, Anglo-Saxon term such as ‘bullshit’.

Your legions of half-educated conservative, xenophobic commentators dribble on incessantly about ‘Big Government’ and the ‘Liberal Media’ conspiracy. Yet the ideals of liberalism are what made your country great in the first place - freedom of opinion, association, individual rights and the elevation of reason over superstion.

You call yourselves ‘The Land of the Free’, but you increasingly look like the “Land of the Fearful’ to the rest of us. You are litigating your rights out of existence and surrendering your hard-won freedoms to wowsers (Australian term for prudish killjoys), religious zealots and other nutters of the radical right.

Read The Decline of the Roman Empire for an insight. There are uncanny resemblances to what you are going through.

Now here’s a pundit who thinks the Western world’s left has gone mad. He begins by praising a recent speech by Tony Blair**:

Poor Blair, who thought he was of the Left himself, has trouble understanding why many of his former comrades now defend not democracy, but mass-murdering fascists and head-lopping Islamists.

In his speech to the joint sitting of our Parliament, he rightly said Islamist terrorists were ideologues “at war with us and our way of life”.

But in a little-noted aside, he added: “Their case is that democracy is a Western concept we are forcing on an unwilling culture of Islam. The problem we have is that a part of opinion in our own countries agrees with them.”

He’s talking of his own Left here, and warns: “The strain of, frankly, anti-American feeling in parts of European and in world politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in.”

After a little detour, he gets down to brass tacks:

American activist filmmaker Michael Moore then produced his own blame-America fantasy in Fahrenheit 9-11, showing President George W. Bush as a shyster who’d been bought off by Saudi oil tycoons, and thus didn’t chase the real villains of September 11. And they weren’t al-Qaida, but . . . his Saudi mates.

As for Iraq, what a peaceful, loving place it was under Saddam Hussein. See the children playing before the Americans bombed them!

This sleazy stuff went down so well that Moore won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and was given a seat in the box of former US president Jimmy Carter at the Democrat convention.

There’s a lot more red meat for those who can’t get enough of it.

Me, I just enjoy the plain old common sense.

——————————————

**about which more another time–for now: Blair deserves a place in the pantheon of those who get it.

The Playgoer writes: “If you agree with this quote, please circulate it widely. [Playwright John Patrick] Shanley should be thanked for speaking out when so many of his peers still remain silent.”

 Agreed. Here’s what Shanley had to say about the play that was a hit in London’s West End but that was taken off the program in New York–postponed, delayed, canceled, whatever (the facts are murky and I don’t have time to research them)–and about what it means for all of us:

“The motives of the people who were going to produce this play [about Rachel Corrie] Off-Broadway in New York are not adequately known and I think that they should be aired…But it highlights a larger phenomenon which is an international gangsterism towards the arts at this time. I consider the New York Times not publishing the cartoons about Mohammed to be an act of editorial cowardice and inappropriate–obviously it was major news–and this idea of it being ’sensitive’ to religion, respectful to religion, not to air differences, not to air slurs, not to air slights, is just giving into intimidation of different kinds. Now the theatre in New York may not have been afraid that they were going to be killed, they may have been afraid they were going to lose funding from somebody, that I don’t know. But I do know there is intimidation across this country in the arts, where plays like Grease are being vetoed by local organizations as being too racy and cartoons are being called unworthy of publication because the sensitivities of people of a certain religion trumps the need of people of every persuasion to know. And I think it has to be looked at. There’s a certain degree of cowardice involved and I think people are going to have to get used to the idea that doing these things–like what happened to [documentary film maker Theo] Van Gogh in the Netherlands–may lead to them being killed.”

Thank you, John Patrick Shanley.
And thank you, Andrew Sullivan, for continuing to highlight this issue.
 

Some bloggers are astonished, outraged, or stupefied by the apparent cluelessness of our goodwill ambassador to the world, Ms. Soccer Mom Hughes. Here, Jeff Jarvis ridicules her idea of “making arrival at the airport friendlier” for foreigners.

Well, yes. It sounds utterly ludicrous…until you think about why this woman, without whom GWB would not have been elected (she made him palatable to those Republicans who were in doubt) decided that this would be her message. And about who she is delivering it to. At that point, it starts to look almost clever (in a ladies’ auxiliary kind of way…)

Who was her message aimed at? For one, pro-war Americans who are worried about being too aggressive and hawkish. (It appeals to their very American sense of fair play.) Way, way more important, however, it extends empathy to American Muslims who are disturbed, hurt, upset, fearful, anxious, and unsettled by the acts of fanatics who have turned their faith into a nihilistic political ideology and who threaten their security.

Apart from showing that political correctness is not the exclusive province of the left, this “compassionately conservative” line that Hughes is peddling (for example, “we’re not very nice to strangers”) is actually a shrewd way to get through to ordinary people going about their business. (Obviously, newshounds and bloggers do not qualify; what we inevitably forget is that most people are not addicted to the news, to politics, or to speaking their minds via keyboard and broadband—they get a snippet of “news” here or a soundbite there and continue going about their business.)

To get your point across to them—and we area talking about most Americans—it needs to be pitch-perfect. Thus far, the Republicans, with their evolved understanding of PR (i.e., they don’t believe it is the spawn of the devil), have been really good at creating these messages.

GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan boldly speaks truth to power by clarifying what the New York Post’s gossip column fails to mention while dishing the dirt from a new biography of Barbra Streisand: that the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, and the Post are both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp.

“[A]ttempting to obscure such financial ties by simply omitting the name of the book’s publisher has been a standard evasion throughout the Post ranks,” Hogan says.

Well—maybe, maybe not.

One thing’s for sure, though: no one would be interested in hearing the dirt on Barbra if PAGE SIX hadn’t brought it up–right?

I mention this because a similar kind of item caught my eye today in the New York Times (–I don’t have a Times fetish: I swear! But I do read the dead tree version daily. Old habits die hard.)

It’s a chest-thumping exercise of self-righteousness inside the front section, where Katharine Seelye reports that the paper has declined an invitation from the White House for one (some?) of its reporters to participate in informal off-the-record meetings with Bush.

Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief for The Times, said in a statement last night: “The Times has declined this opportunity after weighing the potential benefits to our readers against the prospect of withholding information from them about the discussion with Mr. Bush. As a matter of policy and practice, we would prefer when possible to conduct on-the-record interviews with public officials.”

Yes, we all get it: Bush is going all-out in a charm offensive after having slammed, avoided, smeared, and denigrated the press for five years. The NYT is not in a forgiving mood.

Still, the pettiness (wrapped in righteous indignation–does that motherfucker think he can buy us off with one tete-a-tete?) is amusing.

So says Boston Globe columnist Sam Allis about James O. Freedman, former president of Dartmouth, who died recently. I didn’t know Freedman, but I admire his spirit as described by Allis:

He grew up a Jew in gentile New Hampshire, and his years at Dartmouth were roiled by confrontations with the right-wing undergraduate paper, The Dartmouth Review, that once portrayed him in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache. Jim defended its right to do so and then came out swinging. [emphasis added]

That is the spirit of liberty.

Fascinating series of posts about whether liberals should or shouldn’t want to be considered patriots over at TPM Cafe. It’s introduced by Todd Gitlin, who has written a new book, I see. Here’s a snippet from the comments:

Arthur Dent said:

The traditional concept of “the left” has always been both internationalist and patriotic (in the positive sense in which Todd is using that word, rather than narrow nationalism).

It was the cosmopolitan “liberal internationalist ” right that claimed the Vietnam solidarity movement in the 1960s was “unpatriotic”.

While I agree that the term “patriotic” should be reclaimed, I am more concerned about the term “left” itself.

The world outlook of people who are currently considered “the left” is in fact negative, cynical, pessimistic, bitter, humourless, authoritaian and above all hostile to progress. In short they are reactionaries in the classical sense of the word.

I think the focus should be on the fact that they are reactionaries opposed to progress.That is the key dividing line.

The term “pseudo-left” should be used for people whose world outlook is reactionary but who use “leftist” rhetoric. Calling them “unpatriotic” addresses only one aspect of the phoniness of their “leftism” and leads to confusion about their ” internationalist ” rhetoric (which is just rhetoric, like the rest of their “progressive” cant).

The phenomena Todd is describing is clearly global in scope. I’m an Australian and it simply doesn’t make sense here to describe pseudo-left anti-Anericanism as “unpatriotic”. Nor does it make sense to apply that description in Europe. Yet the similarities between the pseudo-left in America and other countries is obvious.

Yesterday, I mentioned I would like to create a list of intellectually honest culture-war debaters. Add Gitlin to that thus far nonexistent list.