Entries from August 2006 ↓

NBC is considering extending the Today show, which runs for three excruciatingly long hours every day, and giving it a fourth hour.

Today’s third hour, heavy with fluff and usually hosted by news anchor Ann Curry and weatherguy Al Roker, amortizes NBC’s costs for the first two hours. Also, affiliates get to sell half the ad inventory. A fourth hour would do more of the same for both sides.

“It makes a lot of sense,” says Steve Friedman, head of CBS’s morning programs and two-time former Today boss. “You just have to make sure you have the staff and the budget to do it right.”

The danger in any expansion is diluting the brand, Friedman says, by exhausting your staff or your material.

No thought given to exhausting the audience, of course, or of muddying the line between “news” and “fluff” even more. Natch.

Because their message isn’t getting out:

Most in U.S. See Israel as Friendly
And Iran as an Enemy, Poll Finds

A majority of Americans view Israel as a friendly country and Iran as an enemy, according to a new Harris Interactive poll.

The online poll of 3,685 adults measured American attitudes towards Turkey, Afghanistan and 11 others countries in the Middle East as well as attitudes toward eight leaders and organizations in the region.

The survey, conducted Aug. 8- 17, found that three-quarters of U.S. adults identify Israel as either a close ally or “a friend, but not an ally,” compared with 16% who see the nation as “not friendly, but not an enemy” and 8% who see it as “unfriendly and an enemy.”

from the QandO blog:

What AP says Rumsfeld said:

In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion” about what threatens the nation’s security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.

What Rumsfeld said:

Over the next decades, a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be appeased, then the carnage and destruction of then-recent memory of World War I might be avoided. It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among the western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis — the rise of fascism and Nazism — were ridiculed and ignored.

Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated — or that it was someone else’s problem. Some nations tried to negotiate a separate peace — even as the enemy made its deadly ambitions crystal clear.

It was, as Churchill observed, a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.

There was a strange innocence in views of the world. Someone recently recalled one U.S. Senator’s reaction in September 1939, upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II. He exclaimed:

“Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.”

Think of that!

[...]

And in every army, there are occasionally bad actors — the ones who dominate the headlines today — who don’t live up to the standards of their oath and of our country.

But you also know that they are a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving with humanity and decency in the face of constant provocation.

And that is important in this “long war,” where any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

Read the whole thing. 

Rumsfeld’s speech, which I mentioned here as the administration’s effort to reach out to Red America with its sobering message, has Democrats-in-Denial and the MSM—exemplified by the buffoon Keith Olbermann, who conducts an entertaining snarkfest on MSNBC every night that no one watches—howling in pain.

For the deniers, it’s all about politics. Rather than grapple with the substance of what Rumsfeld is saying—that Islamofascism is real—they see his speech as an attack on their patriotism.

Here, the brilliant political commentator Olbermann tells us that Rumsfeld has it backwards:

[Bush's] government, absolute - and exclusive - in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis. It is the modern version of the government… of Neville Chamberlain.

Huh?

When Jews defend themselves with weapons, the world doesn’t like it. When Jews send a clear message that they will not allow themselves to be threatened once again with extermination, the world punishes them. The world prefers to see Jews as powerless victims. If the world continues on its present path, perhaps they will get their wish.
The UN leads the campaign to punish Israel and make it a pariah nation:

The United Nations on Wednesday described as “shocking and immoral” the fact that Israel dropped well over 90 per cent of its cluster munitions in Lebanon during the last three days of the conflict – when it was already clear there would be a cessation of hostilities.

I’m still waiting for the UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Provocateur-in-Chief of Iran, of course:

Fortunately, with all the pressures and limitations, the great nation of Germany has been able to take great strides toward advancement and has become a major economic powerhouse in Europe that also seeks to play a more effective role in international interactions. But just imagine where Germany would be today in terms of its eminence among the freedom-loving nations, Muslims of the world and peoples of Europe, if such a situation did not exist and the governments in power in Germany had said no to the extortions by the Zionists and had not supported the greatest enemy of mankind.

It is sad to admit that Europe has lost a lot of its clout in global interactions and has not been able to face and overcome major challenges by relying on itself. This is, of course, understandable. The big powers outside of the continent intend to prove that Europe cannot rely on itself and do anything without their help and intervention.

Our people have also suffered from the interventions by some of the victors of the war after World War II. For many years they interfered in our internal affairs and did not want to see our nation conquer the pinnacles of progress and perfection. They had their eyes on our natural wealth, above all on our energy resources. To secure their own interests, they overthrew the legally constituted government of the time, installed a dictatorial regime and supported it to the end. Later, they supported Saddam in the war imposed on our people and observed no humanitarian boundary in their support for the Iraqi dictator. Our nation has experienced the pain and anguish from the interferences of those who are now crying out for human rights. There are still many suffering from the wounds and injuries of this war.

Merkel, of course, rejected this abomination when she received it in July.

Merkel on July 21 indicated that she would not formally respond to the letter, saying it contained “totally unacceptable” criticism of Israel and “constantly put in question” the Jewish state’s right to exist.

But the Iranian Imp has other tricks up his sleeve: he invited Bush to an “uncensored” television debate. 

And all because they’re committed to only one thing: being “progressive.” Now that they have such a pleasing-to-the-ear label for themselves—one that distinguishes them from un-hip, un-cool tub-thumping Red America—they spend most of their brainpower trying to figure out the proper “progressive” way to think about this policy or that news event.

It is such a drag to hear them say (because they’ve been saying it for so long) that there is a

burning need for Democrats to find a clear, compelling and unambiguous narrative that people can intuitively grasp and support. In this the Republicans have been brilliant, and the Democrats dull. Republicans told a plausible (if wrong) story about terrorism and Iraq; lots of people believed them. The lack of a central organizing message on international affairs was a huge failure of the last Democratic presidential campaign. The Democratic party has to find its own voice, coming from its own convictions, that provides a narrative of fairness, security, participation and opportunity, and tells a story that convinces Americans that Democrats understand their needs, and they are best able to help them lead better, safer, more satisfying lives.

They are so irrelevant. Because while they argue among themselves about whether they should cast themselves as neocons-in-progressive clothing or as sensitive human rights promoters, the Republicans are out there in Red America, telling Americans the “plausible (if wrong)” story they like to hear:

Cheney:

Ladies and gentlemen, on a Tuesday morning five years ago, the nation we all love experienced one of the cruelest acts the modern world has seen. In our sorrow we also felt inspiration, as we learned of airline passengers who rose up against hijackers to prevent greater loss, and rescuers who charged into burning towers and died by the hundreds, and the many examples of kindness and brotherhood that Americans showed to each other on one of the worst days in our history.

From that hour of destruction to this very moment, the people and the government of the United States have answered violence with justice, honor, and moral courage. America is a good, a decent, and generous country. The ideals that gave life to this nation are the same ideals we uphold at home and that we serve abroad. We fight not only to protect ourselves and to overcome the dangers to civilization, but to liberate the oppressed, and to give others the chance to decide their own destiny, so that all of us can one day live in peace on the foundation of human freedom.

Liberty and equality; justice and humanity; self-government, tolerance, respect, and the rule of law — these are the principles by which we fight, the principles by which we live, and the principles by which we will prevail.

Rumsfeld:

And one day, a future speaker may reflect back on this time of historic choice — remembering the questions raised as to our country’s courage, dedication, and willingness to continue this fight until we have prevailed.

I believe the question is not whether we can win. It is whether we have the will to persevere.

I believe that Americans do have that steel. And that we have learned the lessons of history, the folly of turning a blind eye to danger, and of ignoring our responsibilities. These are lessons you know well — lessons that your heroism has taught to generations of Americans.

May God bless each of you. May God bless the men and women in uniform and their families. And may God continue to bless our wonderful country.

confirmed: Borat, opens November 3, 2006

Rumored: a fall 2006 visit from Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev to the White House and the Bush family compound in Maine:

the White House is making arrangements to host the leader of Kazakhstan, an autocrat who runs a nation that is anything but free and who has been accused by U.S. prosecutors of pocketing the bulk of $78 million in bribes from an American businessman….

Nazarbayev’s upcoming visit, according to analysts and officials, offers a case study in the competing priorities of the Bush administration at a time when the president has vowed to fight for democracy and against corruption around the globe. Nazarbayev has banned opposition parties, intimidated the press and profited from his post, according to the U.S. government. But he also sits atop massive oil reserves that have helped open doors in Washington.

If there is a God, he will let the state visit and the movie premiere coincide. (This is a challenge from an atheist.)

CairoFreeze, via Sandmonkey

CREDIT: Marco Di Lauro, Getty Images

Now that the war is over, Haret Hreik is a popular day trip. If Hezbollah’s wartime press tours were all about obtaining sympathy from the outside world, the current carnival is about stoking domestic outrage. As the United States wades back into Lebanon, promising US$230-million in aid, Hezbollah offers Haret Hreik up as a graphic reminder of how the United States helped destroy their country — and of how Hezbollah is rebuilding it. Hundreds of Lebanese walk through the rubble, some with cameras and video recorders, many of them families with kids. Most have come to inspect the ruins of their homes and businesses. Others, including a few Christian families, are simply here to sightsee.

The cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah is, among other things, a serious test for the UN. Now Ruth and Judea Pearl apply pressure where it belongs—on the secretary general:

The time has come for Mr. Annan to personally and aggressively intervene, and to insist publicly that, at the minimum, the Red Cross, or his personal humanitarian representatives, be given immediate access to these soldiers.

Will he? It seems unlikely. Sadly, this is not the first time that concerned parents have turned to Mr. Annan in much the same circumstances. Six years ago, another delegation of distressed families came to the U.N. with a similar tragedy, following the abduction of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah from under the noses of Unifil and, by some accounts, with their help. The investigation that was subsequently conducted found that the U.N. had made “serious errors in judgment” by hiding information that “would have been helpful in an assessment of the condition of the three abducted soldiers.” At that time, the U.N.’s interest in appearing “neutral” overshadowed its commitment to the preservation of human lives. The world cannot afford a repeat of such inaction and poor judgment.

And they remind us of the stakes:

Kofi Annan’s resolve against these acts of terrorism will determine to a great extent what norms will govern our society in generations to come, and whether organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas will gloat in unruly appetite or be reined in by moral principles. We urge Mr. Annan to make bold and brave efforts to ensure–as a legacy and gift–that we will not allow our children and our world be taken captive by terror. Mr. Secretary-General, this time, help bring the boys back home.

Sadly if predictably, Annan, in Beirut today first called on Israel to lift its blockade of Lebanon and at the same time called for the release of the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah: the casus belli (without which there would have been no Israeli blockade of Lebanon).

Annan is inept, weak, and corrupt. He has the distinction of being hated by both the Bushies and Hezbollah’s supporters-–that’s some accomplishment.

UPDATE: Today, Annan is worrying about the humiliation of the Lebanese.

“We need to deal with the lifting of the embargo - sea, land and air - which for the Lebanese is a humiliation, and infringement on their sovereignty,” Annan said before ending his visit and flying to Israel.

As for the Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah, the act which started Israel’s just war, well—that issue has to be resolved “very quickly.”

Beginning with yesterday’s coverage of the release of Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, Caroline Glick pierces the craven hypocrisy, bold lies, and glaring omissions in the MSM’s presentation of the “news” from the Middle East:

What are we seeing when we watch events from the Middle East on our television screens? Is it news or is it terrorist theater?…

While [Centanni and Wiig's] remarks were covered extensively, no one seemed to think that the fact that their first post-release statements were made at a Palestinian Authority sponsored media extravaganza in Gaza was significant. No one noted that the men were flanked by Palestinian “security forces,” and stood next to Hamas terrorist leader and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

No mention was made of the fact that the two were initially kidnapped by just such PA “security officials,” or that Haniyeh is one of the leaders of one of the most fanatical jihadist organizations in the world, an organization that the majority of the “beautiful, kind-hearted and caring” Palestinians voted into office last January.

That is, no mention was made of the fact that until the two men left Gaza, they remained unfree. No one asked whether they had been given the option of not giving a press conference in Gaza. And now that they have spoken, there can be little doubt that a second press conference by the two men, in Israel or the US where no one will force them to convert to Judaism or Christianity or threaten to kill them, will draw far less media interest. After their press conference, the two men became yesterday’s news.

Indeed. And lest anyone think this phenomenon is restricted only to coverage about Israel, note that in late March/early April, I said many of the same things about the exuberant, totally uncritical media coverage of Jill Carroll’s release (see here and here and here and here): similarly at the time, not one news reporter or anchor took note of the fact that in Carroll’s fawning post-release video “interview” with an Arabic-speaking interlocutor, she was dressed in full hijab as she confirmed that of course the Iraqis would be victorious over the Americans.

(The height of irony: Carroll’s ten-part piece about her captivity was running in the Christian Science Monitor while Centanni and Wiig were in captivity.)

But Caroline Glick’s focus here is on the information war aspect of the Hezbollah-vs.-Israel war. Citing by now familiar (to blog readers) incidents involving photograph and casualty staging, fake “evidence” of missile strikes, etc. Glick explains that these incidents are among the preferred weapons in terrorists’ arsenals—and that the global media and NGOs end up as their collaborators:

AS IS the case with the Palestinian war against Israel, one of the most notable aspects of Hizbullah’s latest campaign against Israel has been the active collaboration of news organizations and international NGO’s in Hizbullah’s information war against Israel. Like their rogue state sponsors, subversive sub-national groups like Hizbullah, Fatah and Hamas, see information operations as an integral part of their war for the annihilation of Israel and defeat of the West. And their information operations are more advanced than any the world has seen. As becomes more evident with each passing day, they have successfully corrupted both the world media and the community of NGOs that purportedly operate in a neutral manner in war zones….

The International Committee of the Red Cross, with its internationally mandated status as a protected organization, is particularly culpable. The blogoshere - and specifically EU Referendum and Zombietime Web sites - have shown that Red Cross employees in Tyre and Kana fabricated from whole cloth a tale of an Israeli airstrike against Red Cross ambulances in Kana on July 23. In an exhaustively documented report, “How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War,” Zombietime showed how Red Cross employees took an old, rusty ambulance and alleged that the IAF had attacked it with a missile that blew a hole straight through the middle of the red cross on the ambulance’s roof.

She shows how all this leads to the moral disarmament of Israel:

The Red Cross allegation was reported as fact by such “credible” news organizations as Associated Press, Time magazine, the BBC, ITV, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Age, MSNBC, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both published accounts of the attack as evidence of Israeli “war crimes” in Lebanon.

And finally, she points out that were it not for the blogosphere’s insistence on searching out the truth, we would all be in the dark:

It is not a coincidence that I saw the pictures of the Reuters’ vehicle on Powerline and not in the media coverage of the purported attack. Both the global media and the international NGO community abjectly refuse to investigate themselves. As democratic governments and their militaries have proven incapable of dealing with the phenomenon (in part because they seek to curry favor with the media and the international NGO community), the blogosphere has taken upon itself the role of media watchdog.

BLOGGERS HAVE become a critical component of the free world’s defense in the current war. During the Hizbullah campaign in Lebanon, bloggers scrutinized coverage of the war in a way that has never been done before. Their work has exposed the dirty secret of the Middle East that the media has hidden for so many years: The global media and the international NGO community, which profess to be neutral observers, are in fact colluding with terrorist organizations.

The blogosphere, and particularly Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Zombietime, Michelle Malkin, and EU Referendum, have relentlessly exposed the systematic staging of news events, fabrication of attacks against relief workers, and doctoring of photographic images by Hizbullah with the active assistance of international organizations and the global media.

This is strong stuff—and I agree with Glick, but, as I said, it’s not relevant only to the information war against Israel. It’s highly relevant to coverage of the war in Iraq, too.

Here’s what I wrote at the time of Carroll’s release:

Her appearance was bizarre and unexpected for someone described as a “freed” American hostage. The pictures we were shown and the words spoken by the anchors–that Carroll was “free”–were totally discordant.

This immediately raised questions in the minds of viewers, as I mentioned here. Those questions were not addressed by the reporters and anchors who were viewing the same live feed.

The media failed to mediate: they showed raw footage. They showed us the feed they were getting: before they knew the story, before they could explain to us viewers the context of what we were seeing, which was, I repeat, bizarre and unexpected for a “freed” American hostage. She looked as if she’d “gone native,” in the words of one poster to an online chat at the Washington Post. In fact, it turned out later that she was not yet free when giving that interview, in which she said how well treated she’d been.

The failure of the morning anchors to question what they were seeing, to raise doubts about how “free” Carroll was at that moment, is the nub of the problem.

Read Glick’s whole piece.

Neal Gabler tells it like it is:

The news is no longer regarded as a trust. It is just another competitor for viewers’ time, another distraction in a world of entertainment, though what it is distracting the audience from is essentially itself. No one but old people watch the news today; the median age of the network news broadcasts on ABC and NBC is just under 60 and on CBS just over 60, and the cable network audiences aren’t any different. The young people that advertisers covet apparently feel they have better things to do than watch news, which means, in effect, that the news providers are in the awkward position of finding a way to attract people who really don’t want their product.

But then he goes and disses Hepzeeba fave Anderson Cooper.

After graduating from Yale, he landed a job as a researcher at Channel One, the teen-oriented network that is beamed directly into middle schools and high schools, then, after six months, he decided he would rather see the world and became a one-man television crew, visiting war zones like Rwanda and Myanmar and sending back video dispatches to his old company on an on-again, off-again basis for roughly five years, including a year he spent in Vietnam learning the language — a far cry from on-deadline reports of most broadcast journalists. He eventually landed a job as a newsreader at ABC, then as host of the reality show “The Mole,” and then migrated to CNN, where he has acquitted himself as something more than an airhead. But even so, this is not exactly the résumé of an anchorman, hoisting his way rung by rung and assignment by assignment up the ladder, which is precisely the point. Cooper was a free agent — the journalistic equivalent of a soldier of fortune. He was a lone operator and a swashbuckler with boyish élan who worked on his own schedule and on his own terms. The news wasn’t a trust for Anderson Cooper. It was an adventure.

Gabler has a point about the anchor-as-emcee in our 24/7 “news” universe. But I respectfully disagree about Cooper. I know he’s back to reporting on JonBenet and Katrina after his four-week-long stint in the Middle East—like every other anchor. He’s a good soldier for CNN, but Cooper is no lightweight, as I made clear here and here and here, during the Hezbollah-vs.-Israel war. He always finds a way to inject a note of seriousness into serious stories—and that’s about all you can ask of a news emcee in the Constant Information Era

Textbook prices are out of control. The New York Times describes the problem:

J. Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, said publishers report that sales of a new textbook edition evaporate almost completely after one year, when used copies flood the market.

Authors say that this drives publishers to shorten the intervals between revisions and to raise prices to try to recoup development costs from a shrinking base of new-book buyers — then the cycle repeats.

The system is broken.

Agreed. And now an outfit called Freeload Press is providing free e-textbooks to students. The only catch is that the texts are full of advertisements.

Apparently, the company doesn’t feature enough outstanding textbooks to make a dent in the market. But that’s not the only problem: professors are offended at the idea that students might be polluted by advertising while engaged in higher learning.

I’m agnostic about this. We are already so drenched in advertising that most of us—including “impressionable” college students— are able to shrug off its evil rays. I’m all in favor of e-textbooks, though. And if the textbook publishers don’t get cracking and make available their works in digital form, there will be more barbarians at the gate.

Note to publishers: set books free.

The Big Pharaoh mentions an ad campaign that has been running on Al Arabiya:

The ad shows the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Iraq. At the closure, the message “Terrorism has no religion” appears followed by the verse in the Quran “Whosoever kills a human being without (any reason like) manslaughter, or corruption on earth, it is as though he had killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life it is as though he had saved the lives of all mankind.”

Here’s one of the print ads in the same campaign:

Visit the sponsor’s website here. Here’s what they say about their mission:

Our mission is to expose the fallacy of the distorted and politicized Islamic teachings used by ungodly extremists to sanctify and justify terrorism.
It has become crucial to inform the Muslim and Arab people —particularly the Iraqi people— about the deceptions terrorists employ in distorting the peaceful teachings of Islam.
These terrorists, who claim to follow the Islamic Faith, are in truth only drowning in an abyss of mistaken beliefs.

Back on August 8, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy assessed the stakes in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah:

“In the end we will emerge successful,” he said. “But we have to make sure that our enemies will not be able to project the image that they are similarly successful. This is very important for Israel’s deterrence image,” Halevy insisted, adding “We must engrave in the mind of the enemy that it has suffered a grave and serious setback.”

Now, two weeks after the world declared Hezbollah victorious, Hassan Nasrallah indicates in a TV interview, in not so many words, that he got Israel’s message:

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah came close to admitting Sunday that his group had made a mistake when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on July 12 and set off 34 days of intense fighting.

“We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude,” Nasrallah told Lebanon’s New TV network. “You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military and political reasons. Neither I, Hezbollah, prisoners in Israeli jails nor the families of the prisoners would accept it.”

There are growing indications that this was indeed a massive political setback for Hezbollah:

Analysts said his remarks may be an effort by the 46-year-old leader to defuse ongoing anger inside Lebanon over the scale of the destruction wreaked by the fighting and an indication that Nasrallah is trying to mend political fences ahead of a visit to Beirut Monday by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“Hezbollah has received so much blame for having provoked this Israeli onslaught,” said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a leading Lebanese expert on Hezbollah. “The less negative impact would be to say, `Of course, we wouldn’t have done it if we had known.’”

Ehud Olmert, for one, predicted this in an August 2 interview with The Times (London):

No-one can seriously argue that we genuinely thought that at the end of this operation Israel will not be threatened potentially by missiles.

It’s whether or not Hezbollah and the Syrians and all the others would be quick to assume that it’s worthwhile to shoot rockets or missiles at Israel or they will think twice, three and five times before they dare enter into this again after the experience with Lebanon considering what was the response of Israel and how long we have been ready to endure these attacks and to fight back.

And therefore I think that in the long run this is a dramatic defeat for Hezbollah and for the Iranians that manipulated them. I think the Iranians as well as Hezbollah made a dramatic error of judgement, which is the source of all this failure. And this error of judgement was that Israel would not respond in the way that we did.

Not that Olmert’s prescience will help him at home, where he is deeply unpopular, because a majority of Israelis feel strongly that their government was careless with their lives.

And Nasrallah is now a hit on the pop culture scene.

Palestinian singer Alaa Abu al-Haija, 28, performs the “Hawk of Lebanon” song with the Northern Band at a wedding in the West Bank village of village of Al-Sawiya north of Ramallah, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2006. At the height of the Israel-Hezbollah war, the band wrote new lyrics, in praise of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, for an old tune. The “Hawk of Lebanon” song tapped into Nasrallah’s huge popularity among Palestinians and became an instant hit. (Mohammed Ballas/ AP Photo )

So it goes…

Will Hollywood help Ned Lamont?

More details, as the story of the who kidnapped the Fox News journalists, who knew their whereabouts, and who helped secure their release becomes even murkier (emphasis added):

Ala Hosni, commander of the PA Civil Police in the Gaza Strip, said the kidnappers decided to release the two unconditionally after feeling that they were about to be arrested. He said all the cases of kidnappings would remain open until those responsible were held accountable.

The kidnappers later issued a statement in which they warned “all infidels against visiting Palestine. Any infidel who comes to Palestine will be killed unless he converts to Islam.”

New details on the captivity of Fox journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig:

The Washington-based Mr Centanni said later that they were coerced into converting by their armed abductors, who had handcuffed and blindfolded them, and pointed pistols at their heads. The band of up to ten kidnappers told the hostages that they had been seized on behalf of Osama bin Laden and the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. …

For hours they had to lie face-down on the floor. Each time they tried to raise their heads they were pushed down with a gun barrel or a stick. In the days that followed they were instructed to write their life stories, with Mr Centanni being told to explain what he did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Kashmir, a place he has never visited. “Then we were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint,” he said.

This explains Centanni’s tears upon his release, and the agitated behavior of Olaf Wiig, which was captured on video, upon release and immediately prior to their meeting with Ismail Haniyeh (emphasis mine):

On Sunday, before the journalists’ release, a new video was released, showing Wiig and Centanni dressed in beige Arab-style robes. Wiig delivered an anti-Western speech, his face expressionless and his tone halting. The kidnappers claimed both men had converted to Islam.

Several hours later, the two men were dropped off at the Beach Hotel, wearing Western-style clothing. Wiig walked into the lobby behind Centanni, briefly turned when someone pulled him by the arm and shouted “get off” before heading upstairs.

(photo Reuters TV)

I don’t hold either of them responsible for their behavior during or after captivity—as anyone should know, being kidnapped is traumatic, and post-traumatic stress is a reality. Still, my curiosity is piqued by Wiig’s evident rage, as opposed to Centanni’s evident relief. And also by Wiig’s pointed comments addressed to his Palestinian hosts:

“Your story doesn’t get very well told because it is difficult to work here,” he told the hastily arranged press conference of primarily Palestinian reporters.

Wiig’s father is the Reverend Roger Wiig, according to New Zealand TV. A forced conversion cannot have been easy for someone whose father is a man of the cloth.

This incident is ugly on so many levels.

That was the deal offered, at gunpoint, to the two kidnapped Fox journalists. They took it and now they’re free.

The AP leads with the salient facts:

Militants freed two Fox News journalists on Sunday in the Gaza Strip, ending a nearly two week hostage drama in which one of the former captives said they were forced at gunpoint to make statements, including that they had converted to Islam.

So does the New York Times:

Two journalists kidnapped in Gaza were released unharmed today after being forced at gunpoint to say on a videotape that they had converted to Islam.

So does The Times of India:

Two kidnapped Fox journalists appeared on a new videotape released by their captors on Sunday in the Gaza Strip, in which the reporters said they had converted to Islam, Fox News Channel said.

Nothing else is relevant, really—not the journalists’ gratitude to those who secured their release, not their heartfelt hopes that this incident won’t deter other journalists from getting out the story of the Palestinian people,

“I hope that this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover the story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kindhearted,” said Steve Centanni, a 60-year-old American reporter who was released along with cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, of New Zealand. “The world needs to know more about them.”

not their coded warnings to the Palestinians:

“My biggest concern, really, is that as a result of happened to us, foreign journalists would be discouraged from coming here to tell the story and that would be a great tragedy to the people of Palestine and of Gaza in particular,” Wiig said.

“Your story doesn’t get very well told because it is difficult to work here,” he told the hastily arranged press conference of primarily Palestinian reporters.

Not the photo op in which the two, flanked by Wiig’s journalist wife Anita McNaught, gaze adoringly at the munificent Ismail Haniyeh:

Israeli novelist and peace activist David Grossman eulogizes his 20-year-old son Uri, who fell in Lebanon two-days before the cease-fire:

You were the left-winger in your battalion, and they respected you, because you held fast to your opinions without dodging a single one of your military responsibilities. I remember you telling me about your roadblock policy — you spent a lot of time manning roadblocks in the territories. You said that if there is a child in a car you pull over, you always begin by trying to calm the kid down, to make him laugh. That you always remind yourself that the kid is about Ruti’s age. And you’d always remind yourself how frightened he is of you. And how much he hates you, and that he has reasons for that, and still, you will do all you can to make that terrifying moment easier for him, while doing your job, without fudging.

Read it and weep for the Israeli boy who wanted peace with his neighbors and yet fought like a lion for his family: his country.

Shelby Steele, echoing the bitter conclusions of moderate Muslim bloggers such as the Big Pharaoh, Sandmonkey, and Raja; confirming the conclusions of knowledgeable commentators like Michael Young and Amir Taheri; and lending credence to Tony Blair’s incisive comments about misguided Western reaction the “arc of extremism” confronting us—and our beloved Western values, which we take for granted—cuts to the chase with his analysis of geopolitical reality:

If this [Hezbollah vs. Israel] war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her. And now much of the West is in a similar position, living in a state of ever-heightening security against the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists. So here, from the Muslim world, comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own sake, a hatred with very little actual reference to those it claims to hate. Even the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself. Standing today in the rubble of Lebanon, having not taken a single inch of Israeli territory, Hezbollah claims a galvanizing victory.

Why the West, and in particular Western “opinion,” as Tony Blair has called the narrative line peddled by the media elite, has seen this war as a victory for Hezbollah will be the subject of treatises for years to come.

The left has its reasons (it assumes, a priori, that the colonial oppressors of the West are the root cause of Muslim extremism, which is born of immiseration bred by Western imperialist capitalism). Liberals have their reasons (they are invested in seeing themselves as compassionate, and out of a reflexive intellectual laziness they misconceive Muslims as a new oppressed minority). And the right has its reasons (they are disappointed in Israel’s poor performance in Lebanon, and its failure to vanquish Hezbollah and to silence the provocateurs Nasrallah, Assad, and above all Ahmadinejad).

Steele underscores the tragic reality for Israel, which is caught in the crosshairs of both Western guilt and irrational Islamic extremist hatred:

It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today’s world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor–which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah.

Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel’s historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.

But white guilt’s most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history.

I am sorry for Israel—which is the whipping boy for Western guilt and the subject of a refined punitiveness that seeks to expiate Western guilt at the cost of the moral disarmament of the Israelis.

I worry for my country, for our beloved Enlightenment values, and for my children’s future in a century in which we seem to be turning all that is good into evil and to excusing all that is evil only in order to be able to say “not in our name.”

A big storm is coming, and it has ultra-right-wing vigilante justice written all over it. We will rue the day that we failed to mobilize against the nihilists and extremists who are undermining our way of life.

I wonder what is in the mind of this former president, who works tirelessly to undermine American and British foreign policy:

Tony Blair’s lack of leadership and timid subservience to George W Bush lie behind the ongoing crisis in Iraq and the worldwide threat of terrorism, according to the former American president Jimmy Carter.

	Outspoken: Jimmy Carter condemns the Iraq invasion

“I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behaviour,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

“I think that more than any other person in the world the Prime Minister could have had a moderating influence on Washington - and he has not. I really thought that Tony Blair, who I know personally to some degree, would be a constraint on President Bush’s policies towards Iraq.”

Why does Carter purposefully ignore the deeply considered and thoughtful explanations that Blair has repeatedly and patiently laid out?—explanations that offer the perspective we in the West need to see in order to understand the world we live in.

I am amazed at how many people will say, in effect, there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that September 11th predated either. The West didn’t attack this movement. We were attacked. Until then we had largely ignored it.

The reason I say our response was even more momentous than it seemed at the time, is this. We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn’t. We chose values. We said we didn’t want another Taleban or a different Saddam. Rightly, in my view, we realised that you can’t defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas.

There is a host of analysis written about mistakes made in Iraq or Afghanistan, much of it with hindsight but some of it with justification. But it all misses one vital point. The moment we decided not to change regime but to change the value system, we made both Iraq and Afghanistan into existential battles for Reactionary Islam. We posed a threat not to their activities simply: but to their values, to the roots of their existence.

We committed ourselves to supporting Moderate, Mainstream Islam. In almost pristine form, the battles in Iraq or Afghanistan became battles between the majority of Muslims in either country who wanted democracy and the minority who realise that this rings the death-knell of their ideology.

Well, it turns out that Carter has become such a pacifist that he would only have considered going into Afghanistan after 9/11—an action endorsed wholeheartedly by the vast majority of Americans.

But had he still been president, he says that he would never have considered invading Iraq in 2003.

“No,” he said, “I would never have ordered it. However, I wouldn’t have excluded going into Afghanistan, because I think we had to strike at al-Qaeda and its leadership.

Carter, whose geopolitical sophistication resembles Cindy Sheehan’s, is trying to shame Blair into changing his foreign policy. What a joke—from the president whose policies and actions buried us in the quicksand of the Middle East.

Just in case you didn’t know—and I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing, because, over and over, the war in Iraq has been declared a failure here in the United States, because, sadly, most people don’t know how to measure success and their government has failed utterly to explain it to them—here is evidence from Mohammed from Iraq the Model, who’s just back from having spent a week in Egypt (emphasis mine), where he attended a blogging conference (and met the Sandmonkey).

that’s really what I felt in Egypt that I don’t feel in my war-torn city [Baghdad]; for the first time in 3 years I felt the restrains of government…I told one of my colleagues I feel safe in Baghdad despite the dangers, I may feel afraid of terrorists or random violence but I never fear the government and that’s not only how I feel, Iraqis are not afraid of expressing their differences with the authority

Mohammed compares this to how he felt in Egypt:

Back in Cairo I was sitting in the hotel’s garden reading a book when I was surprised by a man, who reminded me of one of Saddam’s security guys, interrupting my quiet afternoon reading and telling me without any introductions “Don’t believe them!”.
“Who are they?” I asked “those people” he said pointing at the book in my hand and added “we have a very good system that is represented by the government and Islam. Maybe we need some minor improvements but those people want to blow up our culture, history and beliefs”.
I could feel that these remarks would be followed by an informal interrogation with questions about my colleagues so I quickly ended the conversation and avoided going into details. However this came as a flashback from the dreadful era of dictatorship that I’ve forgotten over the past three years….

I could feel eyes following me and walls recording every word I say that for the first time in years I feel I need to watch my mouth in front a simple cleaning worker in the hotel who was cleaning up the conference hall after one of the sessions. He said “if you want to change know that we’re on your side” it may sound like a friendly gesture but I got scared and my immediate response was “No, no! this is not about any change!”

Read the whole thing.

To live without fear of the government is, of course, the minimum condition of freedom. How many Americans can imagine living in fear of their government (and the government’s many “representatives,” i.e., spies?) And yet so many people across the globe are terrified of their government—including in Egypt, a country that is nominally our ally and which receives billions of dollars of aid from us each year.

Those are the stakes in Iraq, and it’s why we must stay until the job is done.

If you’re a Palestinian politician trying to make hay from the kidnapping of two Fox News journalists, you can go pretty low: after claiming to know nothing about it at first, you come to the rescue two weeks later by announcing that you’re about to secure the victims’ release, and while you’re at it, you make sure to blame your most bitter rival for the kidnapping, which, just two days ago, you denounced as contradicting “the traditions, the values and the morals of the [Palestinian] people”:

A previously unknown group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades claimed responsibility last week for the abduction and issued a three-day ultimatum to the US to release all Muslim prisoners held in America.

However, Hamas officials told The Jerusalem Post that the kidnappers belonged to one of the armed wings of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party.

Art critic Robert Hughes shares:

We met at a drinks party in Notting Hill. “Do you want to meet the best fuck in London?” the host delicately inquired. And he pointed to a sofa, on which sat a tall, rangy, square-jawed blonde holding a glass of warm vodka. We were introduced. Things began to click, small cogs and then larger ones to engage….

Two weeks later we were off to Venice. And less than a month after that she had moved with her few belongings into my flat in Cornwall Gardens, SW7: a neat little two-bedroomer, looking out onto a square of winter-bare trees.

Except to pick up groceries and the mail, and occasionally to take in a movie or a play, neither of us stirred outside much for the first couple of months of 1967. We were both in a feverish and untiring rut, a sort of erotic trance: the first thing I bought for the flat was a king-size bed.

Is this guy still doing criticism?

Where is the Sumner Redstone of his profession to tell him that if he’s an art critic (can anyone say “high culture”?)—and he’s in his mid-sixties—we really don’t want to know all about how his wife got the clap from Jimi Hendrix and gave it to him?

Katherine Harris:

Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God did not intend for the United States to be a “nation of secular laws” and that the separation of church and state is a “lie we have been told” to keep religious people out of politics.”If you’re not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin,” Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention. She cited abortion and same-sex marriage as examples of that sin.

How long must we tolerate having this woman involved in public life and affairs of state?

Pity poor Hamas leader Haniyeh as he tries to draw a distinction between the kidnappers of Fox reporters Centanni and Wiig and his own group:

“We express our total rejection to the style of kidnapping. It contradicts the traditions, the values and the morals of our people,” Haniyeh told reporters.

 

“The Palestinian people have always limited their struggle to the fight against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” and never made demands that don’t bare [sic] any relation to the struggle against occupation, he said.

The morals of Haniyeh’s people, of course, allow them to encourage youngsters to blow themselves up inside Israel and take the innocent with them. Some distinction.

A pox on Hamas. No one cares that they consider themselves righteous. They are obscene terrorists and now perhaps the world will make the connection they are trying so hard to avoid.

Last fall, the unsinkable Tina Brown, writing in the Washington Post in the wake of the New York Times’s “explanations” about the Judith Miller war-reporting matter, asked the only relevant questions a serious media professional could ask:

Don Van Natta’s team-reported narrative included such baffling details as Times Executive Editor Bill Keller blandly noting that, after he took her off the Iraq story because of her lead role in co-authoring the erroneous stories of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Miller “kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.” Drifting? On her own? Is the Times after Blair some sort of trackless sea, with lone castaways afloat on rafts? To whom do reporters report? IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?

Obviously not, and this is the real source of the problem—editors are not exercising appropriate oversight. Instead, in the matter of fauxtography, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher, comes roaring to the rescue of the photographers who’ve come under attack from those rude right-wing bloggers.

With most others in the mainstream media silent, I rise here in support of the overwhelming number of press photographers in the Middle East who bravely, under horrid conditions, in recent weeks have sent back graphic and revealing pictures from the war zones, only to be smeared, as a group, by rightwing bloggers aiming, as always, to discredit the media as a whole.

Mitchell goes on to pooh-pooh the few instances of fauxtography that, according to him, are the exception to the rule. The media is completely honest, he suggests, and the criticisms are nothing but partisan hackery.

I’m still on vacation, and not really in the mood to pursue this pathetic attempt to brush off the accusations and to avoid responsibility for locating and fixing the problem. But I will say that this is the media scandal that no one is talking about: the total failure of editorial professionals to do their job.