How else to account for the fact that there was only a 3% rise in the number of trauma patients who visited Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament and neurologist Dr. Ali al-Miqdad.

The reason, he claims, is psychological. Miqdad is convinced that Lebanon’s Shiites perceived the war against the Israelis as a fight for survival, and that they waged, and won, it on behalf of the entire nation. As a result, says Miqdad, “people are not going to the doctor, because their morale is excellent.”

Better clear the way and make room for Hezbollah to take power in Lebanon, though:

“But they also expect to be compensated — in the form of their fair share of power.”

You can read all about it here.

In Lebanon, there are six licensed television stations—one that speaks for Maronite Christians, one for Sunni Muslims, one for Shia who don’t belong to Hezbollah, Al Manar (HezbollahTV), a communist station, and the government-backed station. Here’s how they report:

Because of the high degree of politicization of Lebanese society, current political events are covered in a way that supports the views of each television station with no respect for professional codes and ethics. An early published version of the report by the UN international commission to investigate the assassination of Rafiq Hariri noted that “certain Lebanese media had the unfortunate and constant tendency to spread rumors, nurture speculation, offer information as facts without prior checking and at times use materials obtained under dubious circumstances from sources that had been briefed by the Commission, thereby creating distress and anxiety among the public at large.”

Sounds like great infotainment!

Read the whole article—it’s fascinating. Among the tidbits I learned:

Television dominates the flow of information in Lebanon. According to recent figures by an authoritative study, about 65 percent of Lebanese adults view two to four hours per day, and about 82 percent of the population views television on a daily basis, …

In 2003, terrestrial television penetration was at approximately 99 percent of all households. Cable television penetration is among the highest in the world, and is estimated to be as high as 79 percent of all households.

Name the source of this quote:

Iran, whose president has vowed to wipe Israel off the map, complained to the United Nations on Wednesday that the Jewish state was repeatedly threatening to bomb it.

If you said Reuters…you’re a genius. So then you won’t be surprised that Iran claims Israel’s “threats” are a matter of “extreme gravity.”

Can you stand another post about Sacha Baron Cohen? Good, ’cause you’re getting one. And you will be rewarded for your forbearance, because this time he speaks…as himself to Neil Strauss, for Rolling Stonel And he answers some questions:

“Borat essentially works as a tool,” Baron Cohen says. “By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it’s anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.

“I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”

Yes, it’s true. Apathy, indifference, and lack of empathy are mankind’s worst enemies. It takes only a few evil people and a lot of indifferent ones—unwilling to stand up for what they believe is right, uninterested in the suffering of others, afraid to care—to create catastrophes like Nazism, Stalinism, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution in China, the rape of the Balkans, and, yes, the theocracy of Iran and the thugocracy of Egypt, to name just a few.

Here I thought we’d learned these things in the 20th century, but apparently we haven’t. I’m glad Baron Cohen spoke out to explain what he’s up to: it doesn’t hurt the movie, and it helps spread the message: Don’t look away.

Sacha Baron Cohen hits Australia:

His Sydney trip saw him mobbed in the street, but mocked for using a teleprompter to deliver his ‘off-the-cuff’ witticisms.

Today Borat blamed censorship for the device, before delivering word-perfect facsimilies of the previous day’s humour.

“My government very keen that there is control over words I say,” he said. “There was much controversy in my country over amount of anti-semitisms in my moviefilmso Kazakh censor become involved. And after, he allowed the film to be released after deciding there was just enough anti-semitism.”

Sounds like the editor of the London Review of Books who oversaw the publication of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby.”

[Mary Kay Wilmers] admits now, however, that it would have been better to use a lower case ‘l’ for the word ‘lobby’ - to have avoided the risk of being misunderstood.

Too late for that, isn’t it?

update November 15:Fox denies the story. (via TVNewser) We’ll see.

Via Memeorandum:WorldNet Daily reports that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, the Fox journalists who were kidnapped in Gaza this past summer and forced to convert to Islam on pain of death, were ransomed:

The terror leader, from the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees, said his organization’s share of the money was used to purchase weapons, which he said would be utilized “to hit the Zionists.”

He said he expects the payments for Centanni and Wiig’s freedom will encourage Palestinian groups to carry out further kidnappings.

Officials associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party and its security organization, the Preventative Security Services, confirmed to WND money was paid for the release of the Fox News reporters.

The world has moved on, but I haven’t. Along with Jill Carroll’s abduction, I consider this incident—the kidnapping, the photo op for Ismail Haniyeh that accompanied the journalists’ release, and the victims’ total silence about their abductors and the sick situation in Gaza after the fact—to be one of the most shameful things that the American media has been involved in since 9/11. (And I include Fox News in this condemnation.)

Corrupt, agenda-laden news organizations regularly hide the truth from the American people about jihadists and Islamists; in exchange for a good story, they give the same jihadists and Islamists an opportunity to make themselves look like heroes on American television. I wrote about this at length here, and nothing has changed in the interim.

Where’s the election where we can throw our disgraceful media bums out?