This is a subject that is sure to become more important: how liberals and progressives can be “pro-Israel” (a term currently being discussed at Ezra Klein’s blog) and yet distinguish themselves from the blood-curdling “pro-Israel” stance of, say, a certain Texas pastor.

I want the folks who live in Israel now to stay there and live happy lives untroubled by violence. I think that peace agreements, like the agreement of the late 1970s that has ended war between Israel and Egypt, are the only way to achieve this. Compare me to the Texas megachurch pastor who endorses Israeli military action as the best means for covering the region in a “sea of human blood drained from the veins of those who have followed Satan.” The term “pro-Israel” should not be applied to his view. Yet NPR bestows the “pro-Israel” appellation on him, even while noting that most Israelis reject his position. Suggestions for reforming the discourse are welcome.

Dude, you don’t have to reform the discourse. You have to widen your perspective. ’cause the problem isn’t the discourse here in America. The problem is what’s going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians over there. So you should stop worrying about who your allies on the homefront are and start worrying about what’s standing in the way of peace for those folks in Israel whom you profess to care about. Surely it isn’t that blood-curdling Texas pastor?

But otherwise I’m impressed.

It’s no “Eve of Destruction“ of course:

In fact, that Israeli band’s song sucks (of course I don’t know what the rest of the field is like). But I wanted to know what all the fuss is about.

If only that Finnish organizer guy hadn’t used the word “inappropriate” to characterize it. I’m not defending the song, which is … well, even “unremarkable” sounds like too much of a compliment. I’m defending the band’s right to enter its song in the contest (if the band and the song meet all the other qualifications that other entrants have to meet).

It should be a simple thing, right?

Global politics enters the entertainment arena in Europe. The organizers of the cheesy Eurovision Song Contest, “notorious for the banality of its entries,” as The Times (London) puts it, are confronted with the problem of an Israeli band that sings about not wanting to be annihilated by A’jad (who was last seen yesterday making love to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who showed his appreciation by claiming that A’jad endorsed the Saudis’ 2002 peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. Ha!).

Will Israeli peaceniks be allowed to participate in the world of global pop culture? With lyrics like this? [see this post for a discussion about how pop culture can work to dissipate conflict]

The world is full of terror

If someone makes an error

He’s gonna blow us up to biddy biddy kingdom come

There are some crazy rulers they hide and try to fool us

With demonic, technologic willingness to harm

They’re gonna push the button

Push the button push the bu push the bu push the button

And I don’t want to die; I want to see the flowers bloom

Don’t want a go capoot ka boom, and I don’t want to cry

I wanna have a lot of fun, just sitting in the sun

But nevertheless - he’s gonna push the button

Push the button push the bu push the bu push the button

The New York Times and the London Times quoted one of the contest organizers as saying: “It’s absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition.” Why not? I wonder. Last year, as I recall (and wrote about here), a Finnish heavy-metal band with a rather unappealing Satan-worshipping “message” won the competition.

And an anti-war message is inappropriate in 2007? I’m not sure I get that.

Kobi Oz, the lead singer of the Israeli band whose song was voted into the competition by popular vote in Israel (those are the rules of entry), says:

“I’m not worked up over the issue, because I know our song is not political. …the song is about the state of humanity in general, whereby a minority has access to excessive power. The song could be about the terror in Russia or Spain, or the violence on the streets of England or France.

“Our way of dealing with terror it to laugh in its face. I think the Europeans should adopt this method as well.” [e.a.]

Good luck with that! I’ll be following along.

Or can you?

Howard Kurtz sets up his Reliable Sources segment by calling Ann Coulter a “bomb-thrower” and then CNN gets in on the action by playing—without bleeping***—Ann Coulter’s lame joke (aka a PC Probe Attack (TM)) about the “faggot” John Edwards.

KURTZ: Let me turn now to Ann Coulter. She is the noted lawyer, author and bomb-thrower. She threw another bomb, I guess on Friday. She appeared at the CPAC Conference. That’s the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference, an annual event in Washington.

And we have some tape we’re going to roll. This is what she had to say about John Edwards.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANN COULTER, COMMENTATOR: I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot”. So…

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Now, here’s my question, Gene Robinson. She said this in front of an audience, there were a lot of reporters there.

The first day, nothing in “The New York Times,” nothing on CNN, one reference in “The Washington Post” that didn’t use the “F” word, which I’m not going to repeat here. The “L.A. Times” did report what she had said and used the word that she had used, the anti-gay slur that she had used. But only after a lot of politicians, mostly Democrats, started beating up on Ann Coulter did the rest of us decide, well, maybe this was a story.

What do you make of that?

There follows an interesting exchange, in which Kurtz’s entire panel seems to agree that … it’s better left alone–that there’s no percentage in giving Coulter any more publicity than she has already gotten with her schtick.

Which is pretty remarkable. And the significance of this surely extends beyond what we can or cannot say on television to what we can and cannot say in polite society and in the workplace and in our pop culture and in our political discourse and in our streets. Which is kinda mind-blowing.

Not that I advocating name-calling. I have said more than once that I think it’s an incredibly destructive behavior. I do believe in free speech, however. And I believe that the restraint of free speech that is known as political correctness [and which manifests itself as taboos against language (such as New York City's recent "ban" on the word nigger) or as smear campaigns against individuals for unfortunate (and usually out of context) utterances] is a foul and harmful enterprise.

Repression always causes resistance, and witch-hunts, once begun, are hard to contain. Once upon a time, liberals used to know that. Then … well, I’ll be damned if I know what exactly happened. And I’m not much interested in pointing fingers. I am, however, interested in addressing the problems and challenges that face us as we try to live peacefully among one another in an increasingly partisan society and a chaotic-seeming outside world.

Kurtz’s panelist Blanquita Cullum offered the most interesting perspective:

CULLUM: Well, you know, first of all, [Coulter is] a takeoff on Traficant, who insulted the Congress and called them prostitutes, and he said he was sorry that he called the Congress prostitutes, he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, the prostitutes.But the thing of it is, look, where do we have the outrageous meter? Where does — where does the press really come in?

Is it with John Edwards who had the bloggers that called the right wing “Christofascists”? I mean, is it when we have Farrakhan who calls the pope “a cracker”?

I mean, where is the — where is the outrageous meter? OK?

KURTZ: Well, where does this fall? Answer your own question. Where does this fall on the outrageous?

CULLUM: Free speech. OK? And I would say…

KURTZ: But she’s entitled to say whatever she wants. But should we cover it?

CULLUM: I think you should cover it. I think you should cover John Edwards’ bloggers. I think that the conscience of America is really now almost phony, though, because in some ways, if you go to the blogs and you look at the blogs, they’re a lot rougher and a lot meaner than anything that Ann Coulter would say. But it still goes back to free speech.

I’m sure you’ll all agree. Lots of food for thought here, too. One way or another, we’re having a national “conversation” about what is acceptable and what is not. Welcome to the first cultural revolution of the 21st century.

———-*** I’ll be curious to see who watches Kurtz the Media Watcher.

update: I added the CNN link

Please note that this post is titled “good information,” not “good news.” There is, of course, a big difference. What follows is not a story, in other words. It’s an expert’s examination and analysis of the facts on the ground.

“The news,” on the other hand, is about storytelling (information fed to us in the form of mini-conflicts, with protagonists and antagonists and bones of contention) by “evenhanded” self-styled experts (reporters, anchors, and hosts) who seek (or, in the case of reporters, are presumed to have sought) reliable information from people who claim to be experts in their respective fields. See? That’s why I call it infotainment: it presents controversy, not information. The point of it is to get you all riled up so that you’ll keep coming back for more. ‘Cause being riled up isn’t so bad—it can be fun. Why, it’s entertaining!

And that’s why (although I’m on record as a longtime Anderson Cooper fan) I’m with Eat the Press’s Rachel Sklar in the Rachel-vs.-Ankush-on CNN-vs.-Fox disagreement.

All the cable channels are doing more or less the same thing. None of them are reporting the kind of information you’ll get below. ‘Cause it’s not bloody, it’s not sexy, it’s not outrageous, it’s not dramatic, it’s not horrifying, and it’s not heartbreaking—it’s the nitty-gritty about what is actually happening on the ground. Also, because it reports some progress, it carries the strong suggestion that there is a job for us to finish in Iraq before we pull out. I’ll leave that the political ramifications of that for the politicos to battle over; I’m much more interested in the quality (or, rather, the lack of quality) of the information we are getting from TV “news.”

Anyhoo…back to that good information (which is definitely not all good news—but nothing catastrophic) from Iraq.

The Small Wars Journal is the place to go if you want to find out about how things are going in Iraq from people who know what they’re talking about. The latest is from Bing West:

Based upon a February 2007 trip revisiting locales in Anbar and Baghdad that I had tracked for years, permit me to offer the following observations.

Overview. What is shaping up in Iraq? There are four ongoing wars. 1) Shiite mafias in the south, 2) Anbar Sunni extremists 3) Shiite ethnic cleansing around Baghdad 4) Sunni extremist car bombings in Baghdad.

1. In the South the U.S. is doing little. The energy sector funnels billions to corrupt officials, criminals, militias and insurgents. The Brits weren’t able to impose control. The hope is that the south remains a long-term mafia-type mess, and does not spill north to Baghdad.

2. In Anbar about 60% of the tribes are tilting toward the Marines and fighting the al-Qaeda types. Police ranks are swelling with tribal members. Anbar is improving, but how the Sunni tribes will work with the Iraqi Army, let alone the central government, is moot.

Prognosis for the next six months: Progress but no breakthroughs. The central government has to woo the sheiks and offer terms, figure out how police chiefs and Iraqi army commanders share power in the cities, and crack down on the insurgents captured in Anbar (put them away for life). Jails in Anbar are filling up, and the central government is not stepping up.

3. In Baghdad, as the Shiite ethnic cleansing advances, the front lines are easily marked by the blocks of abandoned houses. Checking the cleansing can be done by military means – barriers, patrols and the like. The Americans are likely to stop this and turn around the trend.

4. Also in Baghdad, the Sunni extremists strike with suicidal murderers and car bombs. It is unlikely, given a million cars, that a technique will be developed to curtail this inside six months. In most countries, bombers are stopped by effective policing and spy networks, and Iraq is years away from that. This is the Achilles Heel. No matter the progress on other fronts, the persistence of gore and Shiite mass deaths is likely to continue to fuel hatred. [e.a.]
What, then, is the biggest problem? How the Americans can infuse into the Iraqi army and police in Baghdad a sense of mission and even-handedness such that the Americans can withdraw from neighborhoods in eight to twelve months without backsliding.

Read the rest here. (via Jules Crittenden, who describes Bing West thus:

USMC Vietnam vet, former asst secdef, counterinsurgency scholar and Dot homeboy

So it sounds like there are good reasons to trust West’s judgment—if that’s what you look for when you’re trying to judge the value of the information you receive (i.e., reporting), that is.

Bottom line, though: West doesn’t sound particularly optimistic. Nor does he sound pessimistic. He sounds like a man who understands that we are involved in a long mission to do what we can do and leave the rest to the Iraqis: stand down as they stand up (remember that?).

Here are a couple of points from Bing’s post that stuck with me:

I’ve seen enough examples of tough Iraqi leadership at the battalion and police chief level to believe that some leadership is emerging. Right now, though, the glue is the presence of the American troops. They have to be out on the streets first, then the Iraqi forces fall in behind them. …
Erratic standards of patrolling. The patrol is the basic tool in the US military inventory. Without patrols, there is no US presence or influence. The variation in the size and duration of patrols from location to location is astounding. … It is caused by an extreme variation in intuitively assessing the threat and setting the balance between force protection and mission accomplishment. A little ops analysis by experienced infantry of how often we are really on the streets and how one determines patrol size and mounted vs. dismounted would go a long ways. [e.a.] …
I am a broken record on this, but I do urge that we systematically fingerprint and take census in critical locales, and provide the Iraqis with simple gear and templates to do likewise. OpSec firewalls can be built in to avoid subversion. [e.a.] …
The Iraqi judiciary system cannot be straightened out for another five years. At higher levels, this is disputed. I remain on the side of the battalions. We must lock up tens of thousands until the violence subsides. [this is certain to be very controversial --ed., who added the emphasis]

4. Under-utilized information tool. The loud speakers linked to news broadcasts several times a day in Ramadi is a terrific innovation that should be immediately installed at IA, IP and JSS locales. [e.a.]

Much food for thought here.

Message to wannabe authors from Gawker: keep your Lower East Side wing apartment and your day job.

What at least one big-house big-wig editor is telling the cute young novelists this week is that, in the current thinking on author advances, “$125K is the new $250K.”

Gawker doesn’t say (probably because Gawker doesn’t know), but I will: relatively speaking, many established authors have it even worse.