Entries from April 2007 ↓

… he knew NBC’s address and didn’t know ABC’s address or CBS’s address or CNN’s address.

 Everyone knows NBC’s address. The staff at NBC says the words ”30 Rock” many, many, many times a day, particularly on the Today show. Why, there’s even a show called 30 Rock—you may have heard of it.

Some viewers, however—like, for example Seung Cho—think that “30 Rock” means Rockefeller Avenue instead of Rockfeller Plaza.

 This guess brought to you by Occam’s Razor, and it is in response to Ann Althouse’s post (responses to which I haven’t read, so maybe someone got there before me. Whatever).

Yes, we know.

VT Killer Mailed Package To NBC

But why oh why do they have to glorify this repulsively insane kid by airing the pictures over and over and over again? What is the point?

 Direct from China to Egypt:

Digital Korans, automatic prayer reciters and headphones dispensing religious advice are all part of the growing wave of outward religiosity that is increasingly defining daily life in Egypt.

At least some people think it’s a sign of the growing religiosity in Egypt that people want to carry around these gadgets that supposedly keep them on the straight and narrow. Others are not so sure:

Sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, on the other hand, thinks the trend is more indicative of the “naivety of the consumers and the intelligence of the merchants.”

“It also says a lot about how quickly the Chinese economy reacts and adapts to the desires of the consumers — whoever they are,” he said with a smile.

Well, I’m with Mr. Ibrahim, ’cause I have a soft spot for sociologists.

Also: there’s this old joke about new gadgets. Here’s the punchline:

Does it give blowjobs?

Attend an Obama rally:

Obama threw away his prepared stump speech, and instead spoke about the day’s tragic events [at Virginia Tech]. “Please, have a seat,” he told the cheering crowd.

He explained his reasons for changing the tone of the event. Then he quoted Bobby Kennedy’s famous speech after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, about how, with one act of violence, “the whole nation is degraded.” America, Kennedy said, seems to tolerate violence, whether it is “civilian slaughter in far-off lands,” our increasingly coarse entertainment culture, or the ready access to guns.

“That was written in 1968–almost 40 years ago,” Obama said of Kennedy’s remarks. “We haven’t made much progress.”

Just what we need: someone else to tell us how bad we are, how bad we’ve been, and how we can do better.

He’s weak, he’s lame, he’s melancholy, and he’s a star. If you want to self-medicate, he’s your guy!

Feh.

All of you oversensitive Anglophiles should sit this one out, because I’m about to violate the Eleventh Commandment:

Palestinians Abduct British Journalist; British Journalists Union Boycotts Israel

I’m not sure what Israel’s crime is, but I hope it’s the craven, abject British National Union of Journalist (probably—and pathetically and wrongheadedly—hoping to ingratiate itself with whoever kidnapped Alan Johnston) that will get the punishment for publicly violating journalism’s code of ethics to take sides: to assert its solidarity with “the Palestinian people” [a faux-pious dodge,*** which fails to distinguish between those murderous Palestinians whose clearly stated and oft-repeated goal is to eliminate Israel and Israelis from existence and those not-murderous Palestinians who wish to get on with their lives and are willing to give peace in exchange for land or rich bribes]”

the Palestinian people — notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting

and at the same time to attack Israel for

a “savage pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza.”

Happily, not all British journalists agree with the NUJ, and some of those who disagree have been quite outspoken in their opinions:

The NUJ also cited Israel’s “continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hizballah.”

“What kind of language is this?” [Toby] Harnden [the Telegraph's D.C. correspondent] asked. “It is tendentious and politically loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness.”

Simon McGregor-Wood of ABC News, who chairs the Foreign Press Association in Israel, said the NUJ’s statements “seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity.”

“I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.

No kidding!

———-

*** I am grateful to the British journalist Nick Cohen for pointing this out in print.  He put it like this:

It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. …

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.

I am mystified by the Virginia Heffernan’s NYT review of “The Muslim Americans,” an episode of PBS’s America at the Crossroads series. Heffernan seethes with indignation that the film (which I haven’t seen yet—I’m Tivo’ing the whole thing: hey! I’m a busy person!) features only Muslims who are content to be Americans:

“The Muslim Americans” could have been really powerful.

Coulda shoulda woulda. Instead:

Women of preternatural beauty are shown in hijab alongside minivans. The Muslim men are described, at one point, as mostly doctors and lawyers. Even one who was falsely singled out by the F.B.I. — he had the same name as someone on their watch list — doesn’t seem that bothered by the experience. Everyone appears to love our big, warm, happy melting pot. They simply want to worship discreetly and get back to business. Perfect Americans.

Ms. Heffernan was looking for something else, though: the frisson of transgressiveness (about which more—a lot more—another time):

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it makes a rather dull and not especially enlightening documentary. Does not one Muslim here think the nudity on American beaches is appalling? Or that Muslim girls shouldn’t date Christian boys? Or that jihad contains an element of violence? Or that the war in Iraq is unjustified? Or that 9/11 was (in the words of some Brooklyn graffiti) “an inside job”? Come on. Are Muslims really that much more measured and evenhanded than everyone else?

Someone is conflating Islam, which is a religion like any other, with fanatical, fundamentalist Islamism, which is a perverse totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion. Someone is buying into the ignorant and idiotic notion that American Muslims have a reason to be seething with resentment against the United States. Indeed, someone at the New York Times is trying to promote that notion.

Why?

Bryan Ferry was wowed by them:

The 61-year-old lead singer of Roxy Music told Germany’s Welt Am Sonntag newspaper last month: “The way that the Nazis staged themselves and presented themselves, my Lord!

“I’m talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags — just fantastic. Really beautiful.”

Ferry has apologized. He hates the Nazis—really! he was merely critiquing Nazi iconography from an “art history perspective,” he says.

Hit and Run’s David Weigel, ever ready to assume the role of the detached intellectual, thinks Ferry has nothing to apologize for. After all, what he said was true!

This is a totally true statement about how Nazis had excellent design sense. C’mon, does someone want to argue that Leni Riefenstahl didn’t have a great sense of aesthetics?

Well, no one is accusing Ferry of lying. Something can be both true and reprehensible, because it is so intellectually detached. So utterly clueless. So tin-eared. So stupid.

That message of peace that Nancy Pelosi claims to have carried from Israel to Syria didn’t exactly work out:

Syria [to Israel]: Accept Arab initiative or we’ll resort to violence

Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal threatened on Monday evening to return the Golan Heights to Syrian hands “by way of resistance If Israel [rejected] the Arab peace initiative.”Bilal did not elaborate but some analysts raised the possibilities of either a full scale conventional war or a terror campaign in the Golan as one of the means to undertake a mukawama (resistance in Arabic).

Is anyone surprised?

I can’t really distance myself from the Virginia Tech story enough to comment with my usual detachment, probably because, as I’ve said, I’m the mother of two young adults. My heart is broken for the kids on that Blacksburg, Virginia, campus, who have suffered such a profound, shocking, inexplicable loss, who have had their feelings of safety and security so cruelly violated.

There has been so much loss already in the lives of these kids, who, after a childhood (following a generation) of peace and prosperity, have grown up in the shadow of 9/11 and the war in Iraq and the war on terror or whatever you want to call it (and the Brits don’t want to call it that anymore, because it’s not helpful and it’s alienating, but that’s a topic for another day).

Also: I don’t feel much like dissecting the media coverage. I’ve got CNN on in the background as I write. It’s vaguely comforting to commune with others who’ve been affected by this horror show, even if “commune” is surely a pitifully exaggerated way to describe the wallowing in gory details that’s going on.

Jack Shafer had some thoughts about the coverage, though:

[M]urders committed at random discompose us at a primal level. They rob us of the false sense of security we use each night to tuck our children in to sleep. The Virginia Tech shootings also marked a new American death record, a detail that many outlets keep repeating to rationalize the news torrent they’re producing. Add to all of the above the fact that the lives stolen were still green, that none of the promise nurtured by loving parents can ever be fulfilled, and you’ve got immeasurable sorrow. And immeasurable sorrow breeds immeasurable interest—not just from journalists, but from news consumers as well. …
If the New York Times weren’t compiling a “Portraits of Grief” for the Blacksburg kids right now—as I bet they are—and if the story came to a close tonight on Anderson Cooper’s show, readers and viewers would riot.

Well, maybe not. But readers and viewers who got emotionally caught up in this incident are seeking closure and/or catharsis. Cable news networks wallowing in the gory details provide something like it, or at least they provide company for your misery.

That’s infotainment. So it goes.

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

I am the mother of two young adults. This picture made me  cry:

Students console one another in front of campus War Memorial.

Add the fear of blaming South Koreans—I kid you not ***—to the brilliant list of the post-Virginia Tech media memes compiled by ETP’s Jason Linkins. Weirdly, none of them attribute guilt (sole guilt or, for that matter, any guilt) to the perpetrator, who was apparently a lone gunman (and a VT student), Cho Seung-Hui.

Linkins’s list:

GUNS, GUNS, GUNS (and a subset of same: THE JIM WEBB COROLLARY)

EVERYONE IN CHARGE FAILED AND SHOULD BE FIRED

“INSTANT PREJUDICE” [I'm not quite sure against whom --ed.]

CREATIVE WRITING AND THE AGONIES OF ARMCHAIR PSYCHOANALYSTS

VIDEOGAMES? REALLY? [the commentary "really?" is Linkins's, not mine]

In a later post, Linkins also remarks on the “English major” meme—which is really a subset of the “creative writing” meme. You can’t trust an English major—and you certainly can’t trust an English major at an institution where he’s surrounded on all sides by engineers. Right?

——-

*** Here’s where Americans are supposedly going to explode in a massive backlash against South Koreans—or so the South Koreans fear:

South Korea expressed its condolences, and said it hoped that the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.” “We are in shock beyond description,” said Cho Byung-se, a Foreign Ministry official handling North American affairs.

It’s quite the coincidence that just a few days after I wrote a post called “the Eleventh Commandment,” in which I made fun of all the people in the world whose feelings are hurt and who are mad as hell and just won’t take it anymore, the Imus brouhaha expoded into the news cycle.

I have nothing to add about Imus. But I can report that the Indians are not at all happy with Richard Gere:

Protesters burn effigies of Gere after Shilpa kiss

Richard Gere’s repeated kisses on the cheeks of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty in an event to promote AIDS awareness sparked protests in India on Monday with demonstrators burning effigies of the actor.

What were they protesting?

The protesters said Gere’s kissing of Shilpa was against Indian culture.

Uh-huh.

By the way, this is the Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not (dare) insult the hypersensitive.

Today, the WSJ reports more or less everything I posted about Gaza yesterday (which I painstakingly stitched together after five weeks of following this story).

 Uncertain Fate
Of Gaza Reporter
Deepens Concerns

 Fanatical Islamists of the type sowing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to be operating with increasing impunity in the Gaza Strip, heightening concern about the rising danger posed by al Qaeda-inspired groups or similar violent fringe groups in the Palestinian territories.

An unconfirmed statement on Sunday by a group saying it had killed abducted BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has added to these fears. Even if that claim turns out to be false, the kidnapping marks a low point for the already troubled Gaza Strip. Palestinian human-rights groups are documenting an increasing number of firebombings and other attacks against targets such as Internet cafes, libraries and cultural centers.

Concerns about such violence come amid an overall state of lawlessness that has prompted even the United Nations to keep nearly all of its foreign staffers out of Gaza. The convoy of a lead official for the world body was shot at last month, despite the use of clearly marked U.N. vehicles. Foreign charitable organizations working in Gaza are similarly concerned.

So I’ve been saying for quite a while now.

I’m not bragging—I’m noting the lag between the time an energetic amateur like me notices a straw in the wind (in this case the Johnston kidnapping, which I’ve been writing about for five weeks) and the time it takes for the MSM to use its megaphone to luanch the story into the news cycle.

Truth be told, despite its huge impact on journalists and on journalism—and despite its ramifications for the rest of us, who depend on journalists to report those things that we cannot see or hear for ourselves—this story may never make it into the news cycle. The WSJ doesn’t have much of a megaphone.

Much will depend on what happens to Johnston (and the kidnappers are hoping to hook us with that ongoing soap opera, to grab our attention with it, as kidnappers are wont to do [[see this June 2006 post, "kidnapping makes for good television," for a link to a study about how kidnapping is an excellent headline-grabbing narrative for terrorists who are looking to make their mark, or their point, in a shrug-it-off world.]] ).

But let’s not forget that Johnston’s kidnappers are competing with what’s  being called the ”deadliest shooting rampage in American history“. Those kidnappers don’t stand a chance. Because we’re now going to feast on this orgy for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Is our understanding of the frightening and shocking bloodbath at Virginia Tech amplified by the presence of every “name” reporter and anchor and talking head in the business?

Apparently so. Here are the headlines (oldest first) from TVNewser yesterday:

Va. Tech Shooting: Greta En Route

Va. Tech Shooting: Couric To Blacksburg

Va. Tech Shooting: Hour-Long Nightline Tonight; Cuomo, Roberts On Scene Tomorrow

Va. Tech Shooting: Williams En Route; Dateline Schedules Special At 10pm

Va. Tech Shooting: Lauer, Vieira, Barber Going To The Scene

Va. Tech Shooting: Harry Smith To VA

Va. Tech Shooting: CNN Suspends King’s Anniversary Programming For Now

Va. Tech Shooting: 10pm Special On MSNBC

Va. Tech Shooting: Greta Live From 10pm to Midnight; Geraldo Live From 12 to 2am

Va. Tech Shooting: Williams & Couric Interview Victims For Evening Newscasts

And just to show you where the American media’s priorities are:

Anderson Cooper is returning from Afghanistan — special live AC360 programs from there have been cancelled…

Last week, Alessandra Stanley, in reviewing the PBS series America at the Crossroads in the NYT, wrote [e.a.]:

The title alone suggests the series’s ambition: “Crossroads” is an attempt to look at the post-9/11 world as broadly and deeply as possible. It’s a worthy and worthwhile examination of the clash between Islam and the West, but it’s also the kind of sorrowful, all-knowing look backward that makes viewers wonder why all these journalists, experts, scholars and former government officials were not more outspoken about the impending crisis before it blew up the twin towers and drove the Bush administration to invade Iraq.

The next time some huge geopolitical horror happens and people start wondering why nobody “connected the dots,” you will know why: because the American media serves the American audience with full-time wall-to-wall “news” coverage of sensational incidents, to the exclusion of “news” coverage of almost everything else.

It’s not the news. It is a weird form of therapy: wallowing in the horrific details.

And when the media doesn’t have events as horrifying and senseless and tragic as the bloodbath at Virginia Tech, it creates dramatic news. Or dramatizes that which is inherently not dramatic.

Because infotainment rules.

There has been no independent confirmation of yesterday’s claim by a previously unknown group, the Tawhid and Jihad Brigades, that it executed BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, who was kidnapped five weeks ago today in Gaza and whose abduction I followed for a while, until I reached the regrettable conclusion that there is no story, there is only the abyss.

Nothing that has happened since has made me feel any more hopeful. Indeed quite the opposite.
I note that the bigger issue—the fact that there’s big, big trouble in Gaza being stirred up by extremist Islamist troublemakers (that is: even more extremist than Hamas, which lately has had to answer attacks from al Qaeda that it has gone soft, because it signed on to the Mecca agreement)—is finally getting some play.

Even the IHT reported on this today, however obliquely (Debka reported it first, as I noted here on March 17):

The group claiming to have killed Johnston said it would soon release video proving his death, but hours after the declaration was made, no such proof had been produced.

Palestinian moderates in Gaza have voiced concern recently over what they call the growth of “Al Qaeda-type thinking” in the Gaza Strip. Over the weekend, a Christian bookstore and an Internet café were damaged by bombs that were presumably the work of Islamic militants.

Tawhid and Jihad was the original name of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s first group in Iraq, before he changed it to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. It is unclear whether there is any relation, in intent or in reality, between the new Palestinian group and the Iraqi insurgent group.

This development should not come as news to anyone who has been following events in the Palestinian territories. The “moderate” Palestinian Hanan Ashrawi was recently caught complaining about Hamas’s religious clampdowns, as I mentioned here. Austin Bay noted here that there have been 48 attacks on internet cafes in Gaza in the last 5 months (and that there have been attacks on internet cafes in Morocco as well).
Trying to clamp down on the free flow of information is, of course, the oldest totalitarian trick in the book. Bombing internet cafes is “al Qaeda-type thinking,” as is burning books and CDs. That happened in Pakistan, but the thinking spreads like wildfire.
Garance Franke-Ruta underscores how deeply this newest development of extremist Islamist violence can hurt the Palestinians:

I can think of few actions more likely to decrease support for Palestinians among American political actors than for militant Palestinian Islamists to begin attacking Palestinian (or foreign) Christians, given the amount of high-level American support for Palestinian rights that’s based on the sufferings of Palestinian Christians at the hands of Israelis, as illustrated by this Robert Novak column following his annual trip to Bethlehem. The specter of the transformation of the territorial dispute between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs into a religious war of Palestinian Muslims against Palestinian Christians and Israeli Jews sounds like a textbook example of the maxim that in the Middle East, no matter how bad things look, they can always get worse.

They can and they will. And “everyone” will be surprised.

Courtesy of the Pew Research Center:

What does it all mean? Nada. But that hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from analylzing and politicizing the results, which can be roughly summarized thus: Americans are just as ignorant as ever! But some of us (guess who?) are smarter than others.
Here are the headlines courtesy of Memeorandum:

…

Nico / Think Progress: SURVEY: Daily Show/Colbert Viewers Most Knowledgable, Fox News Viewers Rank Lowest

James Joyner / Outside The Beltway: What Americans Know: Not Much — A new Pew survey finds …

Ezra Klein: Think They’ll Report, And Let You Decide, This Poll?

Carpetbagger / The Carpetbagger Report: One can learn a lot from ‘fake’ news

Laura / The Galloping Beaver: Education and knowledge. — Via Ezra, interesting results …

Daniel Larison / Eunomia: Who Knew?

Bryan / Hot Air: Poll: We’re getting dumber

Newsdesk / The Swamp: 24/7 news doesn’t make us any smarter

RadicalRuss / Pam’s House Blend: Stewart/Colbert = Funny Truth; FOX News = Noisy Truthiness

Brendan Nyhan: Ezra Klein gives Fox News a bum rap

Jonathan Stein / MotherJones.com: Watch the Daily Show? You’re Smart. …

Wonkette: 31% of Americans Have No Idea Who’s Running the Country

Garance / theGarance.com: Who is Most Misinformed? — A new study by The Pew Research Center …

Libby Spencer / The Impolitic: 24 hour news makes no difference

Old Blue / The American Street: Early to bed makes you stupid, and Fox-y

Injured occupants are carried out of the Norris Hall dormitory at Va. Tech. (AP)

 from the WaPo

Justin May, 19, a Silver Spring freshman, was in a calculus class this morning in a building next to McBride Hall and near a construction site. “We heard several bangs in a row. We thought it might be jackhammers,” he said. But a student in the class had a laptop and pulled up an e-mail sent by campus officials.

May’s class was in lockdown for about 20 minutes before he and his fellow students were instructed to run back to their dormitories. He ran to his dormitory, Montieth Hall, which was in total lockdown. Students were told to lock all dorm doors on the outside, close and lock windows and to close the blinds.

He said they could hear ambulance and police sirens going by. When he was able to look out a window, he saw a security man wearing a bullet proof vest and armed with a pistol “This is an emergency, stay indoors,” the officer announced over a megaphone. The sound of ambulance and police sirens was constant.

“It hasn’t even registered to us,” May said. “This is so much worse than Columbine. We don’t even know what to think of it.”

we remember

People pass through the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ ,’work makes one free’, gate at Auschwitz, in the annual March of the Living, a trek between two former Nazi-run death camps to mourn victims of the Holocaust and celebrate the existence of the Jewish state, in Oswiecim, Poland, Monday, April 16, 2007. The march starts at the smaller Auschwitz site and leads to the sprawling Birkenau death camp, which housed the main gas chambers. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Remembrance in Poland following dedication of the Belzec memorial, June 2004.

Ynet News is reporting that the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has been executed “by an al-Qaeda affilated Palestinian organization.” Ynet says the news comes from “an internet statement obtained by Ynetnews.”

In the message, the group said the British and Palestinian governments were responsible for Johnston’s killing, and vowed to release a video of the execution.

“The whole world knows of our just cause in demanding the release of our prisoners, who are waiting under the fire of the occupation,” the statement began. “Our demand was that all of those who are responsible for the journalist… release our prisoners who are being held in the prisons of the occupation,” it continued.

“The whole world made so much noise about this foreign journalist, while it took no action over our thousands of prisoners,” the declaration said.

“Our objective was to broadcast a clear message, and we were surprised by the position of the Palestinian Authority, which attempted to hide the case as much as it could and to present the case in an untruthful manner, leading us unfortunately to kill the journalist so that our message is understood,” the declaration continued.

According to the Ynet report, the BBC is aware of the internet report but has no independent confirmation.

I hope fervently that it’s not true, but I fear it is. And if so, we may have entered a new phase of the Terrorists’ War Against Us.

I thought of Agatha Christie’s story today when I read the NYT’s coverage of the Paul Wolfowitz controversy, which is beginning to look much more like a political hit job than the simple case of corruption I originally thought it was [e.a.]:

Mr. Wolfowitz’s defenders say that he was right to come in with a mission of shaking up the ingrown bureaucracy at the bank, and that the place desperately needed shaking up. But even they acknowledge that management has never been his strong suit, and that his judgment in dealing with the transfer of his companion, Shaha Ali Riza, was questionable.

In the backlash against Mr. Wolfowitz, though, there is also an undercurrent of settling scores — including those that go beyond the World Bank. Europeans still fume over Mr. Bush’s decision to send John R. Bolton, one of the biggest critics of the United Nations, to New York to serve as ambassador there — an experiment that ended when it became clear that the newly Democratic Senate would not confirm him to finish Mr. Bush’s term.

Stitching together the details from another piece in the Times, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Wolfowitz and his companion were set up—by circumstances, if not deliberately.

On one hand, the documents made it clear that Mr. Wolfowitz was very much involved in the decision to give Ms. Riza a raise to more than $190,000 a year, with the aim of compensating her for the disruption of the transfer, but critics said he violated his own preaching to the bank about the need for transparency and integrity.

On the other hand, Mr. Wolfowitz’s defenders noted that the documents showed he had tried to recuse himself from involvement in personnel decisions affecting Ms. Riza when he arrived at the bank, and reluctantly became involved in her transfer only after the head of ethics for the board directed him to do so.

Surely a longtime insider like Paul Wolfowitz knew this would not be an easy situation. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see him and his companion mounting a vigorous self-defense.

She had already worked at the World Bank for seven years by 2005, when Mr. Wolfowitz, whom she had been seeing for several years, arrived as president.

At the bank, Ms. Riza worked with the Middle East and North Africa Social and Economic Development Group, as the senior gender and civil society coordinator in the office of the group’s chief economist. She was later appointed the group’s senior communications officer. …

Her friends say that she has complained in recent days that she is being portrayed in the news media in a one-dimensional way, as Mr. Wolfowitz’s partner or close friend, not for her accomplishments. They say she believes that she is a vehicle for employees of the bank to get rid of Mr. Wolfowitz, with whom they have clashed on policy and style.

I like to see people stand up for themselves, even against huge odds and even if they lose the battle. I tip my hat to Ms. Riza.

Here’s Gerard Baker saying everything that needs to be said:

Some neocons continue to defend the Iraq war on the ground that the idea was right but the execution was disastrous. This blames everything on Donald Rumsfeld, and, increasingly, on George Bush, for not providing resources for the struggle commensurate with the challenge.

This is not really honest. … A more honest judgment would have to be that neoconservatives and their sympathisers — yes, me — badly underestimated the scale of difficulty of effecting radical change in a country such as Iraq. It’s no good blaming either Bush-Rumsfeld or Iraqis themselves. The fact is, the war’s opponents had it right when they said the US would not be able to pull that brutalised, fractious country into the community of civilised states.

It was an error of judgment and not to acknowledge that is to dodge responsibility for the massive daily suffering of the Iraqi people. I still do not think, however, that the basic neoconservative diagnosis was wrong: that the course of history in the Middle East needed a radical change if the world were not to suffer an even greater misery.

Moreover:

Monetarism was discredited as policy because, while it offered the correct analysis, it failed as policy. I suspect the same will be said for the much derided, little-lamented neoconservatism. It would be foolish if the US tried to do again what it tried in Iraq. But it would be even more foolish to believe that ridding the world of tyranny is itself a mistake. The essence of good policy is fixing the right means in the right circumstances to that end.

If you want even more, you can watch this half-hour with Charlie Rose, who recently gave a platform to Marty Peretz, Franklin Foer, and Leon Wieseltier to explain themselves and TNR’s support for the war and why they should still be allowed to be called liberals. Rather big of him, I thought, ’cause TNR is on a lot of people’s shit list. (See just about every episode of bloggingheads.tv, about which more another time: I’ve become an addict.)

For all of you who are not obsessed with neocondom, Weiseltier has some typically thoughtful things to say about the value of scarcity and long-form journalism.

Through gritted teeth I offer the following offensive defense of free speech:

Naturally, there are a lot more where that came from.

You didn’t really think this was the end of offensive speech, did you? Good. Because we First Amendment absolutists haven’t yet begun to fight.

It’s coming up on five weeks since the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was kidnapped in Gaza and there is still no movement on his release. His parents made a heart-wrenching plea the other day, and the director general of the BBC went to meet personally with Abbas, who claimed that Johnston is “safe and well” but had nothing else to say.

Simon McGregor-Wood, the Jerusalem bureau chief for ABC News, writing in the Independent, has plenty to say about the situation:

The kidnapping of Alan Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza reporter, has shocked the community of foreign journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also having a devastating impact on the coverage of the story. … But ever since Alan’s disappearance, fewer and fewer of us have dared to go.

There have been reports of armed gangs turning up at the local TV production offices in Gaza looking for more foreign journalists to kidnap. That has scared many of us. The Western consulates, including the British one, continue to issue dire warnings and discourage us from going. The danger of further abductions seems real enough.

As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s this:

Until recently, Alan’s BBC colleagues were staying in Gaza working for his release. Now they have pulled out, fearing for their own safety. In the five years I have been here, working for ABC News, the situation has never been this bad, the threat against foreign journalists so real.

And then he gets into the gruesome details—Gaza, which a few weeks ago looked like a great story for journalists because of the very dramatic conflict between the various Palestinian factions, has turned frightful:

Ever since the Israelis pulled out their settlers and soldiers in the summer of 2005, Gaza has provided the battleground for competing Palestinian factions and ideologies. It is the home of Hamas and the place in which the very character of the Palestinian national movement is being fought over. Far from becoming the model of a future Palestinian state that some optimists hoped for, it has become a lawless and chaotic place and, by definition, a compelling story.  …

The environment was certainly hazardous and several reporters were caught in crossfire, and there were some isolated cases of intimidation. But this was all in the realm of manageable risk. The kidnappings are different - Alan’s in particular.

It is thought that the group responsible for the Fox abduction may also be behind Alan’s disappearance, and may be of a different calibre. But there has been no claim of responsibility and, as far as we know, no demands made and no negotiations started to secure his release. Talk to different Palestinians and you get different theories as to why Alan is still being held. But most think his fate has become entangled in wider internal political struggles, and is no longer simply about cash, jobs for the boys or some new guns.

When seasoned war correspondents in the Middle East get scared, it’s time to stand up and listen. Gaza is completely out of control, there is no Western press there to report on it, and all the while Abbas and Olmert are encouraged to make nice.

And Frank Rich thinks he wrote about the Greatest Story Ever Sold. Yeah, right. That’s because he only focuses on homefront political theater.

How technology has changed the landscape of fiction:

Occasionally I’ve wondered why there’s such a vogue, in fiction, for historical novels and pastiche. From Matthew Pearl’s “Dante Club” to Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” to Kurt Andersen’s “Heyday,” why should writers choose the past over the present? I’m sure it’s possible to come up with all sorts of serious, literary-theoretical explanations, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if, upon asking the authors themselves, they said it was because there were no cellphones back then.

Using the royal “we,” Al Sharpton proclaims himself the judge and jury of what will be permissible in and from the American media [e.a.]:

“We will not stop until we make it clear that no one can denigrate based on sex,” said Sharpton, after the CBS announcement. “We need to open up the media world. There are far too many media companies where there are far too much exclusion of women and people of color… We don’t have to be misogynist and racists to be creative in this country.”

Sharpton said he was planning a rally for Saturday, adding that he would sooner go to jail than back down from an issue he felt passionately about.

“We are going to be looking around the television and music industry; there is no one that gets a pass here,” Sharpton continued. “Women should be respected, blacks should be respected, and whites need to be respected.”

Are we all comfortable with that?

Once upon a time, I was a huge Scorsese fan, so I don’t know why I was so surprised that The Departed turned out to be an excellent film. But I was.

By far the biggest surprise was Leo ***, who has grown into his talent. Nice.

Also: this was Matt Damon’s best performance since Good Will Hunting, which is a sentimental fave of mine. Damon and Affleck, born and raised in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, were familiar types for me—from the press reports, their families seemed like counterparts to my New York cohort. It was fun to watch them get famous. I saw Good Will Hunting at the Angelica, and the audience was full of Damon’s friends. They yelled: “Matty! Matty! Matty!” It was down home and sweet: local boys who made good.

The Miramax magic is no more, however. The Weinstein brothers no longer have their finger on the pulse of America. Or, rather, the America they once catered to (Clinton’s America, and Tina Brown’s New York-L.A. corridor of sizzle and buzz) is gone and buried. Tina herself says that London is now the center of the universe and the capital of cool. New York, she claims, hasn’t gotten its mojo back since 9/11.

Ya think?

——–

In his Titanic days, when he was trying to escape the media mob and work off some steam, Leo used to hang around in the West Village with his friend Vince looking for pickup basketball games. I know because my son played basketball with them.

Leo was very low-key, my unimpressed 17-year-old son said. When my daughter heard about it, she burst into tears. She was 12. That’s okay. I read that even Susan Sarandon turned into a slobbering mom on behalf of her daughter, Eva, who was also in love with Leo back then. (Our daughters took gymnastics together, when they were three, at the Sutton gym. Susan was quite the stage mom. Tim was a doll. Boy, that seems like it was a long time ago … )

Power corrupts. This time that truism is most disappointing, because from afar Paul Wolfowitz seemed like an honorable and capable man. Now it’s his turn in the spotlight. Austin Bay tells it like it is:

Overweaning arrogance and lack of self reflection are weaknesses of the Wolfowitz-Hadley-Libby-Feith crew. As a group they were well-suited for Beltway political wars — the kind of Beltway congressional and executive agency infighting that Rumsfeld (and Cheney, Libby’s boss) thought they would face in their battle for Pentagon reform and reorganization. 9/11 changed the mission. Instead of a figurative battle in the Beltway’s arena, the civilized world faced a long war with barbarism, a long, bloody war that placed a preimum on strategic clarity, personal courage and perseverance, not the contacts on your Rolodex. After 9/11 the entire lot should have been eased out in favor of experienced, genuine war fighters — real war fighters instead of Beltway Clerks.

World Bank employees believe Wolfowitz has compromised the institution’s integrity. They certainly have a case.

Anyone hear any good news lately?

Ezra Klein says that Andrew Sullivan has transformed into “something akin to a lefty.”
I wouldn’t know (and don’t care) about whether Sullivan is on the left or the right. I’m much more concerned about his having become a proponent of the notion of perpetual white guilt and moral relativism [e.a.]:

I think it’s legitimate to criticize both Imus and hip-hop, while recognizing that the color of the speaker does make an obvious difference in impact and intent, with respect to hate speech. When black culture deploys its own n-words about itself, it’s a form of self-abasement as well as self-defense. It’s sad and ugly, but it’s different than perpetuating contempt for minorities from a position of majority power and privilege. Neither is defensible, but one is less defensible than the other. …

[S]ince whites still enjoy vastly more cultural power than blacks, Sharpton’s bigotry is more defensible than Imus’s.

What a load of pandering PC bullshit.

Then Sullivan, having claimed that Sharpton has the moral high ground, has the nerve to insinuate, in a post titled “Who’s Next?“, that he disapproves of Media Matters’s newfound witch-hunting fervor:

CEO Leslie Moonves announced that CBS — which owns both the radio station that broadcast Imus’ program and Westwood One, which syndicated the program — has fired Imus and would cease broadcasting his radio show. But as Media Matters for America has extensively documented, bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity continue to permeate the airwaves through personalities such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.

What a fucking nightmare.

Radar outs the Imus “Loyalists” and “Defectors” … and then updates with the news that CBS dumped him.

I guess we know the real name of the game now: Gotcha!

Compared to this, Ann Althouse has had it easy with only five or six episodes of Bloggingheads devoted to her one-minute reaming-out of Garance Franke-Ruta.

Knowing that I am virtually alone, I’ll go on the record and say that I sympathize with Ann, because the same thing happened to me recently … except that it happened in real life. With a friend, who recoiled. Literally.

Face it, Ann. They’re just not that into you. If they read me, they wouldn’t be into me, either. Fuck ‘em.

Speaking of Ann, she’s got this right:

Imus fired, ushering in a new era, where racist talk will no longer be tolerated in mainstream entertainment media.