"Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." "Opposition is True Friendship." -William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1796
The Augean Stables and The Second Draft
This blog takes its name from the Fifth Labor of Herakles, to clean the stables of Augeas, where thousands of cattle had left so much un-cleaned dung that the whole Peloponnesus smelled of it. At Second Draft, our discovery of both Pallywood and the Al-Durah Affair have led us to realize that — at least where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned — our MSM represent a veritable Augean Stables of accumulated misreporting. We dedicate this weblog to exploring the many aspects of our MSM’s problem, not only those concerned with the Middle East problem, but more broadly with the many ways in which our media’s errors and our media’s extraordinary resistance to admitting their errors, have contributed and continue to contribute to the serious problems that plague our globe in this young 21st century.
The Republicans, specifically Romney and McCain, got right back to attack mode in tonight’s Reagan-fest debate after playing civil in the last debate. After receiving the support of Rudy Guiliani, and with Super Tuesday looming, McCain saw the opportunity to deliver to Romney the lethal blow. Romney needed to stop McCain’s surge before Super Tuesday. They both saw advantages in attacking the other, and the resulting exchanges were some of most openly acrimonious to date.
As in the last debate, the moderators asked questions that they hoped would ignite the candidates. Romney was happy to draw first blood, jumping on a question on whether he had warned voters that McCain would lead America down a liberal path. McCain was decidedly unpleasant and arrogantly snide, and was unrelenting in his assault. Romney noted that the New York Times had endorsed McCain, to which McCain replied by pretending to chuckle with Romney for a second too long, then saying that the two Boston newspapers, who know Romney best, had endorsed McCain as well. He said “You’d better believe, my friend” that the Arizona newspaper would support him as well, in a tone that was dripping with sarcasm. Romney had no response. (more…)
(Post by LB) Just when positive signs were coming out of the UK suggesting that they were moving in a positive direction in their understanding of the Jihadist threat, the British government went back to their pattern of over-the-top pandering to Muslims. So afraid are the British government bureaucrats of offending Muslims that they forbade NHS employees from eating lunch in public office space during Ramadan (why they assume a Muslim would be offended by a Christian eating on an Islamic holiday, I still have not figured out), and mandated that already overworked nurses must turn their Muslim patients toward Mecca five times a day if they so wish, dropping all their vital work to turn beds back and forth. No such stipulation exists for Jewish patients.
And now, Her Majesty’s government has decided to rename Jihadi terrorism, committed exclusively by Muslims in the name of their religion and discussed in purely religious language, as ‘anti-Islamic activity’. One can accurately address the threat without descending into Islamophobic bigotry or, conversely, making all discussion meaningless by giving priority to political correctness and outreach.
My favorite headline of the year so far comes from The Daily Mail in Britain: “Government Renames Islamic Terrorism As ‘Anti-Islamic Activity’ To Woo Muslims.”
Some thoughts after seeing President Bush’s final State of the Union address tonight-
President Bush did not mention the word “Muslim” or “Islam” once. Though he did not discuss the war on terror, Bin Laden, or Israel during the first half of the speech, the second half featured those topics heavily. I understand why Bush goes out of his way to ensure that America is not seen as fighting Islam, and to prevent an outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment in America. But regardless of whether or not most Muslims agree with the Jihadists, or whether or not the Jihadists misinterpret their religion, they draw their inspiration and guidance from their religion, and appeal to followers in exclusively Islamic terms. In order to understand the enemy, we must understand the ideology and legal system in which their doctrine is rooted. By pretending the terrorists operate in an irrational vacuum, our government is, intentionally or not, promoting an approach that will never understand our enemy, nor will it predict their next move.
President Bush adamantly defended his foreign policy outlook, the American export of liberty. He referenced democratic developments in Ukraine, Georgia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, saying “These images of liberty have inspired us.” He then turned the focus on terrorism, specifically in Lebanon, Pakistan, Jordan, and London. Bush defined terrorists as extremists who oppose liberty, and called the struggle against them “The defining ideological struggle of the 21st century.”
Bush very briefly referred to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, using the standard lines about two democratic states living side by side in security. He again called for a Palestinian state by the end of the year.
President Bush appealed to the people of Iran, reassuring them that America respects their history and culture, and looks forward to them achieving liberty. His toughest rhetoric toward Iran was -”America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our interests in the Persian Gulf”.
This year, Bush did not mention Syria or North Korea, and overall his language was somewhat tepid.
In the aftermath of the vicious fighting between Hillary/Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, I expected the Republicans to capitalize by refraining from attacking each other in last Thursday’s Florida debate. The Republicans could present themselves as more unified and focused on the future than the Democrats for the first time in the campaign.
From the outset, it was clear that the candidates had agreed not to get into the name-calling and attacks that had characterized their earlier debates. The moderators, Tim Russert and Brian Williams, did everything in their power to get the candidates to turn on each other, including a series of early questions reminding candidates what they had said about one another. There was an entire section of the debate that consisted of the candidates asking each other questions. Notably, Romney and McCain did not ask each other questions, instead lobbing softball questions about China and the economy to Guiliani and Paul. Russert still would not relent, and asked Romney if he trusted McCain to lower taxes. Romney almost took the bait, and said McCain should have voted for the Bush tax cuts, then quickly relented and noted that McCain does now support them, and that he respects McCain but sometimes has differences of opinion with him.
Overall, the Republicans seemed more confident, especially on Iraq. Romney attacked Clinton for her answer in the Democratic debate to the question “What is more important to you- winning in Iraq or ending the war?” to which she replied “Bringing the troops home”. If she overcomes Bill Clinton’s recent harmful statements (such as today’s observation that Jesse Jackson also won South Carolina) and becomes the nominee, that answer will hurt her in the general election.
This week, the Augean Stables will post a review of Major Stephen Coughlin’s thesis, “To Our Great Detriment”. Major Couhglin, an attorney and expert on Islamic law, was recently informed that his contract with the Pentagon would not be renewed after submitting his thesis on the roots of Muslim terrorism in mainstream Islamic law. Observers have opined that the firing of Coughlin was urged by Hesham Islam, head of Muslim outreach in Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert England’s office. Critics say that Islam has brought Islamist front groups into the Pentagon, and that his presence and influence is symptomatic of the ideological decay present within the nation’s national security establishment.
Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote an article on National Review Online about the questions surrounding Hesham Islam’s past.
Questions for the Pentagon
Who is Hesham Islam?
By Claudia Rosett
In the sorry tradition of shooting the messenger, the Pentagon is cashiering its top expert on Islamist doctrine, Stephen Coughlin. Some members of Congress are now contemplating hearings to ask why. Along with drawing attention to Coughlin’s research, now circulating on the Internet, the growing controversy has thrown a spotlight on Coughlin’s alleged nemesis at the Pentagon, a top aide named Hesham Islam - whose tale deserves closer attention. Not least, as a reporter for the Armed Forces Press Service observed last year, it would make a great Hollywood blockbuster.
We hope, in the near future to put up the documentation for the movie in the same manner as we did with both Pallywood and Al Durah, including some of the footage we cut (for example a focus on the behavior of Ayham Ghalia the surviving brother).
At the time it happened, I posted several items on it:
At first I expressed doubt that the incident had even happened at the beach. Too little blood on and too little damage to family possessions led me to speculate that the accident happened elsewhere and the bodies had been brought to the beach.
But since then, Danny Seaman of the Government Press Office gave me the rushes provided to him by Rammattan (which we will post shortly). After careful examination, I have changed my opinion, and in the film suggest that the family did die at the beach (considerable, but localized blood), and that it was most likely from a Palestinian land mine.
This is Pallywood not in the sense of pure staging, as I think in the case of al Durah and many of the ambulance evacuations, but of a genuine tragedy — the family were killed on the beach — in which the Pallywood producers were able to create a story that accused the Israelis of killing them when they were most probably killed as a result of Palestinian actions.
There is much to speculate on here:
Was the cameraman aware that this was — or may have been — from a Palestinian mine, rather than from an Israeli shell?
Just how dishonest was Marc Garlasco, the Human Rights Watch specialist, whose testimony pegs him either as one of the great useful idiots of all time, or a dishonest advocate and propagandist?
When did the media realize the problem but chose either not to mention their mistakes, or to present the counter-case as minimally as possible?
What’s wrong with the Rory Peck Award Committee that, despite all the evidence of foul play, they gave the cameraman an award?
In preparation for the dossier at the Second Draft, we welcome any references to articles or material that we can include in the dossier, including material that may contradict our thesis.
Another example of the cultural norms that the United States is up against in attempting to create some semblance of democracy in Afghanistan- (from The New York Times)
KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.
The student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, who also works on a local newspaper, was charged with directly insulting Muhammad by calling the prophet “a killer and adulterer,” the judge, Shamsurahman Muhmand, said in a telephone interview.
On January 15, an Israeli news crew came under fire at Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha on the border with the southern part of the Gaza Strip. This was a short time after an Ecuadorean volunteer was shot dead by Palestinian snipers. The snipers are not firing at soldiers, nor are they firing at Israelis who are on PA territory (not that targeting either of those would be excusable). They are targeting Israeli farmers and journalists, whom they can clearly identify in their telescopic
Shrinkwrapped has an important series of reflections on my post on Damian Thompson’s new book. I respond in detail:
Both Thompson and Landes have identified a serious danger facing our Civilization, however, if anything I think they underestimate the danger.
Both take the position that in our culture and civilization, rationality and reality testing are the default mode of thinking for the population. Unfortunately, this is exactly 180 degrees off. Rationality and logical thinking are late developments and are not universal. They are mental habits dependent on mental structures that are painstakingly assembled over the course of a long period of time. They are abilities that require a tremendous investment of time and energy to acquire and are extremely sensitive to disruption.
I don’t think this represents my position. (I’ll let Damian speak for himself.) I think that a) SW is right that reality testing is a mental habit painstakingly assembled over the course a long time — more or less a millennium in Western Europe — and not the default mode. On the other hand the reason I may sound like I think the way SW says, is that I think that this manner of “reading reality” — which includes self-criticism, a renunciation of narcissistic vanity, exegetical modesty — is at the core of civil society. So if we have a civil society it’s good evidence that this form of thinking has become the “norm” or “default mode” of western civilization, and if this kind of flakey thinking is still seeping into the mainstream, then this is a deviation — from a Western norm.
Damian Thompson seems puzzled by the easy acceptance of Conspiracy Theories and nonsense by large groups of people, and distressed to see such beliefs moving form the fringes toward the center. The cruel secret is that such beliefs are a great deal easier to acquire and hold than true knowledge.
As I have noted on many occasions, the human mind is a conservative device. Once a template has been established it is far easier to fit new data into the existing framework than to question one’s assumptions and expend mental energy trying to make sense out of contradictions.
This is problematic. We are trained to ignore conspiracy theories. That template was established and one of the things that attracts many conspiracy-theorists is that they are violating the accepted template.
If you already know that George Bush stole the election in 2000, then it is much easier to believe he could also be capable of engineering 9/11, of lying about Saddam’s WMD, and a host of other nonsense that has flourished on the left. If you do not understand how the theory of evolution has been researched and examined in minute detail by innumerable scientists, if you have no real idea how the edifice of science was built, then the minor flaws and incompleteness of the theory can easily be used to support beliefs that have no evidence to support them at all, such as Intelligent Design. (Perhaps the Deity did in fact create life and the universe and included a consistent body of evidence to support the theory of evolution; if so, this would not be resolvable using scientific methodology and until he or his agent appears or reappears, whichever you prefer, it is a matter of faith not science.)
There have been many factors that have contributed to the assault on reason which have eroded our capacity for reality testing. Science is hard; scientific knowledge is only slowly accumulated by extremely hard work mastered by only an extremely small minority of very bright people. Most science is impossible to understand by most people. We have long since reached the Arthur C. Clarke inflection point where “technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Magic is explained by magical thinking, not by science. Science has been reliably demonized by those who are incapable of performing or understanding science. The rigors of the Scientific Method, the single most important reason for our civilization’s success, are too difficult for our children’s tender self-esteem to tolerate. Once we no longer expect our children to understand that 1 + 1 must always equal 2, even if we want it to equal 1.99 or 3, and that all answers are equivalent as long as they are trying really, really hard, we have surrendered our ability to think.
Now we’re back to my comments on post-modernism. The problem is that one need not understand either the complexity of modern science or its technological magic boxes (computers), in order to partake of reality-testing. Self-criticism and a certain modesty is within the reach of every human being.
Worse, even among those who should know better, the temptation to take mental shortcuts persists. When rationality is further subverted by unconscious desires, it is no contest, real knowledge has no chance of surviving.
Anthropogenic Global Warming, a theory that is reliably presented as “proven” by politicians who have no idea what they are talking about, is a prime example. AGW might be an adequate focus for current anxiety; it might even be a potential problem down the road; but as an avenue to increase state power in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians, it has already been “proven.” They do not see themselves as cynical manipulators but as visionaries warning of danger and trying to save the planet. That science does not proceed the way they think it does completely eludes their attention.
This is a good example of what I meant about modesty. Proponents of AGW have enormous ambitions and no self-criticism; so science becomes another black box to manipulate. It’s interesting to think that in the Middle Ages, as far as I know, no one argued that black magicians actually thought they were white magicians. Today, at least in the West, some of the worst black magicians, think they’re doing white magic.
We are living in dangerous times. Anxiety over the future and the pace of change (change ushered in by magical technologies that no one can fully understand) naturally produces powerful regressive forces in a culture. Our rationality can be so subtly and easily subverted that we usually don’t recognize it until far too late. Worse, those whose grasp of reason is weakest, either through limited native intellectual abilities or poor pedagogy, are most susceptible to adopt the easy solutions of irrationality.
limited native intellectual abilities or poor pedagogy or emotional immaturity…
The pace of change naturally produces anxieties over the future, some of which can activate powerful regressive forces in a culture. The question is, what are non-regressive ways of expressing a legitimate anxiety about runaway technologically-driven social change?
Just beneath the surface of even the most stable and reasoned mind exists a cauldron of irrationality. The Unconscious can never be fully tamed and is forever attempting to find access to the Conscious mind to enable and effect its desires. Conspiracy Theories, false prophets and messiahs, and easily identifiable scapegoats are the result; they are here to stay and will plague us and increase until we re-establish the safe haven that can only come from Knowledge.
I’m a bit confused by this finale. Can you explain what the “safe haven that can only come from Knowledge” is? Is this (regressive) pre-post-modernism: knowledge=truth=objectivity=reality? Why is knowledge “safe”? It may “set us free,” or empower us, or enlighten us, but nothing about it suggests either stability or safety. On the contrary, part of what is so frightening about reality and why people run to the cocoons of conspiracy theory and other forms of counter-knowledge is precisely to flee the ego-wounding world of registering what’s going on around us.
Richard Cohen, who is not one of my favorite news analysts, had an important article at the Washington Post last week on Obama’s minister and spiritual advisor.
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page A13
Barack Obama is a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama’s spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright’s daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said “truly epitomized greatness.” That man is Louis Farrakhan.
Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan “epitomized greatness.” For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler — “They helped him get the Third Reich on the road.” His history is a rancid stew of lies.
It’s important to state right off that nothing in Obama’s record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama’s top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.
Fine. But where I differ with Axelrod and, I assume, Obama is that praise for an anti-Semitic demagogue is not a minor difference or an intrachurch issue. The Obama camp takes the view that its candidate, now that he has been told about the award, is under no obligation to speak out on the Farrakhan matter. It was not Obama’s church that made the award but a magazine. This is a distinction without much of a difference. And given who the parishioner is, the obligation to speak out is all the greater. He could be the next American president. Where is his sense of outrage?
Any praise of Farrakhan heightens the prestige of the leader of the Nation of Islam. For good reasons and bad, he is already admired in portions of the black community, sometimes for his efforts to rehabilitate criminals. His anti-Semitism is either not considered relevant or is shared, particularly his false insistence that Jews have played an inordinate role in victimizing African Americans.
In this, Farrakhan stands history on its head. It was Jews who disproportionately marched for civil rights and, in Mississippi, died for that cause. Farrakhan and, in effect, Wright, despoil the graves of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and, of course, their black colleague James Chaney.
I can even see how someone, maybe even Obama, could dismiss Farrakhan as a pest, a silly man pushing a silly cause that poses no real threat to the Jewish community. Still, history tells us that anti-Semitism is not to be trifled with. It is a botulism of the mind.
The Obama and Clinton campaigns are involved in a tasteless tussle over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. What is clear from rereading King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, is how inclusive that dream was — “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”
This, though, is not Farrakhan’s dream. He has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind.
And yet Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan. According to Trumpet, he applauded his “depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation.” He praised “his integrity and honesty.” He called him “an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.” These are the words of a man who prayed with Obama just before the Illinois senator announced his run for the presidency. Will he pray with him just before his inaugural?
I don’t for a moment think that Obama shares Wright’s views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. The New York Times recently reported on Obama’s penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting “present” when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, “present” will not do.
“I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.”
On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”
This political “catechism” is certainly not reassuring, as are his “10 Facts“. On the contrary, it suggests someone for whom “Black Liberation Theology” and third-worldism, and anti-Americanism blend so effortlessly together that honoring a Black Muslim makes “ecumenical” sense. If the thought of Theresa Heinz in the White House, inviting all her PCP2 guests, made me nervous, the thought of someone who has attended this man’s church for 20 years as president makes me even more nervous.
The relationship of Minister Wright — Obama’s minister for 20 years, his acknowledged spiritual mentor — is much to close to Trumpet Magazine both personally (his daughter is the editor, he writes for it constantly) and ideologically (anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-globalization) for him to disassociate himself from this without saying something about Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. whose name graces the award given to Farrakhan.
Back in the Fall of 2006, Kurt Anderson wrote a column about apocalyptic fever in New York Magazine. In it he goes over the “new” fashion of apocalyptic thinking and worries — but not too seriously — that such thinking, particularly when it spills over into mainstream news analysis of perhaps taking us over the edge. I post it now because, a) if anything, I think he underestimates the power and ubiquity of these ideas, and b) we need to think about this material much more subtly than his rather ham-fisted approach — all this stuff is nutty, stay away.
The End of the World As They Know It
What do Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers have in common? They’re all hot for the apocalypse.
The week of September 11 (two weeks ago, not five years), I noticed a poster up at Frankies, my sweet neighborhood trattoria in Brooklyn: It advertised a talk on 9/11 by Daniel Pinchbeck—the former downtown literary impresario who has become a Gen-X Carlos Castaneda and New Age impresario. My breakfast pal nodded at the poster and said, “The guy is selling his apocalypse thing hard.”
“Apocalypse thing?” I knew of Pinchbeck’s psychedelic enthusiasms, but I’d somehow missed his new book about the imminent epochal meltdown. In 2012, he interprets ancient Mayan prophecies to mean “our current socioeconomic system will suffer a drastic and irrevocable collapse” the year after next, and that in 2012, life as we know it will pretty much end. “We have to fix this situation right fucking now,” he said recently, “or there’s going to be nuclear wars and mass death … There’s not going to be a United States in five years, okay?”
2012 is big. Google 2012 Crop Circles and see what you get. In an age when our leaders — Republican and Democratic — seem to be flailing around without any sense of what to do, the younger generation can take “comfort” in these kinds of “promises.” It’s a form of “counter-knowledge” that’s particularly appealing as “reason” commits suicide.
The same day at lunch in Times Square, another friend happened to mention that he was thinking of buying a second country house—in Nova Scotia, as “a climate-change end-days hedge.” He smirked, but he was not joking.
On the subway home, I read the essay in the new Vanity Fair by the historian Niall Ferguson arguing that Europe and America in 2006 look disconcertingly like the Roman Empire of about 406—that is, the beginning of the end. That night, I began The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s new novel set in a transcendently bleak, apparently post-nuclear-war-ravaged America of the near future. And a day or so later watched the online trailer for Mel Gibson’s December movie, Apocalypto, set in the fifteenth-century twilight of, yes, the Mayan civilization.
So: Five years after Islamic apocalyptists turned the World Trade Center to fire and dust, we chatter more than ever about the clash of civilizations, fight a war prompted by our panic over (nonexistent) nuclear and biological weapons, hear it coolly asserted this past summer that World War III has begun, and wonder if an avian-flu pandemic poses more of a personal risk than climate change. In other words, apocalypse is on our minds. Apocalypse is … hot.
Millions of people—Christian millenarians, jihadists, psychedelicized Burning Men—are straight-out wishful about The End. Of course, we have the loons with us always; their sulfurous scent if not the scale of the present fanaticism is familiar from the last third of the last century—the Weathermen and Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians. But there seem to be more of them now by orders of magnitude (60-odd million “Left Behind” novels have been sold), and they’re out of the closet, networked, reaffirming their fantasies, proselytizing. Some thousands of Muslims are working seriously to provoke the blessed Armageddon. And the Christian Rapturists’ support of a militant Israel isn’t driven mainly by principled devotion to an outpost of Western democracy but by their fervent wish to see crazy biblical fantasies realized ASAP—that is, the persecution of the Jews by the Antichrist and the Battle of Armageddon.
I’ve addressed this aspect of the problem — one person’s messiah is another’s antichrist — in this post, and especially in this comment.
When apocalypse preoccupations leach into less-fantastical thought and conversation, it becomes still more disconcerting. Even among people sincerely fearful of climate change or a nuclearized Iran enacting a “second Holocaust” by attacking Israel, one sometimes detects a frisson of smug or hysterical pleasure.
As in the excited anticipatory chatter about Iran’s putative plans to fire a nuke on the 22nd of last month—in order to provoke apocalypse and pave the way for the return of the Shiite messiah, a miracle in which President Ahmadinejad apparently believes. Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, at 90 still the preeminent historian of Islam, published a piece in The Wall Street Journal to spread this false alarm.
That last sentence is ambiguously phrased. Lewis didn’t publish the piece to spread this false alarm, but to warn about something he feared. It’s also not clear whether publishing it did not have an effect on Ahmadenijad’s plans. In all these matters elaborate chess games are afoot. And Ahmadenijad does not “apparently” believe in this miraculous material, he does. (more…)
The following is a flier I prepared for Enderlin’s talk at Harvard on January 17, 2007m, while on tour promoting his book, The Lost Years, whose documentary is entitled The Bloody Years. For anyone in a place where Enderlin is about to speak, please feel free to use this material to inform those unfortunate people who are about to be subject to his misinformation.
Charles Enderlin’s Personal Contribution to The Bloody Years
On September 30, 2000, two days after Sharon visited the Temple Mount, and one day after rioting broke out in the West Bank and around Jerusalem, Charles Enderlin, relying on the word of his Palestinian cameraman, ran some shocking footage of a boy he claimed had been targeted and killed by the Israeli army. If this were true, it would be the first time in the history of TV, that a camera caught live the death –the murder! – of a child. This image had an enormous emotional impact around the world, and incited bondless violence among Palestinians. Palestinian leaders declared Muhammad al Durah a martyr and brainwashed a generation of children to want death by killing Israelis (including a music video of him in heaven saying, “follow me!”) All the first suicide bombers, who followed in a waxing wave of assaults on Israeli civilians, invoked al Durah. Eventually one Israeli observer noted you could predict levels of violence the following day by MDHD – Muhammad al Durah hours per day on TV. No single image has created more violent hatred in this enraged 21st century.
And yet, closer examination shows that Enderlin had no justification for relying on his cameraman’s story. Indeed none of the footage he filmed supports any of his claims, in particular the crucial and most terrible claim, that Israeli fire targeted and killed the boy. Enderlin, despite the impact of this accusation of murder, did not reconsider or clarify. For 7 years he has done his best to stonewall, conceal evidence, misrepresent and mislead the public, and, recently, to present tampered evidence to a French court. As you listen to his account of the Bloody Years, know that he made his own unique contribution to the very violence he now pretends to explain.
To regain his credibility, let Enderlin answer the following questions:
1) What evidence, other than Talal’s word, did you have for claiming in your broadcast where the bullets came from, much less that they “targeted” the boy and his father?
2) Why did you not publicize the fact that your cameraman lied under oath in claiming he took 27 minutes of the alleged “40-minute” shooting scene when you knew he only provided 60 seconds?
3) Why, given the evidence of Talal’s dishonesty – lying to Esther Schapira about having the bullets, lying under oath about filming 27 minutes, that the Israelis did it “in cold blood” – do you still defend him as a first rate, professional journalist?
4) Why did you say you cut scenes of the boy’s “death throes” when there are no such scenes?
5) Why did you cut the final scene (which came after you had declared him dead) of the boy lifting up his elbow and looking out?
6) Do you really think the Israeli position was opposite the al Durah’s, as shown in your own hand-drawn map (on the web), and not diagonally across the intersection?
7) Do you admit publicly, what you reportedly said in private, that Palestinians regularly stage scenes of injury?
8) Why did you cut 9 minutes of scenes from the footage before showing it to the court, including scenes of that day at that junction that were clearly staged?
9) Why, when you saw the hatred and violence this icon spurred, did you not do everything you could to clarify the report (and your errors) in order to help slow the violence bloody years?
To examine the evidence yourself, see the dossier at The Second Draft
Here is the one paragraph in The Lost Years on Muhammad al Durah: [errors in italic; previous and subsequent paragraphs have no relationship to this paragraph].
“Jewish organizations abroad began to intensify their press campaigns against press outlets deemed to be pro-Palestinian. In France, on numerous occasions, following the initiatives of the Jewish Defense League and Lawyers without Frontiers, a disinformation prize was given to several journalists, as well as to Agence France-Presse. During a protest in front of the headquarters of France 2 in Paris, this dubious honor originally called the Goebbels Prize was given to the author of a broadcast report relating the death of young Mohammed al-Dureh in the Gaza Strip city of Netzarim, at the start of the intifada on September 30, 2000. (I had asserted that the child had been the target of bullets coming from an[“the”] Israeli position.) In November 2000, Yom Tov Samia, the Israeli general commanding forces in the West Bank, had personally organized a reconstruction of the incident before concluding in his report that a ‘comprehensive investigation conducted in the last weeks casts serious doubts that the boy was hit by Israeli Defense Forces’ fire… It is quite plausible that the boy was hit by Palestinian bullets.’ Parisian demonstrators brandished signs saying ‘Enderlin Liar,’ demanding the broadcast of a German documentary that adopted General Samia’s conclusions. This marked the beginning of a long defamation campaign, pursued in France and the United States, namely through the intermediary of internet sites claiming that the child’s death had been staged in order to provoke the intifada. France 2 never received a complaint or a formal demand from the Israeli authorities on this matter.”
Note:
• No mention of the article in the June 2003 Atlantic Monthly by James Fallows, that also agreed with Yom Tov Samia’s findings.
• No mention of any of the substantive criticisms in Samia’s report to which Enderlin has never responded (direction of the bullets, angles of fire).
• No mention that although the German documentary was by France2’s sister station ARD, France2 refused to show the documentary in France.
• No mention of the intensive and extensive uses to which the Palestinian leadership put the Al Durah footage as part of a systematic campaign to inculcate hatred and provoke violence, that al Durah was the icon of the Intifada.
• Enderlin treats criticism as defamation, the core of his legal campaign of intimidation aimed at silencing rather than responding to criticism.
• No mention that, in claiming that he had more and worse footage of the boy’s death throes (which he did not), Enderlin effectively bluffed the Israelis into not making any formal demands, but rather dropping the issue.
With honesty and accuracy like this, what can you expect from the rest of the book?
Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF has called for a commission of inquiry about the Muhammad al Durah affair: ”these professionals should study the original tapes to have the best quality images to clarify what happened, something that has yet to occur. These images of the death of Muhammad al-Dura, as they were presented by Charles Enderlin, broadcast by other stations, rejected by CNN, are very serious. They have killed, because they created the vocation of terrorists. It is false to say, ‘Now the affair is history.’ The [images] of France2 are extremely troubling. I was deeply troubled.”
Philip Salzman, an anthropologist at McGill who specializes in Arab tribal cultures, has written an excellent piece on Arab suffering gives the background to many of the points I’ve made about Palestinian suffering. Without understanding this dimension of the problem, all efforts to “resolve the Arab-Israeli problem,” no matter how well intentioned, are doomed not only to failure, but to making the situation worse by reinforcing precisely the forces that contribute primarily to Arab suffering — their political and religious elites.
WHY ARABS SUFFER
Philip Carl Salzman
National Post, January 11, 2008
By modern standards, contemporary Middle Eastern Arab nations are failed societies. On virtually every index of socioeconomic and political development, they compare poorly with other parts of the world.
Under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, an independent group of 20 Arab scholars analyzed the state of Arab human development in a widely-circulated 2002 report. Their findings were stark. In particular, the Arab Human Development Report 2002 found that the 19 nations under study suffer from a “freedom deficit”:
“Out of seven world regions, the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the late 1990s. The Arab region also has the lowest [score] of all regions for voice and accountability [based on] a number of indicators measuring various aspects of the political process, civil liberties, political rights and the independence of the media.”
The Arab region not only ranked last on the freedom scale, but the gap between Arab countries and the next-to-last ranked region, Africa, was substantial. The authors also found the Arab world lagged in gender equality, education, Internet use, human welfare and technological development. “The [total] average [scientific] output of the Arab world per million inhabitants is roughly 2% that of an industrialized country,” the authors noted. “In 1981, the Republic of Korea was producing 10% of the output of the Arab world; in 1995, it almost equalled its output.”
In the number of frequently cited scientific papers generated per million inhabitants, Switzerland scored 79.90, the United States 42.99, Israel 38.63. Among Arab nations, Kuwait led the pack with 0.53, followed by Saudi Arabia with 0.07, Egypt at 0.02, and Algeria at 0.01.
The poet Nizar Qabbani, quoted by Fouad Ajami in his famous book The Dream Palace of the Arabs, concluded that Arab societal dysfunction is so pervasive that he could no longer write:
‘I don’t write because I can’t say something that equals the sorrow of this Arab nation. I can’t open any of the countless dungeons in this large prison. The poet is made of flesh and blood. You can’t make him speak when he loses his appetite for words. You can’t ask him to entertain and enthrall when there is nothing in the Arab world that entertains or enthralls. When we were secondary schoolchildren, our history teacher used to call the Ottoman Empire [Europe’s] ‘sick man.’ What is the history teacher to call these mini-empires of the Arab world being devoured by disease? What are we to call these mini-empires with broken doors and shattered windows and blown-away roofs? What can the writer say and write in this large Arab hospital?’ How can we explain the discouraging state of Middle Eastern Arab societies? Is it the fault of Western imperialism or the existence of Israel, as often claimed?—Nizar Qabbani
It is true that there were brief European imperial and colonial disruptions in the Middle East, and that Arab leaders were guided by Western socialist and fascist political models in developing their dictatorial political systems. Yet these system have been largely over-layers added to—not replacements for—traditionally tribalized Arab societies, with their legacies of violence left intact from Bedouin days.
It is to the latter that we must look to understand the circumstances and difficulties of the Arab Middle East. The lesson is that, in the Arab world and elsewhere, culture matters.
The Arab Middle East has remained largely a pre-modern society, governaned by clan relationships and violent coercion. People in both the countryside and the cities tend to trust only their relatives, and then only relative to their degree of closeness. People define their interests in terms of the interests of their own group, and in opposition to those of other groups. A pervasive cult of honour requires that people support their own groups, violently if necessary, when conflict arises.
What is missing in the Arab Middle East are the cultural tools for building an inclusive and united state. The cultural glue of the West and other successful modern societies—consisting of the rule of law and constitutionalism, which serve to regulate competition among unrelated groups—is absent in the Arab world. The frame of reference in a tribalized society is always “my group vs. the other group.” This system of “balanced opposition” is the structural alternative that stands in stubborn opposition to Western constitutionalism.
Islam, which might have provided an overarching constitution of universalistic rules binding together all members of society, has failed as a political organizing principle, as well—for it too reflects the region’s underlying sociology, having been built up by the Arabs’ Bedouin forebears on a foundation of balanced opposition. This is why it has fueled rather than suppressed the Middle East’s various bloody feuds, such as those between Sunni vs. Shiite and between Muslim vs. infidel.
As a result, Arab political reform has proven elusive, and will remain thus so long as balanced opposition dominates the region’s political culture. Whatever formal unity is imposed by coercive force over a national population—we need only think of the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, etc.—remains illegitimate in the eyes of the subjects on the receiving end, and thus constantly open to violent challenge and radical replacement.
The primary goal of such regimes is to remain in power and maximize their spoils, rather than to enhance the lives of society members. Their dysfunction explains why so many Arabs have suffered so long, and remain without the liberties we in the West take for granted.
The irony in all this, is that such a failed culture on its own grounds can be so effective bringing down a successful culture like Europe.
Since the NIE came out, I have argued that the unbridled glee demonstrated by many in the media (see Chris Matthews) was unwarranted and the uncritical coverage reflected the relief felt in the media that war was now averted. The NIE, inconclusive regarding even the very specific aspect of the Iranian nuclear project upon which it commented, becomes even more suspect when one considers who constructed it and what their motives were. John Bolton, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, adamantly echoes this position.
The 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate, as well as the skewed reporting around it, is a sign of the “illegitimate politicization” of the American intelligence establishment, according to former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.
The document reportedly said Iran stopped its nuclear weapons production program in 2003.
While “Iran’s nuclear program is continuing and expanding,” Bolton told The Jerusalem Post at a book-signing in a Tel Aviv Steimatzky on Sunday, “the NIE has had a devastating impact on our global efforts to try and constrain Iran.”
My friend Damian Thompson, author of one of the better books on apocalyptic thought, The End of Time is now pursuing a really interesting project on “counter-knowledge”. (He’s the anonymous questioners in the second opening anecdote of my article on post-modern conspiracy theory. His exploration draws our attention to a critical dimension of (an often unconscious) information warfare that we are conducting, in many cases, against ourselves. Nothing illustrates the danger of using post-modernism (e.g., “there is no such thing as objectivity”) to detach ourselves from the kind of “reality testing” that only a sober form of self-criticism can assure.
Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact, warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book
George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. “Creation science” disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus.
The fantasy that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks has wormed its way into the mainstream
Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these “secrets”? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace.
This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.
We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world.
That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information.
Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings; someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory; someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.
Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more vulnerable than at any time for decades.
I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his “doubts” about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-sounding observation: “Look at the way the towers collapsed vertically. Jet fuel wouldn’t generate enough to heat to melt steel. Only controlled explosions can do that.” The rest of the party, not being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. “You’re right,” they said. “It did seem strange…”
Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and a masterpiece of counterknowledge.
The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon; that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were faked using voice-morphing technology.
The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated. Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. “Expert testimony” is lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with strong links to the far Right.
Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11 conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a member of President Sarkozy’s government has suggested that President Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Bout