CenterFeud

Fallaci-Khomeini smackdown

In tribute to the recently departed Italian journalist, interviewer and polemicist Oriana Fallaci, Neo-neocon recalls her famous encounter with Ayatollah Khomenini. As good as you remember (or would imagine).

I was introduced to Fallaci's work through reading her 1977 collection, Interview with History, in which the Khomeini interview appears, along with similarly revealing interviews of Golda Meir, Mohamar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger. Hard to get hold of but still highly relevant and a showcase for Fallaci's take-no-prisoners style. She was one tough lady and feared no one. She will be sorely missed.

Reuters admits to faked photo of Beirut

First RatherGate, now ReutersGate. From Pajamas Media, whose co-founder Charles Johnson (of LGF fame) was instrumental in bringing both media scandals to light:

In an apology that should cast serious doubt on much of the credibility of the news service itself, Reuters has acknowledged that its war photography from Beirut had been altered and is officially withdrawing the photograph. In a carefully worded statement Reuters admitted that “photo editing software was improperly used on this image. A corrected version will immediately follow this advisory. We are sorry for any inconvience.”

Inconvenience? This display of media manipulation during wartime was uncovered by Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs who previously uncovered the forged memos of Rathergate. In the past, Reuters has often been accused of bias by the blogosphere, which the news agency has denied.

This clumsily doctored photo, which included cloned portions to "enhance" the smoke and destroyed buildings, is only the tip of a much larger iceberg, in which media outlets continue to live in denial regarding their role in the skillful propaganda war being waged by jihadist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Al-Qaeda. A recent example was CNN reporter Nic Robertson, who led his viewing audience through what he later admitted was a carefully staged Hezbollah propaganda piece.

No one is questioning the media's right to cover the destruction in Lebanon, and to provide the critical Lebanese perspective of the damage that is being wrought by Israel's attacks. But it is irresponsible to hand a megaphone to Hezbollah, or to report without establishing the motives of the people supplying the information. Part of Hezbollah's war-fighting strategy is to milk every possible casualty for its propaganda potential, and there is growing skepticism that some (certainly by no means all!) of the images of dead Lebanese civilans are manufactured or manipulated for consumption of both Arab and Western media. This technique of staging and manuipulating media imagery has been honed to an art form by Palestinian propagandists and was exposed in a 60-minutes segment titled "Pallywood".

It is certainly fair to point out that Israel's attacks are damaging civilian infrstructure and causing suffering and strife among the population, but not without noting that the airports, roads and bridges in question are targeted because they would otherwise be used by Syria and Iran to resupply Hezbollah.

It is also fair to say that Israel censors some of the reporting coming from its side of the border, but not without pointing out that such censorship is common in wartime, even among democracies, and is done to prevent disclosure of operational details that would damage the war effort and result in the loss of life -- and that Hezbollah exercises its own form of "censorship" by threatening the safety of those who might report less-than-favorably.

And it is fair to report the number of Lebanese civilans killed in the conflict, but not without mentioning that such casualties could be lessened if those civilans heeded the leaflets Israel drops as advance warning (not to mention that some of those casualties may in fact be Hezbollah fighters dressed as civilans). And, as has been noted elsewhere (but not repeated often enough in news reports), Israel regards civilan deaths as a tragic failure, while Hezbollah regards them as a victory.

All of the above factor into our understanding of the story and consequences of a victory by either Israel or Hezbollah (and by extension, its masters Syria and Iran). It is bad enough that the media reports the daily airstrikes and battles without supplying critical context; for it to rely on "journalists" who supply crudely doctored photos and act as shills for terrorist propaganda is unconscionable.

Cracking the code on Middle East coverage

Victor Davis Hanson offers a translation guide for the code phrases used by the press in its coverage of of the war between Israel and Hezbollah:

A “ceasefire” would occur should Hezbollah give back kidnapped Israelis and stop launching missiles; it would never follow a unilateral cessation of Israeli bombing. In fact, we will hear international calls for one only when Hezbollah’s rockets are about exhausted.

“Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.

“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel, because everything there is by intent a target.

“Cycle of Violence” is used to denigrate those who are attacked, but are not supposed to win.

“Deliberate” reflects the accuracy of Israeli bombs hitting their targets; it never refers to Hezbollah rockets that are meant to destroy anything they can.

“Deplore” is usually evoked against Israel by those who themselves have slaughtered noncombatants or allowed them to perish — such as the Russians in Grozny, the Syrians in Hama, or the U.N. in Rwanda and Dafur.

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

There's more along these lines, leading to the question of why the coverage tends to stress Lebanese casualties and damage, while ignoring the fact that Hezbollah is committed to the destruction of Israel in the name of the same Islamist ideology that lies behind terrorist attacks around the globe. Yet Israel remains the blind spot. Why?

What explains this distortion of language? A lot.

First there is the need for Middle Eastern oil. Take that away, and the war would receive the same scant attention as bloodletting in central Africa.

Then there is the fear of Islamic terrorism. If the Middle East were Buddhist, the world would care about Lebanon as little as it does about occupied Tibet.

And don’t forget the old anti-Semitism. If Russia or France were shelled by neighbors, Putin and Chirac would be threatening nuclear retaliation.

But while it's useful for Hanson to point this out, this is old news. Europe long ago chose sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with even popular opinion in Britain largely critical of Israel's policies and actions. To some extent this was due to a tendency to see in Israel a reflection of Europe's own shameful colonialist history, and to a large extent it has to do with the continent's energy and economic ties to the Middle East. China and Russia are a different matter. In addition to economic interests in the region, they are still smarting from the defeat of Communism and the rising influence of the US, so will do anything to undermine its policy aims, including turning a blind eye to an increasingly belliigerent Iran.

We know this is the case. And we also know that this time no one can make the claim that the hostilities are about land. After all, Israel withdrew from Lebanon six years ago, uprooted its settlements from Gaza last Fall, and was on a course to withdraw from large parts of the West Bank. Rather than building on these actions as milestones towards a lasting peace, Hamas and Hezbollah are trumpeting them as proof of Israel's weakness and so are pressing the attack, believing they have Israel backed into a corner. That they don't care what happens to the innocent (and some not-so-innocent) civilians they hide among is reason to condemn these terrorist organizations, not those who are fighting them to defend their very existence.

Sadly, not so long ago it was not out of the question that Israel and Lebanon might have one day worked out a peace agreement, since Israel had demonstrated that it was willing to quit its occupation of Southern Lebanon. Unfortunately, the Lebanese government is divided and weak, and Hezbollah's influence was strong enough to drag that beautiful country into war.

So for those who are wondering about the prospects of restoring "stability" to this troubled region, here is a little reality check:

Israel will do whatever it must do to defend itself from a well-armed, highly discplined terrorist group that is ideologically committed to its destruction. Whatever the spin in the media, Israel has no choice.

Hezbollah will press forward at the behest of its sponsor, Iran and its surrogate Syria, who are determined at all costs to prevent the formation of stable democracies in either Iraq or Lebanon. Playing the Israel card through Hezbollah is a reliable way for Iran to rearrange the playing field more to its liking.

The EU and the UN will bleat on about the need for a cease-fire and an international solution, but are not willing to actually expose themselves to real danger, so they are not in a position to affect the situation on the ground. The UN fled Iraq after its headquarters was attacked, and the UN presence on the Lebanese border has merely given cover to Hezbollah. Any credible international force will have to include real soldiers who are willing to put themselves on the line to protect both Israel and Lebanon from Hezbollah.

The US will go along to an extent with the international call for a cease-fire, but refuse to broker one on terms favorable to Hezbollah. The Bush administration realizes that a "peace agreement" cannot be reached with a terrorist organization. Any agreements that are achieved will be made with the Lebanese government, not with its would-be puppet masters in Syria or Iran.

In the Arab and Muslim world, the steady stream of hateful anti-semitic rhetoric will continue unabated. Calls will issue forth for the "Zionist regime" to leave the field to the jihadists, but from their standpoint it will matter little what the Israelis do. If they defend themselves against and kidnapings, suicide bombings and rocket attacks, their response will be decried as beliigerent and "disproportionate"; and if they withdraw their forces or hunker down, they will be scorned by their enemies as weak, and so attacks against them will only mount, with deadlier weapons. The goal is nothing less than the eradication of Israel and the slaughter or ethnic cleansing of every Jew in the region to clear the way for a Taliban-style Islamist regime.

And sadly, the oh-so sophisticated and progressive Western press will cooperate - whether wittingly or unwittingly - in this shameful propaganda effort to demonize and deligitimize the Jewish state. It's up to the rest of us to keep Hanson's decoder ring close at hand.

The once and future quagmire

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson imagines (very convincingly) how World War II would have been reported if the media of that era were like our media today:

May 1, 1945—After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed “island hopping.”

Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a “bunch of dead-enders,” was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.

Worse still, our sources in the intelligence community speak of a billion-dollar boondoggle now underway in the American southwest. This improbable “super-weapon” (with the patently absurd name “Manhattan Project”—in the midst of a desert no less!) promises in one fell swoop to erase our mistakes and give us instant deliverance from our blunders—no concern, of course, for the thousands of innocents who would be vaporized if such a monstrous fantasy bomb were ever actually to work.

We are only now coming off even more terrible losses in Europe, after being surprised by a supposedly defeated enemy in the Ardennes where another 20,000 Americans were killed and another 60,000 wounded or missing—again, due to our continued strategic incompetence and abject intelligence failures. Macabre reports of American bazooka shells bouncing off German Tiger tanks and our Shermans ablaze like Ronson lighters have only now come to light as we plow the Belgium countryside for yet another new American war cemetery. Tragically, this is not the first, but the fourth year of this war, when victory rather than endless bloodshed has been long promised.

Hard to imagine actually winning such a war. And harder to imagine what there was to be gained by doing so. How will our attitudes about the first 21st century war appear several decades from now? In a recent widely-linked post, science fiction writer Dan Simmons conjures up a Time Traveler who tells us:

“Your enemies have gathered and struck and continue to strike and you, the innocents of 2006 and beyond, fight among yourselves, chew and rip at your own bellies, blame your brothers and yourselves and your institutions of the Enlightenment – law, tolerance, science, democracy – even while your enemies grow stronger.”

“How are we supposed to know who our enemies are?” I turned and growled at him. “The world is a complex place. Morality is a complex thing.”

“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the Time Traveler. “Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”

Simmons vision of the unfolding "Century War" is harrowing, all the more because of it is suffused with a bitter nostalgia for our current era, wallowing in the luxuries of high-flown civil liberties debates. The Time Traveler knows that such liberties will soon be a distant memory in many parts of the world:

“At least understand that such decency goes away quickly when you are burying your children and your grandchildren,” rasped the Time Traveler. “Or watching them suffer in slavery. Ruthlessness deferred against totalitarian aggression only makes the later need for ruthlessness more terrible. Thousands of years of history and war should have taught you that. Did you fools learn nothing from living through the charnel house that was the 20th Century?”

And here we are, pondering whether Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's 18-page letter to President Bush is a "diplomatic opening" or in fact, as some experts warn, a pro-forma invitation to embrace Islam, a religious pre-requisite to open warfare. We shudder at the prospect of military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and instead attempt to rationalize living with a nuclear Iran capable of making good its threat to "wipe Israel off the map" and targeting Europe with its Shahab missiles. In the face of a genocidal madman who talks openly of ushering in an end-of-times religious war, we instead delberate on whether our own government is violating our privacy by trying to gather intelligence on jihadists already within our borders who may be preparing to wage that war against not our military but our civilian population centers.

Hanson's historical satire and Simmons' chilling history of the future are bookends of a cautionary tale about our own time, the war we find ourselves in, and the way we choose to see ourselves. Both deserve careful reading and consideration.

Old media dog learns new tricks: MSM blog on the Iraqi elections is good. Really.

Hats off to Eric Black, national and world news writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who is running a feature this week called "The Big Question - Iraq's Election: Is this a turning point?" In addition to well researched articles and interviews with experts on the Iraqi elections, Black provides a blog with a discussion thread for readers to comment at length and get into dialogue with one another.

And you know what? It really works. The discussion is civil in tone, well-informed, and generally less shrill and partisan than what you see in a typical letters to the editor column, or for that matter on a typical editorial page. Thoughtful people weigh in with a variety of perspectives, and there is give and take, with Black occasionally stepping in to clarify or even to take questions back to the panel of experts. One commenter expresses his appreciation as follows:

Eric, you put the major newspapers of this country to shame.

You have brought together not just two sides for the phony balance that is treated as journalism nowadays, but the many sides that every real issue involves.

You have offered to collect questions from your readers to ask the people you interviewed.

It’s all written at a high level, not for sixth graders.

This is the sort of open-mindedness, intellectual integrity, and respect for readers that is so patently missing from our news.

You can bet that I will recommend that everyone I know read this.

Thanks for showing us how journalism is done!

I would definitely second that. This is light years ahead of anything I have ever read in the dead trees edition of the Star Tribune and gives me hope that some of the journalists there are actually interested in journalism and grasp how blogs add a new dimension to the reporting. There are several topic threads going, including "What if the Sunnis lose?", "Are the Iraqis like our Founding Fathers?" and "Does the United States really want democracy in Iraq?" They, and the discussions that follow, are well worth your time.

UPDATE: Eric Black notes in the comments below that he is not an editor at the Star Tribune, "just a reporter/writer" (now corrected above). My bad. Nonetheless, I hope the real editors At the Star Tribune are paying attention to this demonstration on how to involve the readership in a dialogue rather than pushing a simplistic (and distorted) view of events on them. There are many points of view on this story, and the articles, interviews and discussion threads illuminate more of them than I have seen in years of the paper's normal coverage. And I read it daily.

Changing with the Times

American Future traces the New York Times' shifting perspective on Iraq from the early '90s to the present. Instructive.

UPDATE: Part 2 is now available. Props to AF's proprietor Marc Schulman for a truly herculean effort.

(Hat tip: The Glittering Eye)

Pajamas Media's man in Beirut phones Hezbollah

Michael J. Totten has pulled up stakes and moved from Portland, Oregon to Beirut, where he will be reporting on Middle Eastern politics for the next six months. So what do you do when you're the new American journalist in town? Pick up the phone and call the Hezbollah press office, naturally.

Totten is just one of the impressive cadre of bloggers now affiliated with (the soon-to-be-renamed) Pajamas Media, the brainchild of Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson. To date contributors and editorial board members include notables such as La Shawn Barber, Dean Esmay, Michael Barone, David Corn, Eugene Volokh, Tammy Bruce, Cathy Seipp and Evan Coyne Maloney.

An amazing assemblage of firepower, bringing together some of the best talent of the blogosphere and the MSM. I expect them to create a new model of transparent journalism that will rewrite the rules and put their traditional counterparts to shame.

UPDATE: Michael's meeting went down just fine, since Hezbollah's press office is all about courting Western opinion. He promises to write more on the details down the road.

"Like talking to a character from another time and place"

David Frum, in his blog on National Review, has some genuinely nice things to say in memory of Peter Jennings.

South Park Conservatives explained

Plus much, much more. NRO interviews Brian Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives, who comments on college campuses, Fox, Air America, the publishing industry, and of course the impact of blogs.

Sorry to source two posts back-to-back from NRO, but it's an illuminating interview and most of Anderson's observations ring true, at least from my perspective.

And for Blog of the Year it's...Power Line!

What a way to end the year: one of my favorite blogs (and Minnesota boys, no less), Power Line, is named "Blog of the Year" by Time Magazine. Due to their role in both Ra^therGate and the Swift Boat Vets controversy, bloggers have become part of the media landscape and its good to see that acknowledged by the mainstream press, which should view blogging as a complementary, not adversarial medium.

Scott Johnson ("The Big Trunk"), John Hinderaker ("Rocket Man") and Paul Mirengoff ("Deacon") run a first-class site, and for more than two years I have made Power Line a daily read for its insightful commentary from a conservative perspective. Even if you are a liberal (especially if you're a liberal!), you will want to make Power Line a regular stop to understand how the other side views the world and frames its arguments - you might even find yourself persuaded. I know I have been on more than one occasion.

Congratulations to Power Line (along with Little Green Footballs, INDC Journal, Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, and many others) whose role in the CBS document scandal demonstrated the power and collective intelligence of this medium.

UPDATE: James Lileks puts in his two cents:

Full disclosure: This writer knows the Power Line guys, and has a Web site of his own. Good thing, too; the Internet is going to make gigs like this obsolete, once enough people realize that some guy in his basement is capable of turning out commentary as insightful as a tenured eminence who was handed a column 30 years ago and has spent the last 10 coasting on a scoop from the Reagan years. It takes dynamite to get some writers out of the paper.

In the new media, however, a clever blog can spring up overnight and get 100,000 readers in a day. That number can quickly fall to zero if the blogger gets a terminal case of the stupids.

What's more, if the blog allows comments, the readers can grapple with the writer on the very blog itself, which is like a columnist standing outside the newspaper building 24/7, arguing with anyone with a gripe. This is new. Bloggers question authority, as the beloved college T-shirt slogan has it. Isn't that good?