Category: Media

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Hezbollah, of course, are designated terrorists by the US state department, for the 1983 bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon.

Two things about that attack:

Marine barracks are, by any definition, legitimate targets of war.
Do you know why they attacked a military target? Because the US shelled Shia villages in Lebanon.

Let me emphasize, Hezbollah attacked a military target, killing soldiers, in retaliation for US attacks on defenseless civilians.

Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everything Hezbollah does, they’ve done some real terrorist attacks. But they have a policy against terrorist attacks against Americans and have for a long time. Certainly they have killed far fewer civilians than either the US or Israel.

As for Fadlallah and Nasr, her own words say it best:

I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam…

It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated.

But it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission – resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon – that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.

She further notes that as he got older, he actually spoke out against Hezbollah and hardline Iranian clerics:

In later years, Hezbollah’s leadership apparently did not like Fadlallah’s vocal criticism of Hezbollah’s allegiance to Iran. Nor did they like his assertions that Hezbollah’s leaders had been distracted from resistance to Israeli occupation of portions of Lebanon and had turned weapons against their own people.

At first, he was simply pushed to the side, but later wasn’t even referred to as a Hezbollah member. Rather, he was referred to as the scholar – the expert on Islam – but nothing more. During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, his honorary title “Sayyed” – indicating that he’s a descendant of the prophet – was dropped any time he was mentioned on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and other Hezbollah media outlets.

None of this is to say he was a “good guy”, but he was certainly no more evil than a man who launched a pre-emptive war based on lies against a country which was no threat to his own country, killing hundreds of thousands and making millions homeless.

It’s not that journalists can’t have opinions, it’s that they can only have approved opinions, or at least they can only admit to approved opinions.

The Court Eunuch Standard of Blogging Exposed by Dave Weigel’s Resignation

By Ian Welsh

On June 26, 2010

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As many may be aware, Dave Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Post resigned after emails to a private listserv called Journolist were publicly released. These are the things he wrote which cost him his job:

•”This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”

•”Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there — nor in DC at all.”

•”I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.”

•”It’s all very amusing to me. Two hundred screaming Ron Paul fanatics couldn’t get their man into the Fox News New Hampshire GOP debate, but Fox News is pumping around the clock to get Paultard Tea Party people on TV.”

I’ve spent some time reading around the web, and the main criticism of Weigel seems to be that he wasn’t impartial: not only didn’t he like the right wing folks he was covering, he despised them.

This is exactly what is wrong with US journalism. The responsibility of reporters is not to be “impartial”, their responsibility is to tell the truth. Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that America was torturing people? Should that not bother them as people? S Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?

Is that we want? Sociopaths who have no personal opinions?

Weigel isn’t being attacked because he wrote anything in his public work which wasn’t true, because he didn’t write any such thing. As Friedersdorf writes, his public work was of the highest quality and that should be the only thing which matters.

I’ll defend to death, however, the proposition that the work of a journalist should be the only standard by which he is measured. Mr. Weigel’s work is superb: he breaks news, his foremost loyalty is to the facts, and he reliably treats fairly even folks with whom he very much disagrees…

…Firing Dave Weigel incentivizes more digging into the personal opinions of journalists, and validates the idea that they should be judged on the basis of those opinions, rather than the content of their work. What’s next? E-mails sent to a few people and leaked? Opinions offered at a bar over beers and surreptitiously recorded? Can I reiterate how glad I am to have moved away from Washington DC? (You should hear what I say about De Beers in private!)

If you taped everyone’s conversations, and intercepted all their emails, the very few people who could not be hung by their own words, who have never said anything that doesn’t sound bad, are exactly the people you don’t want as reporters or bloggers.

People who are either so self-controlled they never say anything intemperate, or so passionless they have no beliefs that get them riled up are the sort of folks who have nothing useful to say: the sort of folks who don’t challenge a President who wants to attack a country which never attacked the US, has nothing to do with 9/11 and has no weapons of mass destruction.

This standard, the “court eunuch” standard, is exactly why you have a press corp that is worthless for holding those in power responsible. People with no strong beliefs, or whose ambition or fear is so great they never express those standards strongly, are the sort of people who know that bucking a President isn’t good for your career, and so who cares of hundreds of thousands of people die because you’re a gutless careerist?

There’s a phrase for modern PR techniques…

By Ian Welsh

On October 7, 2009

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David Sirota has up an article on how public relations and media messaging is done today, and how’s it’s changed in the last ten years.

It’s good, and you should read it. But it’s also a lesson that there’s actually little that’s new under the sun, because all he’s really discussing is the Big Lie.

… the broad masses of a nation… more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

– Mein Kampf

To Be or Not To Be A Sheep

By Ian Welsh

On April 2, 2009

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This picture of a huge crowd congregating on the Bank of England to protest the G20 meeting is worth looking at, but more interesting is this:

For a second straight day, French workers facing steep layoffs at a Caterpillar factory held four of their bosses at the U.S. manufacturer’s plant in the Alps, union officials said.

Short of the Soviet Union I wonder if there has ever been a population as saturated with propaganda and lies as the American one. Wonder how long it’ll be before such things happen in the US. Wonder if it does happen, if the SWAT teams will go in and start killing people.

Bankers lost trillions of dollars over the last 8 years due in large part to outright fraud, paying themselves billions in bonuses. Under both Bush and Obama, the response to their theft has been to give them trillions of dollars worth of money. Trillions have not been spent on helping people destroyed by the bankers greed, corruption, incompetence and theft.

If Americans continue to put up with this, they aren’t just sheep, they’re serfs.

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Media

Another journalist down for saying something “inappropriate”

The Court Eunuch Standard of Blogging Exposed by Dave Weigel’s Resignation

There’s a phrase for modern PR techniques…

To Be or Not To Be A Sheep