Hey Joe
January 8, 2008
In the expanding stable of mediocrities who serve as columnists for the Guardian, Brian Whitaker is certainly not the worst. Six years back, he did write one decent article. His subject at the time were the Neocons and the various Israel lobby institutions. As any careerist hack would know, this doesn’t do one’s career much good. As a consequence, Whitaker has turned to a subject that guarantees popularity with the powers that be: bashing Islam. These days his average article is a collection of trite quotes gleaned from random blogs which then serve as evidence of whichever prevailing prejudice he has chosen to recycle in the article.
As a born again Orientalist, Whitaker’s new shtick is the argument that the West needs to civilize the Islamic world (how original!). In his present one he is speaking about ‘honour killings’. According to him, this practice is exclusive to the Muslim world. I had to shake my head as only recently I had discovered that the primary cause of death for women under 35 in UK is domestic violence. Whitaker does quote Joseph Massad pointing out that one third of all women killed in the US are at the hands of boyfriends and husbands, but he says this is a false comparison as this is not condoned in the West. Presumably it is condoned in the East? Perhaps Whitaker knows something about the place that I missed growing up in, of all places, Peshawar. But even in Peshawar I couldn’t miss one of Jimi Hendrix’s more famous songs, Hey Joe. Subject of the song? Honour killing.
Hey Joe – by Jimmy Hendrix
Benazir Bhutto Assassinated
December 27, 2007
“Benazir Bhutto ‘killed in blast’” reports the BBC. She had promised to wage the ‘war on terror’ on Bush’s behalf. It appears her adversaries have taken to Bush’s precedent of preemption and savagery with more gusto. Sadly for Benazir, her epitaph will be her last statement before the assassination: Speaking of her notoriously corrupt husband, better known as Mr. 10 percent, she said ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan’. So it goes.
Perhaps this would lead at least some to contemplate the meaning of ‘blowback’ in Pakistan. A thing like this was inconceivable even 5 years back when I was leaving the country.
[Note: BBC's 'security correspondent' Frank Gardner is about as knowledgeable on security issues in Pakistan as I am on gender politics in Equitorial Guinea. His expert opinion comprises of the conventional wisdom culled form Pakistan's english language press mixed with the 'Islamic threat'-mongering of Policy Exchange. His analytical vocabulary is woefully inadequate. This was a political assassination; it has nothing to do with someone wanting to establish an 'Islamic state'.]
New York Times reports that Benazir was actually shot at before the blast, so it appears like a coordinated attack with substantial pre-planning. Refreshingly enough, the following from NYT is not quite the hagiography one usually expects.
An attack on a political rally killed the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto near the capital, Islamabad, Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto was fired upon before the blast, and an official from her party said Ms. Bhutto was further injured by the explosion, which was apparently caused by a suicide attacker.
At least a dozen more people were killed. “At 6:16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Ms. Bhutto’s party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital where she was taken after the attack, according to The Associated Press.
Our Man in Annapolis
November 28, 2007
Angry Arab reveals that the overly uncritical coverage of the farce in Annapolis by the Guardian correspondent Ian Black may have to do with the fact that his son serves in the Israeli Occupation army.
And now for some truth: IMEU has two Palestinians reporting on the realities the Guardian and others will not report.
The right to our land must be restored
Fareed Taamallah, IMEU, Nov 27, 2007This week in Annapolis, Maryland the United States government will host a conference between Palestinian and Israeli leaders to launch peace talks on a permanent agreement. A vital component of the peace proposals to be discussed involves exchanges of territory that would allow Israel to keep its West Bank “settlement blocs” while compensating Palestinians with land inside Israel.
Guardian’s Rendition
October 19, 2007
So Hollywood finally gets around to addressing an issue of grave contemporary relevance, and Guardian assigns the review to a half-wit wanker. The outcome is predictable: there is much obsessing with a single alleged weak link in the plot, and complete lack of comprehension regarding the larger issue. But what caught my eye is this passage:
It’s a structural device that implicitly carries the rational lesson that the US is not an island entire of itself, to paraphrase John Donne, that its actions have consequences for other people’s lives, and are themselves determined by factors outside its borders. It also asks the audience to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too. There’s a decency in this, but also a naivety and a moral equivalence…
Imagine that? Someone actually naive enough to ‘to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too’!
Ahmadinejad at Columbia and the BBC Prat
September 25, 2007
Columbia University invites the Iranian president to speak, presumably in the interest of ‘dialogue’, only to have the host insult him before he speaks. This is the same spineless Lee Bollinger who refused to stand by distinguished academics when Zionist hoodlums staged a smear and intimidation campaign right inside the Columbia premises. But more amusing is the coverage of the event. First we had the CNN’s world class coverage which took the form of a reporter asking a small band of protesting Jews (most wearing yarmulkes and carrying the Israeli flag, but of course representing ‘America’) such challenging questions as ‘Do you think the Iranian president is a terrorist?’. Not to be outdone, BBC sent its own clown, a man with an uncanny resemblance to a boiled egg, who made a point of repeating the fictional quote about Ahmadinejad wanting to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ even though it has known to be false for more than a year now. Pathetic.
Tisdall’s Game
September 18, 2007
It is only months since the Guardian’s front page was turned into a conduit for Pentagon propaganda, leading to widespread condemnation. Here it is now inflicting another load of tosh on its unsuspecting readers: a piece celebrating the latest Israeli aggression against Syria. Bylined once again by pipsqueak scrivener Simon “Officials Say” Tisdall, it tells us Israel’s ‘real-time targets are, potentially, Iran’s nuclear, military and command facilities. And Israel, no longer content with trial runs up and down the Mediterranean, just demonstrated how easily it could hit them.’
So here we have a senior journalist for a liberal UK daily taking a whole article to speculate why Syria may or may not have been bombed by Israel without at any point addressing the more relevant question: does Israel have a right to take unilateral decisions to bomb other countries at will? Imagine for a second how the same news story would read, if lets say Iran were to make a similar demonstration of ‘how easily it could hit them’. Would Tisdall write an article speculating whether its Israel’s treatment of Palestinians that made Iran do it, or was it the belligerent rhetoric of its leaders? Was it its known arsenal of nuclear weapons, or was it its supply of weapons to the extremist settlers in the West Bank?
Update: ‘Officials Say’ Tisdall is back on the Comments pages of the Guardian, this time lamenting why US-Israeli threats against Iran have not been acknowledged with display of appropriate terror in Iran. He offers gems such as, ‘Britain’s sober view that Mr Kouchner had merely stated the obvious appears to have been dismissed, too.’ For one who feels there could be multiple justifications for Israel bombing another country, it must certainly be ‘obvious’ that there should be a war against Iran, as its leaders seem to have failed to show due deference to rattling US-Israeli sabers.
Tom to the Rescue
September 16, 2007
It always amuses me to see ethnic minority-types rush to defend power and privilege.
Before the Iraq war started, congressman Jim Moran was assailed for suggesting that the Israel Lobby was exercising disproportionate influence over the decision to invade Iraq. Four years on, few outside partisan ranks even doubt this proposition. Mearsheimer and Walt have painstakingly documented the lobby’s role in coaxing US into the war in a scholarly book which has for the first time broken the taboo on broaching the subject in the mainstream. They were not the first — John Cooley had already made the very same assertions in his An Alliance Against Babylon. As a result, many, including Moran, have been emboldened enough to state the obvious once more (in the progressive Jewish Tikkun magazine, preceded by Rabbi Michael Lerner’s own expression of discomfort at the lobby’s conspicuous flaunting of its power). But instead of accomodating to the fact that the reality would not be suppressed any longer, here we have Washington Post‘s in-house Uncle Tom launching another scurrilous smear against Moran. For suggesting that the media is too pro-Israel, Moran gets accused of — surprise, surprise — anti-Semitism.
Old Wine, New Bottle
September 14, 2007
Given Israel’s record of disinformaiton and propaganda, these days it has been compelled to consider roundabout ways for planting a desired story in the mainstream. One of the favored tricks in the propagandist’s bag is usually to place a story in a more or less obscure outlet; this source is then referenced by the mainstream. By the time the hokum has lodged itself into public consciousness, it does not matter if the original story is discredited.
So here we have a story in Glasgow’s Herald (a publication with a modest circulation but a generally decent output) which claims to ‘confirm’ that the Israeli aerial aggression against Syria was actually aimed at a convoy supplying Hizbullah ‘terrorists’. It can ‘confirm’ because the Israeli military told it so. Employing this standard of journalism one could also confirm that every rape victim asked for it because the rapist would unfailingly tell you so. Ian Bruce, the pipsqueak scrivener entrusted with propagating this nonsense, appears so delighted in his role as the chosen conduit for Israeli propaganda that he even uses the Israeli designation for Hizbullah as a ‘terrorist’ organization — a view shared neither by EU or UK (Britain only designated Hizbullah’s military wing a ‘terrorist’ group under US pressure, although others in the UK government disagree) — while overlooking the fact that he is actually reporting an unprovoked act of aggression against another sovereign nation.
This is what passes for journalism in UK!
(P.s. Thanks Saf)
On the one hand this, on the other hand that
September 6, 2007
Norman Finkelstein has chosen to resign, and the cowardly adminsitraiton of DePaul University has tried to expiate its guilt by acknowledging his academic excellence. But check out how it is reported by this cretinous hack (Donald MacLeod of the Guardian). If the ‘one the one hand this, on the other hand that’ approach were not bad enough, he actually goes on to quote Alan Dershowitz! — the man whose academic fraud was exposed in a live debate on TV by Norman Finkelstein. And notice how it is Finkelstein who is ‘controversial’, not the man who plagiarized two whole chapters from Joan Peter’s hoax. I also noticed the interesting use of quotation marks: Finkelstein is presented as a critic of ‘the holocaust ”industry”‘, rather than ’the ”holocaust industry”‘, implying that he somehow is skeptical of the holocaust, rather than of the organizations which have been using it for ideological and financial gain. Either this MacLeod has not read anything Finkelstein has written, or he intends to mispresent and smear the author. And yeah, is it not nice when someone quotes ‘Little Green Footballs’ as proof of his fair-and-balancedness? But I demand consistency. If someone is going to quote Little Green Footballs for ‘balance’ evertime someone says something controversial like ‘human rights should be universal’, they should also quote the Flat Earth Society every time someone suggests the earth is round.
NYT’s New War: General Gordon Leads the Charge II
August 24, 2007
When on 10 February 2007 New York Times published a sensational front page story by discredicted propagandist Michael Gordon I had commented, ”How does a journalist with the unenviable track record of Gordon receive the front page of a prestigious newspaper so frequently?”. Given that NYT has provided many more front pages to the same person whose defective reporting led to the Iraq war, to produce very similar propaganda one can only conclude that far from having been misled (which it claimed it had been in its subsequent mea culpa), New York Times deliberately furnished the propaganda for the Iraq war as it is in the process of doing for the war against Iran.
Given the New York Times history of shoddy reporting, I naturally avoid using it as a source for news, so I don’t visit its website unless it is something specific I am looking for. For this reason, I missed much of what the New York Times‘s chief propagandist – General Michael R. Gordon — had been up to.
The February 10 article was immediately followed up by another frontpage story, U.S. Says Arms Link Iranians To Iraqi Shiites.
Despite the widespread condemnation of the report, Gordon has not relented in his campaign against Iran. He first backtracked with two defensive articles, Why Accuse Iran of Meddling Now? U.S. Officials Explain and U.S. Says Raid in Iraq Supports Claim on Iran, but Doubts Persist (27 February), but returned to the ‘deadly device’ theme on 27 March with the report Behind U.S. Pressure on Iran, Long-Held Worry Over a Deadly Device in Iraq . On April 3 the New York Times carried his report, “U.S. Says Arms Made in Iran Were Seized In Afghanistan”, followed on 3 July 2007 by another frontpage report co-authored with John Burns, entitled: “U.S. Says Iran Helped Iraqis Kill Five G.I.’s” (see Greg Mitchell’s excellent critique). This was followed by another one on 8 August 2007, entitled: “U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Is Killing More Troops in Iraq”.]
Of the 3 July article, Greg Mitchell writes:
As if he hadn’t done enough damage already, helping to promote the American invasion of Iraq with deeply flawed articles in The New York Times, Michael R. Gordon is now writing scare stories that offer ammunition for the growing chorus of neo-cons calling for a U.S. strike against Iran – his most recent effort appearing just this morning.
What’s most lamentable is that editors at The New York Times, who should have learned their lessons four years ago, are once again serving as enablers.
The Times carried Gordon’s latest opus at the top of its front page today. The Washington Post, in contrast, carried the same claims by an American military spokesman, in an article by Joshua Partlow, on page A8. After a brief accounting of the military’s assertion, Partlow devotes much of the rest of the story to a general war roundup (including news of civilians south of Baghdad killed by our bombs).
At least the Times, fittingly, ran today’s long list of names of U.S. war dead in a box within the Gordon article.
The latest official effort to blame-blame Iran so that perhaps we can bomb-bomb Iran revolves around new claims by Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner that the deaths of five American soldiers in Karbala in January were actually plotted by Iranian militants. Gordon’s breathless article first appeared on the Times’ site yesterday with absolutely no caveats – revealing his true motives and standards. “In effect, American officials are charging that Iran has been engaged in a proxy war against American forces for years,” Gordon declared.
Perhaps even his editors were concerned or embarrassed. The same story suddenly gained a couple of qualifiers, though not nearly enough, later yesterday (first spotted by Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald), and then got enlarged somewhat today, and with the byline of John F. Burns added to Gordon’s.
The story even has a lead character reminiscent of “Curveball” and “Baseball Cap Guy” from Judy Miller’s reporting on Iraq in 2003.
Our new star informer is a Lebanese citizen named Ali Musa Daqdug aka “Hamid the Mute” who supposedly (this is all coming from Gen. Bergner) has a “24-year history in Hezbollah&hellip.The general said Mr. Daqdug had been sent by Hezbollah to Iran in 2005 with orders to work with the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, to train ‘Iraqi extremists.’”
The Times article contains a number of howlers delivered with all seriousness. Here’s one: “General Bergner, seemingly keen to avoid a renewal of the criticism that the American command has used the allegations of Iranian interference here to lend momentum to the Bush administration’s war policy, declined to draw any broader political implications….”
That’s topped by this, in explaining that “Hamid the Mute” had suddenly started talking: “The official said the shift had been achieved without harming Mr. Daqduq. ‘We don’t torture,’ the official said. ‘We follow scrupulously the interrogation techniques in the Army’s new field manual, which forbids torture, and has the force of law.’”
And who is Gen. Bergner? He arrived in Iraq just a few weeks ago from his previous job, as special assistant — to President Bush in the White House.
At his press conference on Monday, which supplied quotes for Gordon, he admitted he could not explain the motivation for the attack on the five U.S. soldiers; why the Iranians would feel any need to outsource to Hezbollah; or why they would risk this kind of “exposure.”
The danger of the Times article — given the prominence attached to it — is real. For example, Sen. Joe Lieberman responded to the allegations by asserting that this means Iran “has declared war on us.”
You may recall that this past February, Gordon had trumpeted the charge that Iran was now supplying a new form of IED — or as the Times put it, the “deadliest weapon aimed at American troops” in Iraq. This charge, promoted by the U.S. military and given prominent play by the Times, also came at a time of rising calls for taking action against Iran. Experts subsequently disputed key parts of evidence cited by Gordon and the charge largely subsided – until now.
Meanwhile, he has written many articles more optimistic about the “surge” than most of his colleagues in the press. They reflect the view of the surge he stated on Charlie Rose’s PBS show back in January (he was chastised by his editors then for speaking his mind too freely): ”So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it’s worth one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we’ve never really tried to win. We’ve simply been managing our way to defeat. And I think that if it’s done right, I think that there is the chance to accomplish something.”
Gordon, of course, is the same Times reporter who, on his own or with Miller, wrote some of the key yet badly misleading or downright inaccurate — articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. Gordon, in fact, wrote with Miller the paper’s most widely criticized — even by the Times itself — WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, “aluminum tubes” story that proved so influential, especially since the administration embraced it lovingly on TV talk shows.
When the Times eventually carried an editors’ note that admitted some of its Iraq coverage was wrong and/or overblown, it criticized two Miller-Gordon stories, and noted that the Sept. 8, 2002, article on page one of the newspaper “gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program.” This, of course, proved bogus.
The paper’s “mea-culpa” story dryly observed: “The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes,” adding, “The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times article.”
Gordon also wrote, following Secretary of State Colin Powell’s crucial, and appallingly wrong, speech to the United Nations in 2003 that helped sell the war, that “it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington’s case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information.”
That Miller-Gordon Sept. 8, 2002, article also included this: “Iraq’s nuclear program is not Washington’s only concern. An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons….
”Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq’s nuclear program before Baghdad’s defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”
Writing at the Times’ “The Lede” blog on its Web site, the paper’s Mike Nizza states that the question of exactly who the “Quds” force is working for remains unanswered, if the exchange with Gen. Gergner was any guide. He then quotes a transcript.
Gen. Bergner: “Our intelligence reveals that senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity.”
Q “Can you define senior leadership?”
Gen. Bergner: “I think I’ll leave it at that.”
Q: “Would you exclude the supreme leader?”
Gen. Bergner: “I’ll leave it at ’senior leadership in Iran’”?
Q: “Put it this way: Do you think it’s possible that he doesn’t know?”
Gen. Bergner: ‘’That would be hard to imagine.”
Nizza then comments, “A tough question indeed: from intelligence to imagination in four steps.”
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor. He has written eight books on history and politics. A collection of his columns on Iraq will be published next March.
