Selective Attention

Necessary Narratives

It’s a familiar narrative – Palestinians are unreasonable and violent – Israel is forethought, peaceful, and violent only as a last resort against their impossibly aggressive neighbors.  How accurate a portrayal is the official mass media narrative?  Why haven’t any of the mainstream media accounts linked the fact that Israel continues to violate international consensus regarding Jerusalem and the 1967 borders with the Hamas rocket fire?

Today I heard Sean Hannity’s guest radio host (Curtis Sliwa) discussing the Israeli violence with such contempt for the rules of inference that he attempted to demonize Palestinians by pointing to the suicide bomber in Afghanistan that killed 14 children this week.  That in and of itself wouldn’t be so bad, but when you consider the fact that back in September a U.S. air-strike hit a school and killed maybe 100 women and children, or that in November a U.S. air-strike hit a wedding party and killed 40 innocent people, you have to conclude that Curtis Sliwa reasons slightly better than a chimpanzee but not quite as well as a human child.

Domination vs. Co-Existence

Gazan militants are not firing rockets into Israel because they are irrational and violent, at least not in every case. Further, not every rocket fired comes from an organized Hamas effort.

Militants are firing rockets into Israel because of the virtual stranglehold imposed unto the unoffending civilian population of Gaza ever since the 2006 parliamentary elections; the building of the annexation wall in the West Bank, Israeli government policies of constant expansion and totalitarian control of the Palestinian territories with particular regard to the water resources, Israeli policies of blockading U.N. aid workers and shipments from entering Gaza going back to 2006, which 750,000 Gazans depend upon for nutrition, most of them children, are policies that are designed specifically to elicit a Hamas militant response, which as we can demonstrate, may amount to some destroyed buildings and the occasional dead Israeli.

If the Israeli government were truly interested in stopping this, it would address the very serious and very rational motives for the Hamas rocket-fire, but to think that Israel wants the rocket fire to end is to miss the point entirely.

Can There be Any Doubt Who the Real Terrorists are?

Apparently, 1 Israeli is equal to 230 Palestinians

Politely Nodding Along

CNN.com ran an article today titled, Shoe Thrower’s Brother: He Wanted to Humiliate ‘Tyrant’, in which one could find the following information, among other things:

“Bush swiftly ducked the flying footwear and later told reporters aboard Air Force One that the “bizarre” incident was not a sign of popular opinion in Iraq.”
(http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/15/shoe.reporter.profile/)
)

Examine the substance of that sentence and take note of the fact that this statement was accepted without comment or criticism. President Bush said that the incident is not reflective of Iraqi public opinion, therefore the incident is not reflective of Iraqi public opinion.

Our beloved Premiere announces what he believes about Iraqi public opinion, of course without evidence, and the ‘liberal media’ follow along nodding their heads in agreement.

Plagiarism or Propaganda?

Here is the account of yesterday’s shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad from the December 15th edition of The New York Times:

“The shoe-throwing incident in Baghdad punctuated Mr. Bush’s visit here — his fourth — in a deeply symbolic way, reflecting the conflicted views in Iraq of a man who toppled Saddam Hussein, ordered the occupation of the country and brought it freedoms unthinkable under Mr. Hussein’s rule but at enormous costs.”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html?em)

And here is the account in the December 15th edition of my hometown paper, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

“The shoe-throwing incident also punctuated Mr. Bush’s visit — his fourth — in a deeply symbolic way, reflecting the conflicted views in Iraq of a man who toppled Saddam Hussein, ordered the occupation of the country and brought it the kind of freedoms unthinkable under Sadaam’s rule but at enormous costs.”
(*edit:The small print at the top of the Post Gazette article references The New York Times, though there are slight differences in the two articles. Nevertheless, the point remains the same; why must there be one acceptable version of the event, and why must that interpretation fail to address the question that is so obviously being begged by the shoe-throwing incident: what do Iraqi’s think?)

War Crimes just aren’t Sexy Enough

While the “liberal media” is busy attempting to insinuate Barack Obama into the Blagojevich case in spite of the hard evidence supporting his exoneration and the total lack of evidence indicating any wrong-doing on his part, a much more interesting news item hit the press this week, though you wouldn’t know it unless you picked up a copy of the December the 12th edition of The Washington Post.

A bi-partisan Senate investigation into the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib concluded that,

“The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own.  The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”