Here I am on NPR’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle. My segment comes in at 9′15,” but do have a listen to the State Department’s P.J. Crowley, who’s interviewed before me.
Archive for the 'media' Category
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UPDATE: Martin Solomon adds, “Speaking of CNN, take a look at what happened when Rick Sanchez was interviewing Wolf Blitzer, and live responses to Sanchez’s Twitter feed were scrolling along the screen…take a look at the type of thing that made the air: From CNN’s lower third: ‘Jewish lobby runs America’“
In my earlier post (here or join the debate at Harry’s Place,) I mentioned that my appearance this week on CNN was introduced with three clips about the evils of the Israel Lobby featuring Rami Khouri, Stephen Walt and Loretta Napoleoni. I added that I’d never heard of Napoleoni, but one of the Harry’s Place commenters, David Thompson, has. And he points out this miserable apologia for the late, unlamented Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi which Napoleoni published in Socialist Worker, no less!
Here’s a flavor of what she has to say: “He showed strong leadership qualities and organisational skills. The inmates elected him their leader. People were impressed by his determination and his kindness. Once he personally bathed a mujahideen who had been injured and had lost a leg.”
Got the kleenex out yet?
Apparently, CNN International believes that this apologist for Zarqawi, the murderer of American troops and Iraqi civilians, both Shi’a and Sunni, can simultaneously be presented as an authoritative analyst of Middle East politics.
Crossposted at Harry’s Place.
To anyone who knows the medium of television, the statement that a news program is probably the last place to have a serious discussion about a serious matter is hardly a revelation. The allotted timeframe, generally three or four minutes, precludes any in-depth analysis. Discussants are acutely aware that they have to communicate in soundbites, so rather than engaging with each other, they artfully twist the presenter’s questions into answers that emphasize the talking points they arrived at the studio with. That’s how it’s always been.
This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner of the CST blog
On 2 March I posted an article expressing concern about John Pilger: and, more importantly, about what would appear to be the repeated failure of his publishers at the New Statesman to moderate or edit his rhetoric concerning Zionism and Jews.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
A joker once suggested holding a conference with the purpose of abolishing all conferences. That witticism notwithstanding, I took up my invitation to attend the conference hosted organized by the International Press Institute and the Center for International Legal Studies entitled, “The War on Words: Terrorism, Media and the Law.” At this gathering of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists at the Vienna Diplomatic Academy, one could learn a lot.
This is a guest post by Andre Oboler.
My new report into Facebook and Holocaust denial has just been published. The report provides in-depth background and then delves into the reasons why Holocaust denial is hate speech, why counter speech is in this case not an option, and why Facebook as a private company does indeed have both the right and a moral obligation to remove this hateful content.
Continue reading ‘Holocaust Denial: Yes Facebook, it is Hate Speech’
The increasingly nauseating Max Blumenthal is ably taken apart by Dvar Dea here. Serendipitously, Dvar’s piece came into my in-box while I was reading Blumenthal’s whine on the Huffington Post (look it up, I ain’t linking) comparing Israel’s security forces with those of Iran.
Should it ever dawn upon Blumenthal that intrepid journalism involves more than filming a bunch of drunken kids in the safety of west Jerusalem, perhaps he might venture to Tehran. Or at least London, where Press TV may well be willing to take him on, given that so many other pundits are bailing out on the voice of the Iranian regime.
Also recommended: Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez in The Boston Review write about antisemitism in Chavez’s Venezuela.
Over at Harry’s Place, habibi congratulates UK pundit Iain Dale for announcing that he will no longer appear on Press TV, the Holocaust-denying mouthpiece of the Iranian regime which masquerades as a legitimate news outlet. And The Times has an excellent piece here. It’s clear that Press TV, which is based in west London, is violating UK broadcasting regulations. The UK government must act - and shut it down.
You wouldn’t know from the website of Press TV that Tehran is convulsed with violent protests, following Ahmadinejad’s theft of the Iranian Presidential election. Their website currently features an image of a smiling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, and the headline “Leader hails record turnout in Presidential vote.”
Continue reading ‘Press TV: The Iranian Regime’s Mouthpiece’
“But as for those sections of the Cairo speech which turned a gimlet eye on the American past, Obama did no more than speak the truth, or tread where others have to lesser fanfare. Condoleeza Rice first compared the situation in Palestine to the American civil rights movement, and Gershom Gorenberg’s recent cover story in The Weekly Standard implicitly did as well by asking why it was that there was no Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Had Obama really wanted to placate Iran, he would not have repudiated Holocaust denial or quoted from the Torah.”
Michael Weiss casts a critical eye upon conservative readings of Obama’s Cairo speech, in the new - and rather splendid-looking - online magazine Tablet.
This is a cross-post by Mark Gardner from the new - and hugely welcome - blog of the Community Security Trust in the UK. While you’re there, see also Dave Rich’s inaugural post. “This blog will try to shed some light on the nature of contemporary antisemitism, but also on the good work being done to combat it,” he says.
An article in today’s Independent by the paper’s Washington correspondent, David Usborne, contains a stunning example of the conflation of Jews with Israel.
Here is a snippet:
The HRC’s promotion of what are, in effect, blasphemy taboos is a logical extension of its internal policy. The HRC is run like an oligarchy governed by Orwellian speech codes, with any criticism of the body’s behavior immediately stifled in session. In March 2008 testimony to the HRC, for instance, Roy Brown mentioned that the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam-passed and ratified by the OIC in 1990-took sharia as its legal premise and was inimical to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Brown was challenging a claim made by Masood Khan, Pakistan’s UN ambassador, who had told the council, on behalf of the OIC, that the Cairo Declaration was a “complement” rather than an alternative to the Universal Declaration. Immediately, Imran Ahmed Siddiqui, the HRC delegate from Pakistan, issued a point of order, silencing Brown, and announced: “It is insulting to our faith to discuss sharia here in this forum.” The president of the council at the time, Doru Costea of Romania, ceded the point to Siddiqui.
Read the rest, by Ibn Warraq and Michael Weiss, here.
We’ve occasionally had reason on this blog to comment on the antics of the Saddam Hussein acolyte and, latterly, Hamas groupie, George Galloway. Galloway, who serves in his spare time in the British parliament, has his own show on Iran’s Press TV, a Holocaust denial outfit that masquerades as a legitimate news organization. Anyhow, Galloway was reduced by a recent guest into a sputtering, stuttering wreck. It is - how else can I put this? - delightful to watch.
“But for the ‘facts-don’t-matter’ camp, there simply can’t be any threat to Israeli security: Ahmadinejad is just talking and anyway gets translated wrongly; anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world doesn’t really exist and whenever it gets too obvious to deny it, it is only an entirely understandable reaction to Israel; Hamas doesn’t really mean what they say in their charter and if they do, their nostalgia for the good old days without Israel is only human; thousands of rockets and mortars targeting Israeli civilians are just homemade fire-crackers meant to signal understandable frustration, and there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism because whatever the Palestinians do is legitimate resistance against a cruel and inhuman occupation. ”
Read Petra Marquardt-Bigman’s critique of those who regard facts in much the same way as my kids regard broccoli. Although on the latter front, I am more confident.
Back in December, I reported on the story of the Norwegian comedian with a line in slapstick jokes about the Holocaust. One result of Otto Jespersen’s stab at comedy was the condemnation of the PFU, Norway’s press authority.
The Israeli scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld, who has written widely and authoritatively on antisemitism in Nordic countries, has now brought his own complaint to the PFU concerning TV2 - the same station which broadcast Jespersen.
