RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is not surprising that The New York Times launched a frontal assault on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, bemoaning what its editorial board called his “lost opportunities.” But the timing of the attack, which U.S. President Barack Obama could have written himself, is worth examining.

Not only did it appear mere days after Jeffrey Goldberg’s portrait of Obama appear in The Atlantic, but it came on the heels of a couple of notable Palestinian terrorist rampages in Israel (notable not for their being distinguishable from all the other daily stabbings, car rammings and shootings, but due to their having taken place in Petach Tikva and Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem and the West Bank); a two-day shuttle-diplomacy visit to the region by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden; a rocket attack from Gaza; and ballistic missile tests in Iran — with an open threat to annihilate Israel engraved in Hebrew on a few of the projectiles.

Anyone who read Goldberg’s piece might have been lulled by his genuine flair for biography into ignoring the disastrous effect of Obama’s Mideast policies. And this emerged in a glowing report; one shudders to imagine how the U.S. president’s words and deeds would have been understood had they been described by an impartial raconteur and interviewer.

Though Obama, with Goldberg’s help, tried to pin his own failures on other leaders — highlighting Netanyahu’s flaws alongside those of additional counterparts who served to “disappoint” him — what emerged was a handbook on how to turn the United States of America into the world’s wimp. Obama’s mentor, “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky, could not have done a better job.

That the Times took this opportunity to publish a column blaming Netanyahu for the lack of peace with the Palestinians cannot be disconnected from the above. On the contrary, it was like an after-pill; an emergency damage-control measure to place the ball back in Israel’s court. Though Obama is on his way out, a fierce campaign for the election of his successor is underway. The Times, therefore, had to reassure American voters that it is not the Democrats who are at fault for their growing sense of international insecurity, but rather Netanyahu.

Monocultures are prone to infirmity and disease, which perhaps explains The Guardian’s laughable attempt to characterise a journalist who believes in free speech as a witless promoter of anti-semitism. When everyone thinks the same, one fool’s braying is lost in the racket of the herd.
Like an elevator formerly occupied by a passenger afflicted with terminal flatulence, a visit to The Guardian Australia website serves as a sharp reminder that noxious emanations linger noisomely in small, tight, closed-off spaces. As Bertholt Brecht lamented of his contemporaries’ insistence on pouring their talents into the mundane when the workers’ paradise had yet to be realised, “They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes.” Pardon the irony in quoting a red-raggin’ propagandist and totalitarian publicist in regard to a red-raggin’ publication with a pronounced affection for greenish jackboots, but the agit-propping dramatist’s observation is too delicious to resist. Here we are, the left’s march through the institutions long ago complete, yet in The Guardian’s strange and sealed little eco-system the same old battle cries and campfire songs echo yet. Suggest that journalists of the modern breed are bitchily contemptuous of free speech and intolerant of any opinions but their own, as the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann did last week in The Australian, and the truth of that observation is immediately confirmed by something akin to an eruption of explosive peristalsis. The offence against leftist presumption to solely determine what can be discussed and how, having been duly digested, prompts an immediate rumbling in the literary bowel until, after a period of authorial grimacing and discomfort, it spurts noisily forth in a gaseous bum burp as short on substance as it is foully obnoxious. Here, the effusions of former journalism academic and current Guardian contributor Jason Wilson come immediately to mind.

It is quite the case study, Wilson’s excoriation of Uhlmann, but very much of a piece with his earlier and no less gassy gushers. Not long ago, for example, he displayed a unique talent for finding perfidy in the prosaic by denouncing the faddish paleo diet as an assault on women and feminism. That expose should not be missed, especially by those who find amusement in the bizarre, but do set aside more than what might normally be considered adequate time to absorb a few hundred words of the merely tendentious. Some will laugh until they cry, and those tears will blur the vision as thoroughly as does the author’s compulsion to make everything, even plates of offal, symptoms of the right’s cleverly concealed and ever-sinister intentions. As a former Canberra University academic, Wilson cannot have worked in close proximity to Professor Matthew Ricketson, co-author of the infamous Finkelstein review, without having what seems a congenital inclination to useful idiocy greatly enhanced. The Finkelstein opus, it should be remembered, recommended the jailing of recalcitrant editors (see below), so there is another alleged journalist opposed to unfiltered free speech.

It’s important to remember that journalists are human beings, too—and just like everyone else at work, they can often be overwhelmed, underprepared, bought with kindness, and subject to unconscious bias.

People always ask me if I’m pro-Israel. No one has ever asked me if I am pro-America or pro-Canada or pro-Kenya, where I was born. What does it mean to be pro-Israel? The question even seems vaguely offensive, as if it questions the legitimacy of Israel itself.
I am sure that the concept of a Jewish state has always made sense to me. Perhaps because I myself come from an ancient ethnic and religious minority, the Zoroastrians, who continue to live in a diaspora outside of what was once our homeland, Iran.
So I came to Israel with a predisposed understanding of the need for a state, a safe haven for a people that has been a global minority for millennia and continuously persecuted. But as for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I had no clue what was going on, who was right and who was wrong.
What I came to realize was that you simply cannot understand this highly complex, multidimensional situation unless you come see it for yourself and experience it for yourself, without preconceived notions. This is hard to do. So whom do we rely on to do it? For most people, it’s the Western media, and we presume they know what they’re doing. For the most part, they don’t.
I first came to Israel in January 2014 for a short trip. This two-week holiday turned into two years. At the time, I was a graduate student in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While traveling, I stumbled on a really eye-opening story—“everyday life” in the West Bank. In the U.S., I was exposed to images of violence and chaos any time the West Bank was mentioned in the news. So when I accidentally ventured into the West Bank during my travels, I had no idea I was even there. I was surrounded by tranquil scenes, modern infrastructure, and economic cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. I guess this was too boring to make any headlines.
I thought it would be interesting to show people the uneventful side of the story. This wasn’t to negate any social and political injustices of the situation. I just thought people should see the entire truth—not just soldiers, bombs, and riots, but also what’s happening when none of the drama is taking place.
And it wasn’t just the normalcy of life in the West Bank that went unreported. Many of the human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority were never mentioned, such as the lack of freedom of speech and the press, and a complete neglect of the Palestinian people by their own politicians, who continue to exploit the peace process while pocketing European and American funding for a “free Palestine.” My work, however, didn’t consist of criticizing the PA. I thought I should leave that to the “real” journalists. It was their job, after all, to report such things.

Last Friday a Washington Post contributor penned an op-ed with the provocative title, “ISIS kidnapped my best friend. But when I met its fighters, I couldn’t hate them.” The op-ed seems intended to convey a poignant, emotional insight about the tragic human cost to everyone trapped in the hell that is ISIS-controlled territory. But the end result is moral equivalence.

Photojournalist Sebastian Meyer relates that his best friend was kidnapped in 2014 by ISIS militants. Meyer can’t say much more than that, he claims, without further endangering his friend, who presumably then is still being held captive somewhere even after all this time. Given the opportunity months later to question an ISIS captive, Meyer – eager to get some answers and some catharsis – was surprised to find himself becoming sympathetic to the fighter for having been recruited into service with the Islamic terror group at what we in the West would consider the tender age of 13.

Meyer detailed the captive fighter’s background:

Ali was born in 1995 and joined the Islamic State in 2008, at the age of 13, he told me. He was trained as an assassin and given his first mission two years later. He and three friends were sent to kill four Iraqi police officers in Mosul. The group tracked the men down, executed them with shots to the back of their heads and buried them where they fell. Ali said he had killed eight or nine men in battle, not including the five he’d beheaded.

http://edgar1981.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/understanding-media-terminology-for.html?m=1 Thanks to  William Narvey

The premier rule governing those who practice medicine is apparently not applicable to reporters for the New York Times. Sharon Otterman has the byline for an article detailing the arrest of David H. Newman, distinguished Mt. Sinai physician and author, on charges of sexually abusing two patients in the emergency room at different times.(”Colleagues Express Disbelief Over Arrest of Doctor with Picture-Perfect Life,” NYT 1/21) The reporter goes on to give the dates and circumstances of each patient’s story, one having occurred on Jan 12 and one elicited by a patient after hearing news of that event; her experience occurred the previous Sept. The Times article differs from all other coverage of this story in that Ms. Otterman felt it necessary to mention the full name of Dr. Newman’s wife, a practicing physician herself. She also felt the need to describe the house where the two live with their children as well as the town where it is located.

Needless to say, Dr. Newman has not been tried or convicted yet so we are not reading about a man guilty of the crime for which he has been arrested. We are possibly reading about an innocent man, wrongfully accused by a woman under the influence of morphine. The names of the two purported victims are withheld out of respect for their privacy. Why isn’t Dr. Newman’s wife afforded equal respect, both by Sharon Otterman and the Times editor who reviewed her article before publication?

In googling Ms. Otterman to gain some insight into what sort of reporter reveals irrelevant information including details of the wedding pictures of the accused, I found her own wedding announcement with the names of her bridegroom and parents. I won’t reveal them but will say that someone with the same name as Ms. Otterman’s mother has a pornographic website online. Yes, that’s irrelevant too.