Weeks have passed since the “deadline” for the Iranian regime to accept the deal that offered to enrich their uranium for them. In public, the Iranians keep telling us “no” and that they aren’t giving up the promise of a nuclear-armed revolutionary Islamic state:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday reiterated that his country’s rights on “the nuclear issue” are non-negotiable and its nuclear activities and cooperation happen within the framework of IAEA regulations, according to at report on the Iranian student news agency ISNA.
“Iran is ready for constructive and honest cooperation with western countries in the field of nuclear technology,” he was quoted by ISNA as saying, while warning that the West’s confrontation with Iran only makes the country “more powerful and more developed.”
And oh, by the way, Ahmadinejad tells us that the media are “the lever of international Zionism to dominate the entire world.” So are we done yet? The Obami have gotten their answer and have done nothing. Where are the sanctions, the other options, and the “international community”? It seems nowhere. The Obami, we were told, had a Plan B if engagement failed. Yet it has, though they are loath to tell anyone. But the Iranians gleefully observe our paralysis and move apace with their nuclear program.
Do you feel safer yet?
Nothing brilliant, but I do have one small suggestion: Embed more reporters, including credible non-Israelis, with the IDF. That way discovering the truth won’t be entirely dependent on cross-examining the enemy.
There should be a movie of this and released as a CD. A documentary at least. Not by Spielberg.
Nidra Poller asks, “Can this be responsible journalism?”
The French media has a unique tradition. An example was the reportage surrounding the massacre of 17 October 1961. Then over 200 North Africans peacefully protesting the Algerian war were clubbed to death and their corpses thrown into the Seine. They floated through the middle of Pairs.
Those murders were the work of the Paris gendarmes, under orders from their commissioner, Maurice Papon, the same who had sent 1500 Jews to the Death Camps in the 1940s.
The entire French establishment from de Gaulle in the Elysee to all the political parties in Parliament, and not least, the French judiciary, was soon fully aware of the massacre. Yet it was kept out of the news for over 20 years. No newspaper or radio or TV broadcast mentioned the matter. In fact the MSM’s silence remained largely in tact until the 1990s. Only in 2000 did Lionel Juspin agree to an official inquiry which put a modest plaque on the railing of the St-Michel bridge mourning that “tragic event.”
In short France’s Third Estate helped cover up that crime. It collaborated, not for a week or a month but for decades. It acted not as a free and independent media but as the adjunct of a police state.
The Al Dura hanky panky shows French journalism as raunchy and corrupt as ever.
The French press is deeply committed and loyal to some hazy notion of “French Grandeur”. It is almost tribal in its reportage. And this way of thinking seems also to imply automatic allegiance to the arab-palestinian side. It is a mystery to me why this has to be so. Is it that a corrupt system has a natural affinity to a like system?
Also the French judiciary system is corrupt through and through in a similar way. In 1961 the courts helped whitewash the massacre. In 2007 the lower court in the Karsenty-Enderlin (i.e. the “Al Dura”) case had all the evidence to rule against Enderlin. Yet when Karsenty asked that the court view the original footage the judge refused saying it was unnecessary and ruled, against the expectations of observers, that Karsenty libelled Enderlin.
A parallel scandal is that the BBC evaluated its own Israel coverage then suppressed the results—the Balen Report. If the BBC has nothing to hide it should open its report to some sunlight—free the Balen Report.
How is this possible? Not that hard really. As has been noted by many, many people, the news media is not in the business of reporting news, but of reinforcing narratives. If the story fits the narrative the media wants to promote, it gets accepted much more easily than otherwise. Kind of like the “Jenin massacre”, or virtually all the reporting in New Orleans (my personal favorite was the story of a raging gun battle on one of the levees where several gunmen were allegedly killed by national guard soldiers as the gunmen mysteriously tried to prevent a levee repair, a story that of course never happened, not that this stopped a breathless media from reporting it as fact), or much of the Iraq as Vietnam stories.
The media’s sin here was two-fold. First the media reported the story as fact, not taking due care to make sure the story was accurate, particularly in an environment so rank with propaganda. More fundamentally, why was this story so prominently featured? Israeli children have been intentionally butchered by terrorists all too frequently, but the media couldn’t care less. Yet the media went into riot mode about this one supposed incident, and the “story” unleashed a wave of violence. Obviously the perpetrators of this violence are culpable in any event, yet the media will never be called to account for this.
The link to pajamas media does not work. You need to reference the site using http:// else your software will understand it as a relative address and attach it to the end of the current URL.