Whether it’s general ignorance of religious issues or the impossibility of turning a complex issue like the Middle East into easily digestible sound bites–the American media’s specialty–the mainstream media’s coverage of the region is ghastly. Nowhere was this blind spot more obvious than the press coverage of Mitt Romney’s trip to Israel and his comments echoing what Arab leaders and scholars have said for years (though less harshly) about the ways Arab culture has held back regional economic development.
What Romney said is clearly true, which helps explain some of the terrible reporting. For example, I wrote about the Washington Post’s awful write-up of the story, in which the reporter made snide remarks about Romney and offered demonstrably false assertions without consulting the experts. This is most likely by design: had the reporter consulted experts, they would have told him what everybody knew: that Romney was, of course, correct. But the media’s attempt to write the first draft of this story and set the narrative against Romney was so egregiously off-base that it has made commentators across the ideological spectrum uncomfortable enough to speak up. One example comes from the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, who writes:
The cultural difference between Israel and its Arab neighbors is so striking that you would think it beyond question. But when Mitt Romney attributed the gap between Israel’s economic performance and the Palestinians’ — “Culture makes all the difference,” he said in Israel — the roof came down on him. PC police the world over raised a red card, giving him demerits for having the temerity to notice the obvious. Predictably, Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator and a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, denounced the statement as “racist.” It was, of course, just the opposite.
How could such cultural criticism be the opposite of racism? Cohen explains that not only does Arab culture hold the Palestinians back, but the West’s soft bigotry of low expectations only exacerbates the problem:
This hubbub about culture may seem esoteric, but it is really very important. The tendency to hold the Arabs blameless for their own culture is part of the predilection to hold them harmless for the lack of peace agreement with Israel. The Israelis have much to account for, but they are not alone in this matter and they are not the ones who have over and over again rejected peace plans. The adamant refusal to hold the Arabs accountable infantilizes them — a neo-colonialist mentality that is, in the end, simply insulting.
Beyond columnists, the debate has become academic as well. Yair Rosenberg notes that Albert Einstein held to this theory long before Romney did. More recently, however, it was David Landes, whose work on the subject Romney explicitly mentioned in his Jerusalem speech. That led to a somewhat amusing round of commentary in which Jared Diamond, author of a book Romney also mentioned, wrote that Romney not only misunderstood Diamond’s book, but that Landes might not even agree with Romney. That inspired Landes’s son, Richard, to take to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to ever-so-politely point out that Diamond knows nothing of Landes’s work–but that Romney got it exactly right.
It is, as Cohen acknowledges, somewhat shocking to be even having this conversation. Our current secretary of state once characterized the culture of Palestinian child development as blanket “child abuse”–farther than Romney, Landes, or Einstein were willing to go. That half a decade later this country’s flagship newspapers have elevated their interpretation of political correctness and cynical point-scoring above even basic facts offers us an uncomfortable truth about the extent of the intellectual rot at the institutions of American liberalism.
Richard Cohen: Even a fool with a broken watch tells the right time once in a while. He had to throw in the obligatory 'The Israelis have much to account for'. Really? Like what, Richard? Not bleeding to death faster? Fighting back? Not coughing up concessions fast enough to the Palestinains who elected Hamas, the Egyptians who elected the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Syrians who are now busily chopping each other up with an enthusiasm that would quickly triple if they could get their hands on the Israelis? n nJared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel, while an interesting read for the many disparate points of information, proven wrong as a theory by, well, reality. It is the ultimate paean to the leftist trope that we are all equal, and just differ in the opportunities the physical environment has offered to us. If it were not for the fact that Zebras are untrainable compared to Asiatic horses, Africa might have led the world. Right. One would think that Prof. Diamond would embrace the culture as determinant theory, as culture is the main determinant of the human environment, but hey, much easier and acceptable, if you are left of center, or a full blooded communist, to believe that it is the physical environment that is deterministic. Means of production, and all that. Oh well. It's too much to expect logic when one has a politically charged idea to purvey.
The Israelis didn't build Israel. Somebody else made that happen. n nThey used oxygen made by plants, and water stolen from the Oceans and Rivers. n nWe all own that oxygen and water. n n n(I have no doubt Obama believes that).
Yes, that was one of those bizarro world moments, where Romney advanced what for my entire life has been a fairly conventional view of Israeli/Palestinian culture, and such outrage; it was very odd.
The Israelis didn't build Israel. Somebody else made that happen. n nThey used oxygen stolen from trees, and water stolen from Rivers and Oceans, not to mention land stolen from Arabs who stole it from Ancient Jews (who are unrelated to modern day Jews because the latter are descended from Khazars who stole Judaism so they could use it to steal a patch of worthless desert in the eastern Mediterranean 900 years later) who stole it from Canaanites and Philistines from whom Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and the noble Arab Palestinian people are descended even though the Canaanites and Philistines were not Arabs but it doesn't matter because it is a deeper truth, just like Jesus and King David and even King Solomon were Palestinians, even though everyone knows king David and King Solomon and King Solomon's Temple never existed, and if it did it was because black slaves built it for them while not having health insurance. n nObama/Khalidi view of Israel, and told by Thom Freidman. n n
There is no way to properly express the love and admiration that I feel from reading these nCommentaries.They have become something to look forward to,,daily.I am not Jewish instead raised as a Southern Baptist,,turned to Assembly of God. nHow refreshing it is to hear the truth reported.How do I know it is true?The small inner voice,tells me it is so. nJoseph Smith
Every passing day sees the left kissing more and more the behind of a failed ideology: communism. nIf the Arabs of Israel were not in close contact with the Israelis, they would be like the rest or the majority of Muslims: poor and ignorant.
What enrages leftist elites is not that Romney's statement insulted Palestinians-but that Romney's statement was a slap in the face of the leftist elitists themselves who are committed to the preposterous belief in the inherent superiority of "the wretched of the earth".