The Washington Post's veil of ignorance

I used to think that perhaps i was paranoid about this .
But it is indeed a global press phenomenon.
I can understand the Churches keeping silent.
But why the Press too ?

Not all "churches" are silent on this, Davo. Search for persecution.com, brother andrew, samaritan's purse, charisma.org, to name a few.

Exactly the same pablumized version of events in Sudan appeared in a piece in yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail by Estanislao Oziewicz. I was going to write a LTTE, but didn't bother- this type of clarification NEVER gets printed. It's only when a columnist gets his/her teeth into an islamist issue that the public ever reads in the mainstream media about such jihad. The media are contemptible for the most part.

Parenthetically, but perhaps not surprisingly considering the threat that islam represents to the rights of Western women, I've noticed that the three Canadian journalists who have highlighted the islamist threat most vigorously, have all been women (Wente; Blatchford; diManno).

KA
I should have soecified the Roman Catholic church and the protestants.
Perhaps because of their historic associations with islam and the threats to their flocks in Muslim countries.
But the press have no such sword of damacles hancing over their heads that i am aware of.
So the dhimmification of the press problem is not easily explained in terms of Socialist marxism association with jihadists.
Why are they pushing us towards suicide ?

Why isn't the Pope speaking out about this?

IT'S NOT IGNORANCE, IT IS MORAL COWARDICE !!!!

http://in.rediff.com/news/2003/oct/21franc.htm

by Francois Gautier

In this story, the Washington Post has shifted the blame from Muslim fighters to the United States that has "not applied enough pressure" to stop the violence. Were it not for the fact that readers on this site know the truth, we too, would have been duped by their duplicitous "veil of ignoirance."

Of course the Post has a Leftist agenda. It always has. However, not exposing the true nature of genocide is a greater sin than that of being a Leftist. This is an example of a traitorous press abusing their Constitutional freedom. I believe that there malice of forethought in much that is written in this newspaperl

Davo:

The Western media is often intimidated in the dar el-Islam by the withdrawal from the press of essential "on the ground" services such as interpreters, guides, security-escorts, drivers, technicians, stringers, assorted "fixers", etc.

In "Palestine", all these are laid on for reporters by the PA/PLO-Hamas-Jihad Islami-"Pal" Hezbollah, out of the American Colony Hotel in east Jerusalem. The media pay a handsome fee for all of this, of course, but without it, they'd be given no entree and could've stayed home.

There is a more general problem with the hiring, and training, of journalists who will report from abroad. By and large, they are not well-educated. They are not asked to take tests on history or on literature, as some journalists in other countries, where guild pride matters, are asked to do so. If one compares the level of writing, of wealth of knowledge and ready use of that knowledge, in those who report, for example, in the Italian press, it is simply a different world. Perhaps it has something to do with the belief that no evidence of individual sprightliness should be allowed: the prose itself is to be homogenized, and put in words that cats and dogs can understand.

In the Middle East, one would think that a sine qua non for all reporters would be Islam -- its teachings (its real teachings), in Qur'an and hadith, its history (including that almost always ignored subject, the institution of dhimmitude). It is easy to fool journalists. Some of them, of course, want to be fooled. For one example, there is H. D. S. Greenway, much looked up to, I was amused to discover, by those of modest backgrounds working at The Boston Globe because he was reputed to be a Brahmin (in the Boston, not Benares, sense) and was said to arrive, as I was told, "in a different car every day." Impressive.

But H. D. S. Greenway, who not only reported for years from -- you guessed it, Israel (even in his "retirement" he engages, every Friday, with great regularity, in Israel-bashing and insistence that all heaven will break out if only the Israelis stop being so stiff-necked and give the poor "Palestinian people" what they so richly deserve. Then all manner of things shall be well. But Greenway not only reported for years; he was the senior foreign correspondent of The Globe; it was he who, if he should know anything, should know about the Middle East. And one cannot know about the Middle East, one cannot make sense of anything from there -- least of all the relentless Arab siege against Israel, which is simply a classic Jiahd against an Infidel polity -- without knowing about Islam. And Greenway knows nothing, to judge by his years of commentary. Absolutely nothing. He has never mentioned, never alluded to, the tenets of Islam. I wonder if he has ever heard a khutba live, or if he has a clue as to why some "Palestinian" Christians echo so faithfully the Muslim line. Has he ever heard of the isntitution of dhimmitude? What does he think Jihad means? I doubt that he even knows, about the uncompromising division of the world between dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb. I am sure he ha snever read Majid Khadduri, never investigated the strict rules of Muslim jurisprudence regarding agreements with Infidel states and peoples (the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya, mentioned so often to Muslim audiences by Arafat it was embarrassing). In other words, he knows nothing of major relevance to the matter at hand, and has only his personal impressions -- his mere reporting on the surface of things (a lot like some reporters from Iraq, who report what happens, but haven't a clue as to why it happens, why the Iraqis exhibit the attitudes that seem so ungrateful and inexplicable, and yet make perfect sense when one understands fully the attitude toward us as Infidels).

This Globe nonentity, with his flashy fleet of cars, can be usefully compared with another, far better journalist, the brilliant French journalist, who used to report from Le Monde from Algeria and Egypt, Jean Peroncel Hugoz, whose book "The Raft of Muhammad" ("Le radeau de Mahomet") is well worth reading. Peroncel Hugoz, from his Frenchj education, his lively curiosity, his refusal to be taken in by the Arab East (he appreciated, it seems, Edward Cecil's epigraph to his "Memoirs of an Eygptian Official," an epigraph memorized by an older generation of Europeans who had to deal with the Arabs: "Here lies one who tried to hustle the East."), he not only saw, but made sense of what he saw, as in Egypt where he noticed the mistreatment and persecution of the Copts, and began to understand the deep ideological roots of Egyptian attitudes, Egyptian behavior, based on the inculcated hostility, in Islam, toward all non-Muslims. It was amazing to see, a few months ago, H. D. S. Greenway, who lived in the MIddle East for years, who took that as his special beat, the place which he knew above all others, to write in a column that he had received information that the Copts in Egypt wee no longer being treated well, that their situation had declined. He reports this with conseternation, failing to realize that this treatment of the Copts has been a permanent feature of Egyptian life ever since the Arabs first conquered in the seventh century. (He reminds me of a certain female teacher of Shakespeare at Harvard who, in a Sunday Globe interview years ago, announcded breathlessly that "few people realize" that in Shakespeare's plays the female parts are played by males." Ah yes, that little-known fact, of which only a profound scholar of the Elizabethan stage would have been apprised.) In his untouchably brahamin bow-tied condescension, Greenway managed to get away with his own bottomless ignorance, and indeed the assorted upper-class twits at the Globe seemed as impressed with him as those below, so admiring of his automotive fleet. Unlike Greenway, Peroncel Hugoz, like Arnold Hottinger of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, like a few others who actually were deeply learned about the East, did not keep dishing the same old "two tiny peoples" dirt about the Arab siege. He knew the centrality of Jihad, he observed up close the condition of the Coptic dhimmis of Egypt, he was not foolable, and knew what Islam was all about. Anyone reading Peroncel Hugoz's book cannot fail to be struck by the vast gulf between this level of understanding, and cultural preparation, and the shallow pap produced not only by the Washington Post, but by many other papers -- for of no other region in the world is it necessary to have done much study ahead of time, to make sense of the raw data presented. in a place where many people are versed in taqiyya and kitman, so plausibly and charmingly presented.

Peroncel Hugoz understood the effect, in an overwhelmingly Muslim society in an almost completely Muslim part of the world, of what waspreached in the khutbas, what limited readings (Qur'an, hadith, sira; Qur'an, hadith, sira) were the daily fare of so many, what it did to one's brain to be filled, every day, in every way, with the verbatim lines of the Qur'an and hadith stories, and the attitudes and atmospherics, of a civilisation essentially based on one book, and whatever could be teased out of it. Peroncel Hugoz understood that the journalistic cliches that Arabs have been "humiliated" (and if people have been "humiliated" then they certainly need to be made whole through concessions made to them -- don't they?) were nonsense. Instead, it would be more accurate to describe them as thwarted -- thwarted in their various relentless attempts to destroy a non-Muslim state in their midst (and its size is of course irrelevant -- no non-Muslim state can be permitted to exist within the dar al-Islam). Muslims are "thwarted" mainly in their perception that the proper, the natural, the allah-given position of Islam is, for some reason, not being offered up. For, as Muhammad, and Hassan al-Banna, and every Believer knows, "Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated." Thee is scarcely an episode in the 1350-year history of Islam, from Spain to China, from the seventh century to today, that does not demonstrate the centrality, and frenzied fervency, of that belief.

There are no tests for foreign reporters, no need for them to demonstrate that, for example, the man posted to Moscow knows who Felix Dzerzhinsky was, or the Kadet Party, or Kerensky, or what was NEP, or what a "tunoyadets" is, or where Alexander Jakovlev had the leisure to think, or why people flocked to Tartu to listen to Yuri Lottman, or what happened to Frunze on the operating table, or who were the orphans of the Civil War, or who was Bydyonnij, or Pavel Morozov, or why Vertinsky returned to Russia after the War, or what is the function of a tamada, or ...well, you get the point.

Similarly, one should require that journalists (and diplomats) posted to the Middle East to demonstrate, through a series of examinations, that they actually know something. What is the significance of the dates 622? 632? 1258? 1458?1517? Who was Hulegu, and what happened to him? Who was Suleiman the Magnificent? What did Muhammad dream about Constantinople, and then about Rome? What are the hadith, and which collections do Muslims find most authoritative? What is "isnad"? What is the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya, and of what possible relevance is that Treaty today? What is "sulh" and what is "salaam"? Who was Aisha? Who was Abu Bakr? Who was Ali? Hussein? Hassan? What distinguishes Shi'a Islam from Sunni Islam? What are the Sufis? Why did Saddam Hussein call his campaign against the Kurds "Al-Anfal"? What is Wahhabi Islam? What is the Jabal Shammar? Of what amirate was Hail the kingdom? Who lived in Mesopotamia, Syria, and "Palestine" before the Arab conquests? After the Arab conquests, who lived there? And for how long? And under what conditions? What does it mean to be a member of the "Protected Peoples"? Describe six different kinds of disabilities imposed on the "dhimmi" under Muslim rule. Who are the ahl al-kitab? What was the position of the Hindus under Islam? Where they members of the ahl al-kitab? Did it matter? Did the situation of the Hindus improve, or decline, after the British conquered the Mughal Empire? Where did the Zoroastrians go? What is the evidence for the Hijazi origins of Islam? What is the evidence for the non-Hijazi origins of Islam? What was Muhammad's "NIght Journey" or miraj? Whatis the reason for the later interpretation of the phrase "al-masjid al-aksa" in the Qur'an, identifying that phrase with a place on the Temple Mount? What happened to the Greco-Buddhist civilization of Afghanistan after the Muslim invasion? What happened to Buddhism in India? What is the history of statuary under Islam? Of other depictions, such as paintings, that show living forms? How many Jihads were declared, and where, in the 20th century? Who took part in the Armenian genocide, and what does "giavour" mean?

This is late in the day, and off the top of my head, late in the day, but one can declare with confidence that almost every American (or English, or French) journalist now in the Middle East knows almost nothing of what I have offered here, and would be completely at sea with a much more rigorous examination of the kind they should be able to pass, if standards existed. But they don't.

And more astonishing still, is the fact that there are reporters (certain NPR reporters in Israel come to mind) who, though they may live in a country or report from an area, year after year, never give any signs of having deepened their knowledge of the real forces at play, the deepest and most powerful currents that determine everything of which they merely report the surfaces, and in the shallowest and most banal of manners, with fixed phrases, Homeric epithets, and malign attitudinizing. They never attempt to analyze the effects of Islam on its adherents, the effect of inculcated hate, the hysteria that comes, possibly, from an environemnt in which, every day, the "natural" place of Islam -- to dominate -- is unnaturally, not to be found, and where a belief-system that does everything it can to stamp out skeptical and free inquiry, or even to allow texts other than those based on, or teased out of, the Qur'an, the resultant hysteria and hate (in Ramallah, in Gaza, in Baghdad and Falluja, wherever crowds of Muslim men -- for the women are kept in the house -- gather, to express their primitive rage which comes from, though they would not admit it, the gulf between what should be their place, according to Islam, and what, of course, is their place in the world. It cannot be, it must not be, it does not accord with Allah.

Greenway is unimportant except as an egregious example; everything he has ever written is not worth a single piercing paragraph from Peroncel Hugoz. Needless to say, once Peroncel Hugoz' book appeared, Le Monde took him off the Middle Eastern beat -- he was too perceptive, too knowledgeable, too daring in his willingness to offend his Muslim host-countries. He now writes travel articles, about places such as Portugal. Le Monde's Middle Eastern reporting remained safely in the hands of Eric Rouleau, openly pro-Muslim and anti-Israel, a great Khomieni supporter for a while, and of course a man threatened by the likes of Jean Peroncel Hugoz.

The level of general cultivation, of education, has declined in every profession. Vocdational training is the order of the day. Why should it be any different for journalists than for laywers? Still, it is amazing to think that Anton Chekhov (as Anton Chekhonte) once contributed humorous sketches to the press; that Dickens, in his day, had done the same. Or that even in the unappetizing twentieth century, Dino Buzzati was writing for the Corriere della Sera, as was Montale;that a regular contributor to the Dublin Times was the writer Flann O'Brien (Myles na gCopaleen), and there were others.

Now here's my question: can you think of a single piercing article, a single =memorable phrase, by any columnist in The New York Times, during the past twenty, thirty, forty years?

You can? Okay, what was that phrase, then?

See, I knew you were lying.

well said Hugh. I can only hope the "media" reads this, and maybe realize that we the people, are sick and tired of the crappy media we see these days.
Which is why I won't buy a newspaper anymore. Magazines I can read in the doctor or dentists office, real news I can get on the internet, free, and much more truthful.
Pretty reporters with a grade 8 history and general studies diploma from high school, and a year or two in a community collage is not what the standard of a reporter should be.

TOUR DE FORCE, Hugh! - BRAVISSIMO!

I once had the privilege of viewing the Bamian Buddhas - breathtaking.

When a "secularized, bourgeois" Moslem Lebanese I'd previously met in "multicultural" Beirut came on a tour to Sydney, decades ago, when the Arab population of the city (big then, many more now) was predominantly (at least semi-) de-dhimmified Christians - Maronites from Lebanon, Egyptian Copts, Syrian and "Palestinian" Catholics and Orthodox, Assyrians and Chaldeans from Iraq, etc - he was somewhat bewildered and uncomfortable at always being outnumbered by these assorted Arab Christians (most of whom had arrived in flight here from the spectre of Islam).

At one point he "explained" to me that this was a totally UNNATURAL state of affairs....

I guess I was to see what he TRULY meant several years later, when the relaxed Beirut I'd visited was consumed and destroyed in wild, primordial bloodlust.

Hugh, you are absolutely and totally right. American journalism is often as much an abuser of freedom of speech as it is a champion of it.

Back when the Falastin thugs took the Church of the Nativity hostage, _Newsweek_ (It resisted the temptation to call it "Newspeak") spoke of "Muslim" invaders from Persian in 611 AD--when Muhammad's hijra wouldn't take place for another 11 years! I wrote a letter, and got a condescending reply--who was I? Just some stupid reader who'd happened to have read a little history.

Frankly, the journalistic profession tends to go in empty-headed and swallows as Gospel anything its totalitarian minders feed it. It happened in Communist Asia. The Washington Post was puffing Chinese Communism up to the day Dung Xiaoping sent the troops after the students.

Well, HG, where I am in Taiwan, I'm outnumbered by Canadians and feel a bit odd, since it's so different from my native continent where we Yanks are the majority (except when we take a vacation that wanders too far north). But I can't say I feel bothered or angry or even uncomfortable "odd"--I just remind myself that every so often, the luck of the draw gives some Asian city more Canadian than American English teachers than the relative proportions of the two populations worldwide might lead an American to expect.

HG
Hughs post is the sign of an intellect that seems hardly of human proportions!
Perhaps like achilles he is part god! Only the god of intellect not war.
The journey he takes us on is akin to a whirlwind of knowledge which incessantly humbles us into the recognition of our own ignorance and the ease with with we accept the views of journalists who are largely ignorant of the complex nature of the History of eastern christin communities and their fate under islam. it is the modern age of cliches and icons and instant education and i as have many others have swallowed this without too much question.
I recently found out that the Assyrian Christians community in Australia is amongst the largest in the world. To me such people are true refugees. And i cannot help wondering if Islamists have not learnt from them to gain access to Australia

Davo:

Yep, the Assyrians were indeed truly refugees. They were abandoned to their fate by the British departing Iraq after WWII, following decades of loyal and competent service to the Empire (as the "Assyrian Levies"), but a last-ditch arrangement let most of them emigrate, many coming here to Australia.

(Those remaining in Iraq immediately became the subject of massive oppression and murder by the Moslems.)

Kepha:

YOU can figure out the basis of the American/Canadian mix in your town because you've got some RATIONALITY in your perception.

Alas, this is something greatly LACKING in the minds of many, many Moslems ("bourgeois-secularist" or not), who plump for their deranged illusions over reality, every time.

- Otherwise, how can they possibly swallow half the pathetic nonsense which they're perenially given to spouting?