Hugh Fitzgerald, the Vice President of the Jihad Watch advisory board, discusses a choice bit of dhimmitude from Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief:
“The US needs to find a way to engage the Arab media, rather than shut down, marginalize, and ostracize news mediums such as Al-Jazeera,” said Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief.No, we don't have to "engage the Arab media." We should be doing everything we can to "shut down, marginalize, and ostracize news mediums [sic] such as al-Jazeera."
Hundreds of thousands of households in the United States receiving propaganda for the Jihad, for that is what the worldview of Al-Jazeera is all about, is a security threat. Does Rajiv Chandrasekaran speak as one who has studied what Islam teaches, in all of its main canonical texts, or is he one more Tom Friedman, skimming on the surface and, as a mere reporter (not all reporters are mere reporters -- think of Peroncel-Hugoz, or Arnold Hottinger -- but a good many are), who may believe that because he was the Washington Post's "Baghdad bureau chief" (what a satisfying phrase that must be for reporters -- "bureau chief"), he understands things in the Middle East. But without an understanding of what is essentially kept from the superficial Western reporters, with their breathless reports on what happened that day, that hour, an understanding of the deepest wellsprings and promptings of Muslim behavior, of the role of Islam in the life of any Muslim society (simply incomparably more present and vital and overpowering than any that of any other faith, so that Westerners have a hard time understanding just how omnipresent Islam is, especially when they are likely to have their closest contact with people who know exactly how to minimize this, to present themselves as quasi-Western men).
Al-Jazeera is a cross between TASS and Der Stuermer. During World War II the Americans would not have stood for one minute to have Nazi propaganda broadcast into this country. During the Cold War, the Russians were ultimately allowed only to produce one glossy magazine, full of smiling kholkhozniks fulfilling the glorious five-year-plan on a collective farm, and of course articles about "50 Years of Soviet Rule in Azerbaijan" and "Pushkin and the Great October Revolution." But we already have a small army -- no, a large army -- of apologists for Islam abroad in the land. We have a hundred different Muslim groups, spreading a view of Islam far more deceptive than the best the clumsy Soviet propagandists could ever come up with.
Al-Jazeera is a spreader of lies and nonsense. It has the blood of Americans -- beginning with Americna soldiers in Iraq -- on its hands. Allowing it to broadcast in this country is madness.
We are run, in large part, by people who are ignorant, and utterly obstinate in that ignorance, of Islam. Part innocence, part stupidity, part denial because to recognize the truth means to recognize how much of what has been done, over the past few decades, implicates so many of our ruling class in past and present follies, this phenomenon is akin to what one observed in the 1930s. But the folly of the 1930s came to an end with Hitler's invasion of Poland. Reality broke in.
There will be no cross-border attack of large, mechanized forces of Islam. The attack is different; it involves not so much qital, or battlefield combat, as the use of "wealth" and "pen, tongue" (propaganda) and demography, the latest weapon of the Jihad to create conditions everywhere so that Islam may triumph. This is not a fiction, a dystopia. Right now, in tolerant Holland, the leader of a major political group, Geert Wilders, lives in hiding, moving from army base to army base. The same is true for one of the most outstanding members of the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In England, one Will Cummins lost his job even for writing some very mild home truths about Islam; so did a popular BBC host. At the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, when evidence was produced that high-school textbooks in Egypt contained Qur'anic passages urging the killing of Infidels, the Pakistani ambassador, speaking for all 56 or 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Countries, called such a charge an act of defamation and incitement to hatred, and prevented the textbooks to be shown. In other words, Muslims can inculcate hatred of Infidels (and it is all over the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira), but those who point this out are guilty of "whipping up hatred" themselves.
One wonders of Rajiv Chandresekar has any idea of what is really in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Now that he has returned from being "Baghdad Bureau Chief" with all of its excitement, he can actually begin to study what Islam teaches, and what has been the treatment meted out to non-Muslims -- Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists -- under Muslim rule. It would be instructive.
If the Administration will not ban Al-Jazeera, then Congress should do so. And the Democrats, who by being even worse in their misunderstanding of Islam, make this Administration look good even when it is far from being what it should be, need to come up with a few more Henry Jacksons, and many fewer William Fulbrights.
Hugh!
You are absolutely right. If this dope thinks we can win the propaganda war by giving the enemy free access to our airwaves - he's a complete fool.
Fight the propaganda - don't give it free reign.
We need to "engage the Arab media" by pushing it back where it came from.
An editorial letterwriter to this morning's Globe & Mail captured the problem very succinctly in response to another letter writer who opined that the way to root out terrorism is to eschew our current efforts and change our "personal belief systems and intolerances":
Terrorism is not a product of our intolerance of others; it is a function of the terrorists' intolerance of us.
The republican Congress should be very careful with this; if something bad happens in this country, can one imagine the hateful, Jihadist filth that democrats will be able to find on Al Jazeera?
And then the question will emerge: How could we allow this? Whose fault was it? It won't matter that the democrats are not to blame. It will only matter that the republicans are in control of both Congress and the executive branch.
I can see it now: The Bush war on terror is a failure and a joke. Take a look at what was allowed to be aired in the US. Here come those images, the hate, those anti-American, pro-Bin Laden, anti-Semitic curses, the Al Jazeera reporters considered 'martyrs' in the war against America and Israel.
Here it comes Congress. Are you ready? What do you think the voters will think? Better have a look at this.
Given his name, I'm guessing he's of East Indian
Hindu descent. Perhaps Mr. Chandrasekaran should
study the history of his ancestral country a bit
more closely about how the Muslims have treated it.
Especially how they "engaged" the local population.
The public's right to know has come up against the unwillingness to see that is studied and practiced by our leading media.
For a number of generations now, our leading thinkers have prided themselves on how free they are from making "value judgments". The practical upshot of it is that they are spineless before someone large and determined enough to force his views on them.
Sorry JTF, although it might offend your ideological blindsideness, Bush's war on terrorism is a friggin joke, or don't you read, aren't you curious, don't you keep up with the real news, not the administration pablum coughed up and regurgitated by the corporate media.
And it isn't just the Repugnicans, this goes way back, way, way back even before Clinton, but including him of course (for instance the Balkan wars in which we and NATO intervened in behalf of the Jihadi's, the Mujahadeen of Bosnia and Kosovo.
Use that credit card and read some books, other than reinforcing crap from webblogs. For starters read
Al Qaida's Jihad in Europe, the Afghan Bosnia Network by Kohlmann, but better yet read the recently published Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have penetrated Washington by Paul
Sperry, and then get real scared (most of this under the watch and with the sanction of George w. Bush).
Sorry JTF, although it might offend your ideological blindsideness, Bush's war on terrorism is a friggin joke, or don't you read, aren't you curious, don't you keep up with the real news, not the administration pablum coughed up and regurgitated by the corporate media.
And it isn't just the Repugnicans, this goes way back, way, way back even before Clinton, but including him of course (for instance the Balkan wars in which we and NATO intervened in behalf of the Jihadi's, the Mujahadeen of Bosnia and Kosovo.
Use that credit card and read some books, other than reinforcing crap from "Repugnican" webblogs. For starters read
Al Qaida's Jihad in Europe, the Afghan Bosnia Network by Kohlmann, but better yet read the recently published Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have penetrated Washington by Paul
Sperry, and then get real scared (most of this under the watch and with the sanction of George w. Bush).
Giaour-
Politicians rarely lead. And even if they want to (as Churchill tried unsucessfully in the 1930's), they generally have to wait for an opportunity -in some stunning disaster- to BE ABLE TO DO anything ahead of the slow-moving public will and wishes.
Bush had his chance with 9/11 to begin to instruct the American people about the real threat.
Apparently neither he nor his advisers or national security consultants knew what it actually was. Or is.
Jihad? Islamic restoration of the global Caliphate? Madrassas? Koran? Hadiths? Control immigration? Regulate the borders? Wha?
The moment of the 'iron being hot' has cooled, as the fury in the blood cooled, and the answering 'strikes' degenerated a few literal battles- in Afghanistan and Iraq- instead of a concerted assault against the root mentality behind this religio-mafia.
But that might have offended those upon whom we are too dependent on oil for. And their well-greased C.A.I.R. spokemen in-country.
Americans drifted back to meaningless sex crime scandals and reality t.v., watching an unwitting porn heiress insulting working slobs, or trained canaries singing oldies but moldies. Or scads of forensic pathologists rooting through mortal mayhem. (This fixation itself says something.)
Until the next mass-murder, the possiblity to expose the real enemy- fanatical Islam and its hateful, misogynist and despotic tenets- will have no possibility of being spoken of convincingly by any leader.
It would seem: too little too late.
Or, too much too soon.
Bush dithers while Osama burns.
The ship of fools.
With the captain dozing on the poop.