interesting point, anas. however, i would say that a reasoned critique of american foreign policy in the middle east would rely at least in part on an understanding of the area the said policy seeks to influence – a point which has been well made many times with reference to the policy itself, of course! in other words, if you’re going to criticise gordon ramsay, as it were, you need to understand food, cheffing and customers at least as well as he does in order to have some credibility, no matter how objectionable his manner, tone and invective. interesting that you don’t think relying on official US documentation is problematic given how little people tend to trust other information provided by them! although i note that in an interview with tom friedman, asharq al-awsat (!!) doesn’t appear to regard it as problematic that he gets much of his arabic material translated from MEMRI!

Although saying that he is a Hebrew speaker so I guess that means that whatever he says about Israel must have added credibility according to your argument.

hehe. the stupider and more objectionable israeli ministers, policies and officials, like their less objectionable colleagues, provide no shortage of rope to hang themselves with and, to my knowledge, don’t say anything in hebrew that is not widely translated by a variety of sympathetic and unsympathetic media, to say nothing of the blogging and commentating community. chomsky doesn’t really say anything about israel that is particularly new – what makes him a heavyweight critic is that he is a clearly intelligent, academically respected jewish-american dissenter, so that despite his admirers he deserves at least a listen, even if one disagrees with him.

oh and, re blair, i forgot sierra leone.

b’shalom

bananabrain

Point taken about the inability of naysayers to get their point onto any media. BBC included. And I don’t deny Blairs other legacy, I just think that his Iraq legacy will define his time in government. Spin and all. And I think that is understandable, in terms of other PMs, we tend to admire the ones that took a stand on foreign policy and ignore their domestic policy issues. At least, when sufficient time has passed.

except the bit about bernard lewis being “tendentious” – from now on i hereby reserve the right to describe noam chomsky as “tendentious”, because frankly he is a lot less credible on the middle east than bernard lewis is, having a) spent 60+ years studying it b) not speaking farsi, arabic and turkish, which chomsky doesn’t as far as i knowand c) it being his primary area of peer-reviewed expertise whereas chomsky’s appears to be, unless i miss my guess, yank-bashing. perhaps if more people actually read bernard lewis they might have a bit more respect for him.

…
sorry, i meant to say lewis speaks the languages and has spent 60+ years on this area, unlike chomsky, who seems to do very little other than write books which provide “progressive” cleverdicks with reference material with which to bash the americans.

You’d have a point, BB, if Chomsky was claiming expertise in Middle-Eastern culture or politics, but the focus of his non-linguistic work is on American foreign policy and its effects on various regions of the world, based heavily on official US government documentation and Western media sources and NGO reports — so not knowing Arabic is not a major handicap there. Although saying that he is a Hebrew speaker so I guess that means that whatever he says about Israel must have added credibility according to your argument.

As for Bernard Lewis he is what we would in Urdu call a pukka harami.

I can only take someone seriously if they’re willing to criticise both sides and see that the world isn’t as black and white as it is made out to be. Chomsky doesn’t seem to do this, though I haven’t read most of his work though I have read a fair bit, and unsurprisingly neither does Anas (and people of similar disposition).

Errr, very zen-like Sunny, but as for people of a similar dispostion, I think you’d come under that category. Your view of the world seems very black and white when it comes to say religious organisations like MPAC (I’d say calling them racist was pretty black and white), or HuT or whoever else is in your sights. Actually your argument is a pretty pointless one, what’s at issue is how well Chomsky’s arguments can be refuted w/o resorting to ad hominem. And btw Chomsky is not Anti-American, he goes out of his way to present a positive picture of the majority of Americans (why else would he make the manufacturing of their consent such a central part of his model of the media?), he focuses his critiques on those who have the power, the elites.

b’shalom

bananabrain

Good to see you posting here again.

I am not at all convinced that there was any sort of Zionist conspiracy. Where I would agree with the article, however, is that we still don’t have a clear understanding of why Bush went to war.

Were the media not, as I suggested, ‘fans with typewriters’? My general impression from reading the piece was that it was a lamentation on the decline of the investigative arm of journalism.

A question for you though. Leaving aside the relative strengths or weaknesses of the Wests’, and Muslims’ medias and societies for a moment, do you think the citizens of the US were well served by these agencies in the run up to Gulf War 2?

having read the article, i am led to one inescapable conclusion – which is that the author appears to be succumbing to precisely what bernard lewis has diagnosed about a feeling of rage and disempowerment, which fuels resentment and seeking to find someone to blame – and i think we know who’s in the frame for that:

“ooo, he won’t let us blame israel!! that’s just mean and horrid!! please let us blame israel, pleeeeasse!!! and the US, too!!”

in short, he seems to be making lewis into a straw man who manufactures arguments to keep the arabs down whilst praising the turks (which, given his output over decades, i find not remotely credible) – i think he gives credit where credit’s due and criticises in the same way; he has been for example one of the earliest western thinkers to identify the current iranian ascendency as a resurgence of a perennial persian-shi’ite ideologically-driven clash. he also clearly hasn’t read lewis’ book on “semites and anti-semites”, almost the first sentence of which points out that there’s no such thing as a “semite” except in philological terms and, therefore, that the canard of “oo, we can’t be anti-semitic, we’re semites too” is nothing but pure sophistry usually based on semantic ignorance – except when it’s not. i also note that the author traduces (whilst appearing to condemn anti-semitic conspiracy theories) a list of obviously jewish neo-con ideologues, all of which are masterminded by lewis himself! i’ve read a lot of lewis and i quite simply don’t take out of him what this chap and a lot of others take. quite possibly this is because i am “orientalist” myself, i dare say, but i’m a bit more sophisticated than that, i’d hope at least.

as for media networks, i don’t expect them to be balanced – i get my news from a variety of sources, like leon and take them with their prejudices showing. i’d find it hard to say that the bbc are anti-palestinian, considering how much coverage they give to the admittedly horrible situation for which the israelis must take a large part of the blame. in fact, the idea that the bbc isn’t prejudiced in this respect is simply silly. it’s not that they’re pro or anti palestinian or israeli. rather, it’s that they like, like all media, to show the “goodies” and the “baddies”, which in the bbc’s case is all about who are the “villains” and the “victims” – so they can sympathise with the “victims”, be they civilian casualties, friendly-fire victims, “collateral damage” (ugh), people whose human rights are violated, etc etc. only the *assertive-aggressive* are criticised – only the *passive-reactive* are admitted to have right on their side. nobody should ever act first without being “pre-emptive”, “reckless” or “disproportionate”, “premature” or “foolhardy” – nobody should ever take a risk, nobody should ever make the first move or take the initiative. it’s precisely what you’d expect of a profession that is at its best when it is reactive and at its worst when it attempts to be proactive by pushing its own agenda. in this way, it’s easy to understand how the US (and israel) are always going to get a kicking from the fearless guardians of balance and second-guessing.

the reason that human rights violations by israel, the US and indeed the UK are always so closely scrutinised is that they are open societies with a free media. try doing that in egypt, saudi or iran and see how far you get.

b’shalom

bananabrain

I’ve read the guys full article, and, apart from a wee bit on self censorship, he doesn’t seem to mention censorship at all. Could you point me to where he says it?

What he does seems to be saying is that, in the main, the American media let the Bush administration off scot free on what we all now know to have been propoganda and spin. That the American media did not itself understand the rationale for going to war. Do you think that that analysis is wrong? Do you think the function of media is to give comfort to governments?

ain’t that the truth. it does make me laugh when people start expressing surprise at media ‘failures’ to challenge ‘governments’ as if that’s what they expected them to do! perhaps at least express that surprise after having looked into the reams and reams of stuff on political economy of media and telecommunications. then express your ‘surprise’..

the best thing to do is to try to watch and read from as many different sources as I can.

Yup, very much agree.

That’s a particularly blatant case of assuming your conclusion by definition.

The question to ask is, what about state censorship is wrong? What about it causes bad things, whether individual abuses within a mostly-free society, or bulk-scale horror within a totalitarian one?

Then, to what extent do those problems carry over to corporate instead of state actors?

If you look at the propaganda produced by non-state actors like the self-proclaimed ‘jihadists’, that contains lots of ommissions, falsifications and exagerations. Is that problem-free because those groups are not governments?

Free press does not mean that Fox News should hand over a microphone to every puffed up scarecrow who has developed delusions of being a great journalist.

Gary Kamiya does not know what he is talking about. He thinks that free press means press that is controlled by the govt. Well, he is free to go to Saudi Arabia and start practising his brand of free journalism over there.

As far as the secular democratic and capitalist nations of the world are concerned, the point of view that Mr. Gary expresses will find no takers.

Not for the Telegraph it isn’t.

If you actually think that that is what Edward Said is about then you are probably the dumbest person ever to post on this site.

I see Naxal has a small problem of understanding etiquette and seems to think this is a blog for village idiots from Punjab. Oh well, I think I accidentally banned him.

Not really. Spending money overseas is always going to show less return than spending locally on military R&D, stealth fighters, homeland defence. There is no senator for Iraq to lobby for pork spending there.

The only economically rational explanation is that, in the context of the $2200 billion annual US tax revenue, the war was seen as potentially good value for money, something that people would vote for.

If it had cost say $400 billion, and resulted in revenge on Saddam, weakened al qaeda, increased national prestige, and a grateful iraq, the numbers would have pretty much added up, from the point of view of the average US taxpayer.

Compare US annual charitable donations of $241 billion: feeling good about yourself is where the money is.

The relevance of this is that the $2200 billion revenue stream is now drying up. The war is no longer good entertainment: it has no clear story, no heroic good guys, too many corpses, and no chance of a satisfying ending. In short, it’s Lost.

You might get the budget for a few military advisors, warship patrols and a timeshare option on air strikes from a fraction of the $20 billion oil revenue alone, but the era of large scale bases, regiment-scale deployments, body-bags is going to be over soon.

Yes, you could put it like this.

If we are going to examine this idea then Said comes into play again. He states clearly that when the West was ‘secularised’ (18th Century) what we ultimately ended up with was a very Christian secularism. Some things were inevitably retained – anti-Semitism being one of them.

The Western media demonstrates this Christian anti-Semitic secularism by paying so much attention to Israel in the first place.

There are plenty more countries who have far, far worse human rights records than Israel, yet scarcely get a mention.

The comment stands alone and undiscussed (by me at any rate).

I’d say if you feel that the BBC is pro-Palestinain, would you agree then that Sky and CNN International are even more so?