Why didn't you know?
[This is a continuation of a preceding blog entry originally posted on 2005-08-21.]
The 9-11 Commission Report states that the architect of 9/11 was motivated by anger towards America for its "foreign policy favoring Israel."
Here are direct quotes from the report:
No one exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks. KSM followed a rather tortuous path to his eventual membership in al Qaeda. — Page 145.
By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel. — Page 147
Unless you read my earlier posting on this subject, or one of only a handful of independent media stories written in the past year that that talk about this, you did not know we were attacked because of our support for Israel. The mainstream media has yet to tell you that 9/11 is the result of our support for Israel as it continues to brutalize the Palestinian people. They've been too busy playing the sound-bite of President Bush saying over and over again, "they hate us for our freedom", a statement so poisonous to the health of this republic that it very nearly amounts to treason.
I see now that my previous post on this subject was too sweeping in scope. It is true that we have been misled on the nature of the London bombings. For instance, the mainstream media in America has yet to report on the fact that there was an anti-terrorism exercise taking place at the exact moment of the 7/7 attack, and they were very late in reporting that the 7/7 "bombers" were almost certainly duped into carrying the bombs. And the story about the Israeli Consulate receiving advance warning of the attack continues to be ignored, even though we now have three separate sources all confirming that that is exactly what happened.
And of course, everything we are told about the attacks by Scotland Yard now has to be taken with a grain of salt, given the apparent dishonesty demonstrated when relating just what happened when a young Brazilian was mistaken for a terrorist connected to the London bombings and shot to death.
In order to understand the duplicity in the coverage of the London attacks, I think you have to be convinced that the mainstream media is capable of such duplicity in the first place. Hence the importance of the 9-11 Commission Report and the near-total failure to cover the biggest news story since the 9/11 attacks, which is, why these attacks happened. Why were we attacked?
Please click the link to the commission report given above, go the page 147, and read it for yourself. Yes I know it's a big PDF file and they're never any fun to deal with, but it's vital that you see it for yourself and not simply take my word for it. This is the official version of events of what happened that day, at least according to the mainstream media, who, incidentally, thought the report significant enough to give coverage to most everything else contained within.
The cause of 9/11 should have been reported to the American people as news, and it wasn't. Only when you begin to understand the magnitude of the deception at work here can you then begin to see what happened in London in the proper context. The failure to report on this most relevant portion of the commission's report, like the President deliberately misleading us as to the real cause of this attack, comes very close to treason as it is defined in federal law. When national security is threatened, it is absolutely vital to understand the nature of the threat; failure to do so works against our being able to then address the threat. That's as basic as military doctrine gets; find out who's shooting at you and why. It appears that the mainstream media consciously made the decision to deny us information that would help make America more secure, and it doesn't take a genius to arrive at a pretty good guess as to why this information was kept from the American people.
It was out of fear that if the true price of our support for Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people were known, our support for Israel would evaporate. After all, it isn't the first nor only instance of bias we've seen favoring Israel in our news coverage. To this day most Americans are unaware that the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis far exceeds the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians. The reason they don't understand this is simply because they are never told the truth. Like the truth about 9/11, a calculation appears to have been made that the less the American people know about such things, the better it is for Israel.
Why does this bias exist? There could be a number of reasons for this, but in this blog entry I'm going talk about the influence Jews have in American media. Israel is after all the Jewish state, it makes sense that if you're Jewish that you would have different feelings towards Israel than someone who isn't Jewish.
Eric Alterman wrote a column addressing this subject over two years ago, and it's worth a read today. Here's how it starts:
C.L. Sulzberger would not have liked this war. Back in 1937, New York Times Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock was hoping to be named editorial page editor. As Gay Talese tells it in The Kingdom and the Power, Sulzberger would not even discuss it. He explained to Krock, "It's a Jewish paper and we have a number of Jewish reporters working for us. But in all the years I've been here, we have never put a Jew in the showcase."
This war has put Jews in the showcase as never before. Its primary intellectual architects--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith--are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Marty Peretz. Joe Lieberman, the nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician, has been an avid booster, going so far as to rebuke his former partner Al Gore and much of his own party.
Then there's the "Jews control the media" problem. It's probably not particularly relevant that the families who own the Times and the Washington Post are Jewish, but let's not pretend this is so in the case of the Jewish owner-editors of, say, U.S. News & World Report and The New Republic. Mortimer Zuckerman is head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and Peretz is unofficial chair of the American Arab Defamation Committee. Neither is shy about filling his magazine with news Jews can use.
And then he says this:
A big part of the problem in addressing the "Jewish war" conspiracy thesis is the reticence of almost all sides to broach the issue of Israeli and American Jewish influence on US foreign policy. A few writers, most notably Stanley Hoffmann, Robert Kaiser and Mickey Kaus, have raised the question gingerly. But writing on the Washington Post op-ed page, New Republic editor Lawrence Kaplan insists that even raising "the specter of dual loyalty" is "toxic." Kaus noted accurately in Slate that the dual loyalty taboo is "quite openly designed to stop people from raising the Likudnik issue." And it works.
And it works?
No, please, not any more. We have to break this. The failure to report on the finding that American support for Israel was the cause of 9/11 ends any and all sensitivity I have towards issues related to Israel, and especially those that concern the "dual-loyalty" question. Those Jews here in America who take advantage of whatever positions of power they may attain in order to benefit Israel need to be called on it, especially when their actions are contrary to American interests.
We're in the middle of what appears to be yet another Israeli espionage episode directed against America, accomplished we are told by Jewish-Americans in the Defense Department, and this is an excellent example of the "dual-loyalty" problem, but to be honest, it doesn't really concern me. Why? Because action is being taken. An investigation is under way. The system is working.
What concerns me is the extent to which influence can be exerted on Israel's behalf, especially when it is contrary to American interests, and nobody dares say a word to challenge it, and nowhere is such influence felt as keenly — and without so much as a whisper of criticism — as in the mainstream media.
There are a lot of problems with the mainstream media today, but whenever the subject is brought up, the only criticisms one hears concern corporate ownership of the news and the consolidation that inevitably brings about, or the dumbing down of the coverage we receive, e.g., we get stories about Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes when we should have been hearing more about, say, the provisions of the Patriot Act as they were being debated (and which have since passed).
But it is the lack of diversity in the mainstream media, particularly in executive and editorial positions, that seems to me to be a far greater threat to the quality of our news, especially today in matters of national security. Not being told about why 9/11 happened because it is seen to be inconvenient for Israel is unacceptable. Not being told the extent of the treatment Palestinians routinely receive at the hands of Israelis is similarly unacceptable, especially given our complicity in that treatment. This should be crystal clear to all of us by now. By not understanding the extent of the atrocity Israel was committing upon the Palestinian people, we as a nation didn't have an opportunity to anticipate what the inevitable consequence would be.
Corporate ownership played no role here. Look at The New York Times or The Washington Post, which as Eric Alterman correctly points out are news organizations controlled not by corporations, but by families. The New York Times was not only instrumental in selling the war on Iraq to the American people, but it took the lead in misdirecting the American people from the truth about 9/11, and it's still doing it! Even with all of their recent coverage concerning the 9-11 Commission Report as related to the Army Intelligence operation called Able Danger — now totaling seven stories — nowhere is to be found mention of the role American support for Israeli policy towards the Palestinians played in precipitating the attacks on 9/11.
They can assign two reporters full-time to investigate what the 9-11 Commission Report didn't tell us, while remaining mute about what they did, even though the latter is by far more newsworthy.
The question of Jewish influence in the media is perhaps most easily addressed by imagining for a moment what kind of coverage we'd be receiving if instead of Jews we saw Muslims in so many positions of power within.
In a Muslim-influenced media, do you seriously believe that you would still be unaware of the fact that the number of Palestinians killed since September 2000 is nearly four-times that of the number of Israelis? Or that the stories about the Israeli Consulate receiving advance-warning of the 7/7 London attacks would be blacked-out?
Do you seriously believe that the coverage would continue to keep the spotlight on the alleged efforts on the part of Iran to build nuclear weapons, all the while staying silent about the fact of Israel's nuclear arsenal?
If you visit The New York Times or The Washington Post, do yourself a favor and spend a little time over at Aljazeera too. The contrast between the two couldn't be starker. One is clearly looking at events from a Muslim point-of-view.
The other from a Jewish point-of-view.
From where do we get news featuring an American point-of-view?
I've now spent quite a bit of time looking in to the extent to which Jews are in a position to influence American news coverage. Eric Alterman points at The New York Times, The Washington Post and U.S. News and World Report as examples of Jewish influence, but by no means does it stop there. In a word, the extent of Jewish representation in positions of power within the mainstream media in America is: improbable. Here's the beginning of a complete list. It leaves out a number of big names though, like Rick Kaplan, President of MSNBC, or Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief of Time Warner, or Jonathan Klein, President of CNN. Just to name a few.
A list like this is certainly controversial, and I'd certainly welcome the opportunity to participate in a process that could see the creation of such a list without having some idiot reflexively resort to the charge of anti-Semitism. Ideally, there should be a place where news consumers can go to learn more about everyone who plays a role in shaping the news coverage we receive. We should be able to know everything about the individuals who produce our news that could in any way influence the coverage they bring us. For instance, if a reporter owns stock in a particular company, you'd want to know about that if the reporter then produced a story about that company or the industry it is in. Similarly if the person who edits a story about some particular region of the world happens to be of an ethnicity associated with that region, some kind of process has to exist that allows the reader to learn of that connection, and view the story accordingly.
We should all hope for fair and unbiased news coverage that represents the broadest possible perspective. You can't have that if one specific group is so over-represented within the media, especially if that over-representation is largely hidden from view.
Some days ago I had considered that this could be an ideal task for Wikipedia. There is a page there titled List of Jews which has a section on Jews in the media, and which conceivably could support a process that could see just such a list created, but the little time I've spent watching what goes on there as well as on other controversial pages suggests that more heat than light would be created as a result. For instance, if you go and visit the talk page (which is a kind of online forum where participants can discuss the page being created/contributed to) you will see that there are many remarks celebrating the great success Jews have in many fields, often showing up in numbers well beyond what would otherwise be expected given their representation in the population at large, but once the subject turns to Jewish influence within the media, what was expression of pride in other categories quickly turns to scorn. Somebody who is Jewish by virtue of a Jewish grandparent alone makes the cut in the section on Jews in Medicine for instance, but apply the same standard in Jews in Media and you're one step away from being decried as an anti-Semite. [2006-06-06: It appears that this list was "reorganized" some time ago and interestingly during the process somehow the list of Jews in the media got deleted! So I put it back. No promises as to how long it lasts.]
Wikipedia also has a page on something called Jew Watch, which is a web-site that once created a list of Jews in the media (but no longer maintains it, the list appears to be considerably out-of-date), and the site is labeled as anti-Semitic, and one of the reasons it is labeled as anti-Semitic is because it produces a list of Jews in the media. Why is the list anti-Semitic? Nobody can really say, but the page points out that some of the people who are attributed as being Jewish are in fact not. Which names? Again, nobody seems to be able to say, with one exception: Rupert Murdoch. Why is Rupert Murdoch not a Jew? The answer given is that it is because only anti-Semitic websites say he is.
That's the kind of process that takes place there. As I write this, a number of people are petitioning to see the List of Jews page deleted. Indeed, Wikipedia itself is now in the process of seeing its content become more static, giving greater control over content to a select few, and so I think the petitioners will very soon have their way.
Is the extent of Jewish influence over the media a fair question? And if so, what is the best means of gauging the extent of that influence? And note, I use the word influence here in a somewhat loose fashion, as I will explain later.
The fact that the 9-11 Commission Report detailed the reason why America was attacked on 9/11 but that this was not covered by the mainstream media is all I need to answer the first question. This is clearly an omission that benefits the Jewish state, and that it puts America in great peril seems to be of little consequence to those choosing to keep this information concealed from the public. The mechanics of this are as clear as day: tell the American people that we were attacked because of what Israel does to the Palestinians, and the American people might decide that they no longer want to support Israel. The first rule of agenda-making in the media is to never report on issues when you're happy with the status quo. Only spend ink on those issues where you are desirous of change.
I'm guessing that the question of to what extent this control is real or how it is translated into real power over what we see and hear on the news is quite a bit more complicated. But there are some pretty startling benchmarks that can be devised and which I think illustrate the situation well. Suppose you were to divide the media into four basic groups: the broadcast television networks, the cable news networks, newspapers and news weeklies. Then take the top three organizations in each category. That gives you twelve organizations, we'll use this as a set from which we will draw the top three individuals in each organization, from boardroom to the newsroom. A lot of different names are used to describe these positions, e.g., Publisher, CEO, Chairman, President, Executive Editor, Editor-in-Chief, etc. What we're after here though is the chain-of-command that can be seen as having the most influence on the news coverage that organization provides, regardless of the mechanism through which that influence is achieved.
The population of the United States is approximately 300,000,000. The most commonly cited figure I see for the number of Jews in the United States is 12,000,000. That of course fluctuates wildly depending upon what your definition of a Jew is, but I think we'll see in a moment that such subtleties are not all that important. Given these numbers, we can safely say that the odds of a person of Jewish heritage holding a particular position within one of these media organizations is about 1 in 25, or a 4% chance.
Observing that we've selected the top three positions out of each media organization, the odds are considerably better: 3 out of 25, or 12%. That is to say, in an organization that has a Editor-in-Chief who answers to a CEO who answers to a Chairman of the Board, the odds that any one of these individuals is Jewish is roughly 3-in-25.
The odds that this would be so in each of the twelve media organizations selected above are obtained by multiplying 12% by itself, twelve times. The math here isn't difficult to understand, it's like estimating the odds of rolling two sixes. The odds of rolling a six are 1-in-6, so the odds of rolling two sixes are 1-in-36, or, 1/6 times 1/6. So applying the same method to the odds of a Jew being in one of the top three positions for each of the twelve organizations selected above comes out to about 1-in-100,000,000,000, or one-in-a-hundred-billion. One-in-a-hundred-billion. Those are lottery odds.
Like I said before: improbable.
We could find an organization here or there that doesn't see a Jew in a top position, as appears to be the case with USA Today for instance, and still be facing a highly improbable sampling of Jews overseeing our newsrooms. You could change it from the top three to the top four or five positions in an organization and it wouldn't appreciably affect the outcome. Nor would adjusting the overall number of Jews in the population, by doubling it for instance. The improbability of this kind of representation is staggering.
- The three broadcast networks:
- David Westin is President of ABC News, and is alleged to be Jewish, as is the Chairman of The Walt Disney Company, Michael Eisner. Michael Eisner used to be President of Disney as well, but now that job belongs to Robert Iger, who it is said is Jewish as well.
- Les Moonves is President and CEO of CBS News and is said to be Jewish. CBS is owned by VIACOM, and VIACOM is owned by Sumner Redstone, who is said to be Jewish.
- Andrew Lack is President of NBC News and Neil Shapiro is President of NBC; both are said to be Jewish.[2005-09-07: Neil Shapiro resigned yesterday, and was "only" President of NBC News. Jeff Zucker it turns out is President of NBC, but he too is said to be Jewish! Andrew Lack evidently was Neil Shapiro's predecessor (though there appears to be conflicting information on this). Will update when I'm convinced I'm sure this is all correct (and if I remember to.)]
- The three cable news networks:
- The President of CNN is Jonathan Klein, said to be Jewish. It used to be the job held by...
- The President of MSNBC, Rick Kaplan, who is said to be Jewish.
- The President of News Corp., which of course runs The Fox News Channel, is Peter Chernin, who is said to be Jewish. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp. is often said to be Jewish but that is just as frequently disputed.
- The three big newspapers:
- USA Today does not appear to have anyone identifiable as Jewish within the top tier of management.
- Peter Kann, CEO and President of Dow Jones, Inc., Publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is said to be Jewish.
- Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher of The New York Times, is said to be Jewish.
- The three big news weeklies:
- TIME Magazine's Editor-In-Chief is Norman Pearlstine, who is said to be Jewish.
- Newsweek is published by the The Washington Post Company, whose CEO is Donald Graham and who is said to be Jewish by virtue of a Jewish grandfather, the guy who started The Post, Eugene Meyer.
- And then finally there's Mortimer Zuckerman, Publisher of U.S. News and World Report, and who is said to be a Jew.
Now having gone through that, do you know what? One or two entries above are probably wrong, or more likely, inaccurate insofar as the individual doesn't meet your standard of Jewishness (which almost nobody seems to agree on). Nevertheless, it's pretty striking I think. Note that for some organizations you have multiple Jews in the top spots, and that many of these organizations are owned by or also own other major media properties.
Also note that, these are just the people who are running the show today. Most of these organizations also featured heavy Jewish leadership in the past, e.g., William Paley of CBS or Gerald Levin of Time Warner. Of particular note is The New York Times which has seen Jewish ownership/control of the paper for something like a hundred years now.
(There are going to be people who will want to jump on an entry being wrong and somehow transmute that into evidence that I'm anti-Semitic or whatever, as if the question of diversity within the media isn't a fair topic. The way I see it, it's our right to know potential biases these individuals might be holding; there shouldn't be any guesswork involved in this exercise.)
Could there be a reasonable explanation for the improbable representation we're seeing here that doesn't involve a conspiracy of some sort or the other? I don't know. I mean, the obvious explanation of course would be to acknowledge that Jews excel in many fields, esp. intellectual pursuits, and such excellence simply sees a higher proportion of Jews in those fields. The question of why this is so isn't really important here, merely the fact that it seems to be true.
I have no problem with this at all. We need all the smart people we can get. Smarter doctors? I'm all for it. I could care less about ethnicity or religion there, since any over-representation in medicine doesn't lend itself first to the kind of concentration of power that corrupts the institution in any way and, secondly, to an agency through which that power might be abused.
And we do after all see other examples where specific groups of people excel in certain pursuits more so than other groups. For a very long time the British simply owned rock 'n' roll, with near total domination over the genre, after it was largely brought to life by African Americans, who today appear to be invincible in professional basketball and many other sports.
So it's not unheard of to see one group so dominate in a particular field. However, this doesn't explain why there are so many Jews in positions of power within the media. The reason is simple: rock 'n' roll was really good during British rule, and pro ball is extremely competitive today with so many black athletes in the big leagues.
Is anyone seriously going to make the claim that the quality of the news coverage we receive today is similarly good?
No. The quality of the news we get in America today totally sucks. There is just no other way of putting it. By many estimates we're not even in the top twenty nations when ranked by press freedom, and usually it is government censorship that causes the low scores other nations receive; we have no such excuse in America. Survey after survey demonstrate that the public's opinion of the American media is bad and getting worse. Stories which should get play — like the exit polling in the 2004 Presidential Election or the Downing Street Memos — don't, while stories like the runaway bride or the missing student in Aruba are headline news, and not just all day, or all week, but month after month after month.
You can't tell me that we see so many Jews in the media because they're good at it. How can we say that anybody in news is doing a good job when its quality is so abysmal?
We can talk about whites being over-represented in various fields, or men outnumbering women, but still it is taboo to confer the same attention to Jews? Why? That has to stop! Maybe you don't agree with the conclusions being made here, but the level of discourse has to at least reach the point where pointing at the influence Jews exert over the media doesn't automatically elicit the idiotic accusation of anti-Semitism.
Israel makes this relevant. Of course, you'd want to see diversity in any case, but the specter that Israel creates for our future makes this an especially critical issue today.
For decades Ted Koppel has been hosting Nightline. Nightline was born during the Iran Hostage Crisis back during the Carter Administration. It was an ongoing story featuring the Middle East. And many programs since have focused on the Middle East. And yet, it is only the other day that I learn that Ted Koppel is Jewish.
This is clearly unacceptable. If Ted Koppel were to own stock in some company he were to then report on, the rules would require him to offer his audience full disclosure of that fact. The need to do so in the face of the obvious conflict-of-interest Israel presents a Jewish journalist covering the Middle East is just as great, if not greater.
Does saying that mean I don't trust what Ted Koppel has to say on the Middle East simply because he's Jewish? No. Is it possible for a Jewish journalist to deliver unbiased news coverage about Israel or any of the other nations in that region of the world? Of course.
But are we to simply trust that the journalist will do his or her job, without benefit of the insight necessary to be wary of biases that may present themselves? Obviously not.
The really interesting question here is whether there a conspiracy on the part of some number of Jews within the media to influence the coverage in order to advance Israeli interests. The thing is, I don't think we need to go that far. Influence of a kind can be exerted through other avenues, and I say this despite believing that I have seen overt examples of localized bias in certain places. For instance, The New York Times leaps to mind here; I do believe there is more than enough evidence to conclude that the bias at that paper is institutional and directly related to the faith/ethnicity of the publisher and many of the senior editors on staff. Does that extend to the rest of the media? Especially as though it were a monolithic entity, controlled by a bunch of Zionists in a dark room somewhere? No, I don't think I believe that.
I think there are other factors that contribute to the bulk of the influence being exerted here that have to be considered first.
For instance, there is the usual sucking-up that goes on in any hierarchical organization, especially in a culture that perhaps sees us defer to Jewish sensibilities more often than should be the case.
The fact that Eric Alterman, who is a Jew himself, feels as though there is a taboo against discussing obvious conflicts-of-interest relating to being a Jewish-American covering American policy towards Israel is as sure a sign as any that this culture is deeply ingrained in American society. This has to change. Is the reason we never learned about why 9/11 happened because the people in control of the media all got together and imposed a blackout on the story? Or is it simply because no one wanted to risk being called an anti-Semite by pointing to facts that have implications for American support for Israel?
Another factor concerns a relatively recent phenomenon: the college degree in journalism. Can somebody tell me exactly what it is a person studies for four years in order to become a journalist? The only real requirement to being a reporter that I can see is an ability to write or speak and a commitment to a fairly terse set of guidelines defining what may or may not be published given the information at hand. It doesn't take four years of college to learn how to do this, so why is the mainstream media placing an ever greater emphasis on the journalism degree as being prerequisite to becoming a reporter?
One obvious reason that has to be considered is that it provides a newspaper with the opportunity to gauge an individual's world view, to see where he or she stands on any given issue. If you're The New York Times, hiring talent away from a small town paper may seem more prudent, until you consider that, while years spent reporting on local events may adequately describe a reporter's competency, it doesn't give a publisher a picture of how this person would then go on to write about bigger issues that are wider in scope, issues which the publisher or senior editors may be desirous of presenting with a particular agenda in mind.
Four years of journalism school likely provides the prospective employer with an excellent portrait of a reporter's ideological leanings. And surely to some extent the way student journalists write the stories they do has to reflect what they believe are the prevailing attitudes in those places within the mainstream media where the hiring decisions are made.
So if you're a kid and you want to write for The New York Times and the only thing you know about the paper is that the publisher and much of staff are Jewish, you're not going to be as likely to take up the cause of the Palestinian people as you might otherwise be were religion and ethnicity not perceived to be a factor. And it doesn't even have to be a conscious bias at play here. It just exists in the back of the student's mind, a student who is competing with a lot of other students for jobs in the media, and in a culture which today treats the Holocaust as though it is still the only relevant symbol of evil in this world.
Those are some simple, easy-to-accept answers I think. I don't want to leave out some of the more sinister explanations though. I have always been and always will be suspicious whenever I see the aggregation of power in the hands of a small group of people, as we seem to see with Jews in the media. Especially when there is agency for such power, as we seem to see with American policy towards Israel. Israel is a foreign power. It has some pretty clearly defined interests, and it isn't shy about pursuing these interests. Clearly, the coverage American media has given Israel has been very positive, considering its behavior, and it is hard to see how this positive coverage hasn't been instrumental in seeing the U.S. government adopt such favorable policies towards Israel, including by some estimates over a trillion dollars in foreign aid/military hardware/forgiven loans given to Israel over the years and the seemingly Pavlovian way in which the United States vetoes any resolution that so much as slaps Israel on the wrist for the many grievous wrongs it commits on the Palestinian people.
Obviously, achieving influence within American media could be seen as a legitimate policy goal of the Israeli government. I know of no evidence for this, but of course, it wouldn't be something the Israeli government would advertise doing. I just keep looking at the very long list of Jewish names in the mainstream media, then I look at the complete failure of the mainstream media to report on the contents of the 9-11 Commission Report, or the hypocrisy in pointing at a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist in Iran while ignoring the one that does exist in Israel, and I ask myself, if I were Jewish, would I be doing this? Would I be this biased?
I really don't know what the answer to that is, but somebody out there does. More people need to be talking about this.
Why aren't they?
Because they're afraid of being labeled as an anti-Semite?
That has to stop. 9/11 means that this has to stop. After the attacks took place the opportunity was to step back and look and see what the situation really was. To ask ourselves, "What caused this?"
It is the failure to do that which has landed us in Iraq. And now, instead of solving the problem of terrorism, we're exacerbating it. Instead of working to eliminate terrorists, it's as if we're actively engaged in breeding them by the planeload.
The conversation that we as a nation have to have with ourselves can't take place if such a fundamental component of the way we make policy in the Middle East remains a taboo subject. We can't grasp what is really going on over there unless we first grasp what is wrong with the way we see that part of the world, especially, with the way we see the things we've done over there over the years.
Jewish influence in the media is as fair a subject as corporate influence in the media. It's the unhealthy aggregation of power in an institution that is vital to the health of this democracy. Any such aggregation of power, even its mere appearance, has to be fair game for frank and open discussion.
Maybe I'm overstating the influence. Or maybe I'm terribly naive and the situation is far worse than I imagine. Either way, any potential harm in talking about it is more than made up by the potential gains should we finally see fit to acknowledge our role in this conflict and take real steps to putting an end to it.
And to those who would accuse me of anti-Semitism for writing this post, let me just say this: it is outrageous to accuse someone of hatred for seeking only to end bloodshed. You may find my comments on this subject to be rude or insensitive, and I'm happy to take that criticism, but what you do not get to do is label me as somebody who hates, not while all I am trying to do is see the violence stop.
The ultimate expression of hatred is, after all, violence. The United States and Israel indisputably drew first blood in this conflict, moreover, we've together spilled more blood than all the terrorists we claim to be fighting, combined.
If the accusation of hatred is to be made then let it be made against those who so recklessly cast this charge of anti-Semitism for no other reason than to see this conflict continue, even while they know in their hearts that it is wrong and that it violates everything their faith teaches them about how to act towards their fellow human beings.
I've done a lot of thinking about this and I'm convinced I'm firmly grounded on that side of the line opposite of hatred. Stop killing people, acknowledge our mistakes and move to address terrorism by working to keep people from hating us in the first place, and if I then continue to go on about Jews in the media or whatever, then fine, I'm an anti-Semite.
Until then, the hatred is on you. Hitler is dead. Jews aren't the only victims anymore.
Indeed, they never were.
Postscript
This blog is supposed to be about the war on drugs dammit, and I realize the title Holocaust Now isn't exactly ideal for today's subject, but you know what? That's too fucking bad. I'm not creating another blog for this shit. Any bias, any agenda, on the part of those who make up the media ultimately serves to abet the war on drugs. If you approach the news with an eye towards influencing peoples' views on select issues, you cease being a journalist and become instead a propagandist, which is, in a way, a kind of politician. That is, you see yourself in possession of political capital, and you don't dare spend it on any issue other than those that are dear to you.
I'm coming to believe that this is why the media coverage on the war on drugs is so submissive to the prohibitionist point-of-view. If your first priority is Israel (or whatever), why spend political capital reporting the truth about our drug policy, when it will only make you enemies, enemies that might otherwise be allies in seeing your priorities realized?
So the big view here sees the failure of the media today responsible not just for the many deaths in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or London, New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, but for the almost incomprehensible number of casualties caused by the war on drugs as well.
If people would just do their jobs, and stop trying to play God all of the time, all of this shit would just sort itself out. By reporting fairly about the conflict in the Middle East long ago, yes, you would have increased pressure on Israel to withdraw from land that doesn't belong to it, and that may go against your sensibilities, but then too, we'd be so much further along the road to peace right now. If those who possess agendas figured out that their vocation should be politics and not journalism, maybe we'd have a clearer understanding of just how devastating the war on drugs has been to America, and we'd be further along that road too.
You know, a lot of what goes into this "taboo" Eric Alterman talks about is a misplaced sense of guilt over the Holocaust.
Did you cause the Holocaust? Then why in the hell are you feeling guilty about it? I sure in the hell don't. I feel guilty over not doing enough to stop the twin holocausts that are going on now, before our very eyes.
The war on drugs. The war on terror. Both are euphemisms for killing people we don't like. If you're going to feel guilty about anything, feel guilty about not doing more to stop something you actually stand a chance of stopping.
To be continued.
[2006-09-13: corrected link to AlJazeera.]
