Melanie Phillips is a journalist at the UK's
Daily Mail, who writes from a conservative, and unabashedly pro-Western point of
view on the topics of the day. She is also unashamed of her Jewish heritage, and is
willing to speak up against the old prejudice which threatens once again to rot
at Europe's moral core.
She does this
in a balanced, thoughtful way - no mere apologist, she is willing to criticize
Israeli policy when appropriate. But what she is patently unwilling to do is
engage in post-modernist games of moral
equivalency.
Good for
her.
For all of this, she is apparently
roundly excoriated by the British left, but never mind - she's got some words
for them, and the UK media, whom she blames for so twisting the facts to fit
their preconceptions as to have entirely lost their moorings as well. And, as a
lover of the written word myself, it's always a pleasure to read a
craftsman.
You really ought to take the time to read the whole thing , but here are some of my
favorite tidbits:
Terrorism
is designed to achieve maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so
that pressure is put on the leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot
be said too often that what drives al Qaeda is not the exercise of
disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its weakness and
incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda must
surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to
fall into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war.
These terrorists know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and
pressure the British media will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every
incentive to ratchet up the atrocities. That’s why the hostage Kenneth
Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the media duly do what
the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins, and the
pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more
intolerable.
--------
(The)
systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the
ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat
that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they
don’t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so
much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would
harm them.
Yet that is what
is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of
objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on
their heads. Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to
be understood and sympathised with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous
climate in which prejudice and lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable
fact; a climate which is now being eagerly manipulated by terrorists who know
that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute the video the result
will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split away from
President Bush and shatter the coalition in defence of the free world.
--------
It
is hard to exaggerate the relentless way in which all this nonsense has been
promulgated by the media. So why has the coverage of Iraq been so obsessional?
Is it just hatred of America? But why should America — or Bush, for that
matter — be hated with this pathological level of intensity? A
crucial part of this frenzy has been the firm belief that Iraq was the wrong
target. And that’s because the media knew what the real target should be.
The real cause of terror, goes the prevailing wisdom, is Israel’s
perceived refusal to grant a state to the
Palestinians...
---------
So
Israel is at the core of the fury over Iraq. Yet Israel can hardly be the
principal goad for a movement which declares its aim to establish an Islamic
state in the north Caucasus or in southern Asia. But then, the real nature of
the threat posed by the Islamic jihad is never reported either. The butchers
of Beslan were referred to constantly as Chechens or separatists when the
evidence was that they came from neighbouring states, that some of them were
Arabs and that their goal — according to their leader — was not
Chechen separatism at all but an Islamic state in the north Caucasus ... So
most people are quite unaware that these goals are the defeat of western power,
the overthrow of western values including democracy wherever Muslims either
live or have a historic claim, and the re-establishment of the medieval Islamic
caliphate which stretches from Asia to southern Europe... They are unaware,
because the media doesn’t report it, that the hysteria which has produced
the human bomb death cult is fuelled by demented propaganda which tells them
that the west is out to destroy
Islam...
---------
(S)o
they fix on Israel as the cause, because through the relentless TV pictures of
Palestinians weeping in the rubble of houses demolished by the Israeli army,
with a running commentary which predicates the myth of Israeli tanks against
Palestinian stones, they are provided with a neat cause of righteous armchair
indignation. The obscenity of using even children as human bombs focuses
British ire not at the Palestinians for doing so but at Israel, their target.
The actual causes of the slaughter — the indoctrination from the cradle
in gross Jew hatred, paranoid delusions about the west and a cult of death
sanctified and even mandated by religious edict — are studiously ignored
by the media which presents it instead as a dispute over land.
---------
So
why has all this happened? Why has the media succumbed to this epidemic of
bigotry, blindness and bias?
One obvious reason is
simple fear. In Ramallah, when Arafat was alive, reporters who assembled for a
press conference happened to witness a man being frog-marched outside and shot.
They were threatened with death if they reported it...
The second reason is the
cult of postmodernism to which the media, like the rest of the intellectual
world, has fallen victim. Some time ago, journalism decided that objectivity
was bunk and truth was relative. Facts stopped being sacred and news reporting
became an expression of opinion. And because truth itself was merely a
subjective view, the way was open for propaganda based on lies to be promoted
as the truth as long as it fitted the prevailing prejudice.
That prejudice is
overwhelmingly the mindset of the left. Since the left demonises America and
western capitalism, and lionises the third world and all liberation movements,
America or Israel can never be victims, only aggressors, while the Muslim and
Arab third world can only be victims because they are the powerless pawns of
western
imperialism...
----------
The
outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from
lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no
longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all
evidence is filtered through prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to
which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by
gullibility.
----------
There's
much more meat there besides (I know, after all my excerpts, you probably find
that hard to believe). But it's good
stuff.
Thanks to Gary, who got it from Power
Line , for the tip.
Posted @
12:26 PM
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Posted in
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Sendit
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Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
