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Deja vu — Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Judith Apter Klinghoffer

MSM BURIES PROOF OF MEDIA BIAS

Yesterday I wrote about BBC efforts to avoid evidence of its biased ME coverage as a whole and of the second intifada in particular. The outrageous coverage of the Lebanon War was obvious to all as it included doctoring pictures. Remember?

Indeed, so obvious was it that a few months ago none other than Marvin Kalb and Dr. Carol Saivetz of the Shorenstein Center of Harvard University concluded in a study entitled : "The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict" that

A closed sect, Hizbullah, can retain almost total control of the daily message of journalism and propaganda.

As Honest Reporting notes MSM, though not the blogger sphere, with the exception of the Jerusalem Post completely ignored even the Harvard report.

It was certainly not included amongst "all the news fit to print in the New York Time. If you wonder why, you may find a clue in Soccer Dad's analysis of the paper's editorial attitudes towards the conflict. Personally, I believe Hirsi Ali got it just right in a recent interview comparing Dutch and Israeli realities for her analysis equally applies not only to the global intellectual elite:

Minority Racism
"I studied social work for a year in the Netherlands. Our teachers taught us to look with different eyes toward the immigrant and the foreigner. They thought racism was a phenomenon that only appears among whites. My family in Somalia, however, educated me as a racist and told me that we Muslims were very superior to the Christian Kenyans. My mother thinks they are half-monkeys.
"When I started to explain this truth in the class, the teacher responded that it was ‘untrue and impossible.' I said, ‘Yes, it is true." I mentioned that I was living in the center for asylum seekers in the town of Ede and that the Somalis I knew there talked about native Dutchmen as uncircumcised, irreligious, and dirty.
"When a Somali man in the Netherlands sees his sister with a Dutch friend, that is what he thinks and he usually becomes very angry. Such attitudes may spill over to behavior. There was a case in the Netherlands, for instance, where an Iraqi man killed his sister because she bore a child from a native Dutchman. That is extreme nonwhite racism, even if it is called honor-related violence. After my initiative in the Dutch parliament, a pilot investigation was carried out that found there had been eleven honor-related murders in the Netherlands over an eight-month period."
Dutch Double Standards
"There are many other cases of minority racism. For instance, a nephew and a niece may have to get married because the family wants to keep its blood pure. Marrying someone from another race, of course, is completely out of the question. If, however, a native Dutch woman says, ‘I'm not interested in a Moroccan man,' then it makes all the headlines. The Dutch think this manifests the decline of their society.
"If a Dutchman says he doesn't want a Moroccan or a Turk as a neighbor, he is a racist. If a Moroccan says, ‘I want to live next to other Moroccans,' that is viewed as a sign of group attachment, because he has been isolated by immigrating. So that is not considered racism. If a right-wing skinhead draws swastikas on a Jewish cemetery, that is Nazism and he will be punished. If a Moroccan immigrant does the same, it is an expression of his displeasure with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"A few years ago on 4 May when the Netherlands commemorated its World War II dead with two minutes of silence, Moroccan youngsters made a lot of noise in one Amsterdam location and played football with the memorial wreaths in another. Although there were angry reactions, even this was explained as a protest against the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
"Defining an individual as an eternal victim is a fundamental mistake. Colored people, Muslims, and other non-Western immigrants are not victims. They are individuals, like me, who have come to the Netherlands in search of a better life. It is my responsibility to improve my life, and I am not asking the authorities to do it for me. I request only to live in an environment of peace and security. The socialist worldview is different. Those who are not white and Christian, and do not share the ideas of Christian civilization, are victims by definition.
"Paradoxically enough, that attitude derives partly from the Holocaust, which created major guilt feelings in the Netherlands. Some people think the behavior of their countrymen toward the Jews during the war is something that should never be repeated. Thus they compensate by letting Muslims beat their wives and a few others beat up homosexuals or prepare to plant bombs. Such an attitude reflects mental illness."
Double Moral Standards toward Israel
"The crisis of Dutch socialism can be sized up in its attitudes toward both Islam and Israel. It holds Israel to exceptionally high moral standards. The Israelis, however, will always do well, because they themselves set high standards for their actions.
"The standards for judging the Palestinians, however, are very low. Most outsiders remain silent on all the problems in their territories. That helps the Palestinians become even more corrupt than they already are. Those who live in the territories are not allowed to say anything about this, because they risk being murdered by their own people."
When asked whether the moral standards to which many Dutch hold Israel are often also far higher than those they apply to the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali replies: "The VVD and parts of the CDA Christian Democrats do not apply double standards to Israel, nor do the smaller Christian parties. Many other politicians do, however.
"This also has to be seen in a wider context. Not only the Netherlands, but many other European countries have changed their minds after more than fifty years of commemorations of the Holocaust. They are happy to free themselves of its history and of Israel's history. Thus they apply these very unequal criteria. They also think they are entitled to have their double standards, whereas the Israelis are not."

Now you understand why DeToquiville understood American Democracy better than Americans ever did. It takes the fresh eyes of an outsider to see things clearly.

Posted on Wednesday, May 2, 2007 at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | Return

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