By As’ad AbuKhalil, english.al-akhbar.com
Mon, 2012-07-30 19:11- Angry Corner

Rebels celebrating capture of a police station in Aleppo. Summarily executed policemen surround them.  If these men had been defenders of Assad, they would have been denounced from every pulpit in the American media. 

The performance of the Western media (American, British, French and others) regarding the Syrian conflict has been quite shameful. One does not expect much from American media. Ill-informed foreign editors and correspondents and political cowardice turn American media into tools of US foreign policy.

This is especially true when it comes to coverage of the Middle East, where extra political courage and uncharacteristic level of knowledge and expertise are rather rare, even though they are essential to challenging US foreign policy. But when it comes to Syria, British media – including the liberal Guardian which has often been brave in challenging Western foreign policies and wars – have been indistinguishable from American media.

These media have failed their readers on many levels. Their shortcomings can be summarized as follows:

1. Resorting to methods of documentations that are never accepted when covering the Arab-Israeli conflict; like the reliance on accounts of people through Skype and email whose names are not obtained through a random process, and the reliance on Saudi or Qatari press media offices.

2. Hiding behind the cliché that “the Syrian government does not allow journalists in” to justify the various anthologies of errors contained in media reports. Many journalists have either been allowed in or have managed to sneak in, so the general disclaimer used daily in the New York Times is inaccurate and misleads readers. Such a disclaimer is never used against Israel, which imposes rigid forms of censorship on reports emanating from Israel, especially when Israel is perpetrating its regular war crimes and massacres.

3. The reliance on exile Syrian opposition reports without any scrutiny or healthy skepticism.

4. The assumption that Saudi-funded or Qatari-funded media outfits don’t carry the agendas of those governments.

5. Obscuring on purpose the heavy role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian exile opposition in order to project a deceptive image of a secular opposition.

6. The role that most Western journalists and correspondents have played on Twitter to cheerlead the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian exile opposition. The pretense of objectivity is discarded.

7. The consistent reliance (especially in the US press) on “experts” from the Zionist Washington Institute for Near East Policy as if it has no ideological lobbying agenda. Reference to that institute only informs the readers of its political slant – to put it mildly.

8. The deliberate distortion and mis-characterization of one side in the conflict.

9. The insistence that Bashar al-Assad has no power base in Syria – outside of the Alawi community – when the endurance shown by the regime requires more than a resort to brute force, which the regime is known for.

10. The gap between past coverage of Syria which disregarded human rights violations by the Assad regime during its years of understanding with Western governments and the sudden discovery of the brutality of the regime.

11. The obsession with Israeli concerns: the media audaciously covers the Israeli-originated story about Syrian chemical weapons without ever mentioning the vast arsenal of Israeli WMDs.

12. Lack of verification of published information.

13. Blurring the lines between editorial policies and media reports – this has been true even in The Economist – one of the best samples of modern journalism.

14. Covering the story of Syria from other capitals, primarily Beirut, where the press corps is highly dependent on the services, suggestions, and even instructions of the Hariri press office. (The former CNN bureau chief now works for the Hariri family).

15. Fear of challenging assumptions and orientations of Western policies.

16. Lack of irony in reporting about Qatari and Saudi support for democratic struggle in Syria.

17. Covering up war crimes and other misdeeds by the Free Syrian Army.

18. The reluctance to report on foreign jihadi fighters in Syria until the US government admitted their presence.

19. The tendency to echo one another in the coverage.

20. The lack of hesitation to report lies and fabrications as long as they serve the cause of Western governments and as long as they hurt the cause of the enemy Syrian regime.

21. Disregard for the political background of some of the sudden opponents of the Syrian regime. Western media have yet to report on these personalities who have been apologists for the Syrian regime and who pretended that they were opponents of the regime when it became politically and financially convenient.

22. The pattern of reliance on reporters who don’t know Arabic and don’t know the region continues. The New York Times continues to send reporters who have covered American politics or the police beat in NYC to cover the Middle East region.

There is no accountability and it is unlikely that someone is going to write a book on the shortcomings and failures of Western media. Western media also marketed the Libya story and they were never made accountable for the lies they peddled there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As’ad AbuKhalil Arabic: أسعد أبو خليل (born March 16, 1960) is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus.
AbuKhalil is the author of Historical Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam & America’s New “War on Terrorism” (2002), and The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004). He maintains a blog, The Angry Arab News Service.  He was born in Tyre, Lebanon, and grew up in Beirut. He received his B.A. and M.A. in political science from the American University of Beirut, and a Ph.D. in comparative government from Georgetown University.  AbuKhalil is a professor at Cal State Stanislaus and was briefly[1] a visiting professor at UC Berkeley.[2] In addition, he has taught at Tufts University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Colorado College, California State University Stanislaus, and Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.[3]

AbuKhalil describes himself as “a former Marxist-Leninist, now an anarchist”,[4] a feminist, and an “atheist secularist”.[5] AbuKhalil is vocally pro-Palestinian, describes himself as an anti-Zionist, and supports one secular state in historical Palestine.[6] He is an opponent of the Iraq War. He is critical of Israeli government, of United States foreign policy, of Saudi Arabia, of both Fatah and Hamas, and of all rival factions in Lebanon.[4][7][7][8][9][10][11]

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Selected Comments
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2012-08-02 07:15.
Actually The Guardian is going against the mainstream this time too. It supports intervention in Syria while the majority of public opinion in the West is against it, evidenced by the number of Westerners who comment here in support of the Assad regime.
Submitted by lidia (not verified) on Thu, 2012-08-02 21:38.
Actually The Guardian is playing the same dirty role as before colonial war on Iraq – calling to “liberate” Syria by NATO bombs. It is very “mainstream” in imperialist camp. The majority in UK could be against it – at least for now, but who cares? They were against war on Iraq too. It is called “liberal democracy” to not give a rat’s ass for what the majority want in case the “free press” somehow could not lie the majority’s brains out to support one more imperialist crime.
Anon is sure like to twist the plain facts, but no amount of spin could change the reality – Western media are but a tool of imperialism.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 2012-08-02 06:57.
Most of the points you made can be applied in reverse to Sharmine Narwani who visited Syria and told us everyone loves B. A..

Submitted by lidia (not verified) on Thu, 2012-08-02 21:35.
I dare anon to cite Sharmine’s writings with “everyone loves BA”. Sure, to tell anon that not everyone hate him (as NATO/GCC/Zionist media claim, excluding only “shabiha” from “everyone) is a sin, but why lie?

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Our Rome correspondent Gaither Stewart has filed this little gem of an interview with the controversial author. We trust it will be of interest to many of our readers.—Ed

Vidal lived large, unapologetically, and his villa in Ravello, on the Amalfi coast,  remains a must-see location for the knowledgeable visitor.

DATELINE (Gaither Stewart in Rome) When I interviewed Gore Vidal in October, 1983, in his penthouse apartment on Largo (Piazza) Argentina in the very center of Rome, he related the time a lady from the New York Times asked as her first question: “Mr. Vidal, you really hate the United States, don’t you.” He answered: “No, I hate the New York Times.”

Like the time, he recalled, he was introduced on an NBC television show as “the outrageous Gore Vidal”, he stopped the show when he asked why outrageous. “Ronald Reagan is outrageous,” he replied.

During the over two hours we spoke about politics and literature which I recorded on tape, Vidal never once minced his words or resorted to niceties toward anyone or anything. Forever irreverent as was his nature.

From the huge transcript, I fashioned articles subsequently published in various European leftwing newspapers and magazines, including L’Unità, the official daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, De Morgen, the major Belgian Socialist daily in Gent, The Haagse Post, an Amsterdam leftwing weekly, and others I no longer recall.

We tried sitting on his terrace overlooking Piazza Argentina and the ruins of four Roman temples but the noise from the late Sunday afternoon traffic was so deafening we soon retired to the huge salon. Yet this apartment that he had owned for 20 years, he called his retreat, reserved for work—reading and writing and thinking. The only reason he agreed to the interview here was because I lived in Rome.

American artists were all over a cheap Europe in the early post-war period. And they all passed through Rome: that catastrophic driver Tennessee Williams, writer and composer Paul Bowles, William Styron, Normal Mailer and Saul Bellow. Here on the loud Rome piazza he wrote his famous Myra Breckenbridge. Though the figure of Gore Vidal that Sunday loomed larger than expected against the reflections of the flashing lights from the heart of Rome below us, I had the thought that we could just as well have been in New York or his beloved California.

Rather than try to reconstruct the interview, I have recalled here some of his chief political points, familiar to older readers, but most likely new to the younger generation, which Vidal describes as a ‘non-reading generation.’ Surprisingly, most of his words of nearly 30 years ago ring quite contemporary today.

“American leaders never deal with real political and social problems. The Founding Fathers feared most of all democracy and monarchy and saw to it that we could never have either. We should scrap the Constitution and start over. It is only a document to protect property owners while America has the weakest union movement in the Western world, with only 20% of workers organized. I attack the system that has done this to the American people. Meanwhile we should get rid of both the New York Times and the Constitution.

“On the other hand the people are not concerned about real problems either. Americans don’t vote, while corporations select and pay for the politicians and get the Senators and Presidents they pay for. They function like Italy’s mafia that buys its votes.

“The Left-Right classifications are complex. I have said I am a man of the Left. But I think we need a new definition of the Left and its goals and how they can be achieved. It’s a good thing for people to govern themselves but it must be explained how it can be done. We need a new document, a new analysis, a new synthesis of those goals.”

Gore Vidal, 30 years ago, saw literature in a grim situation. “In my visits to some 125 university campuses I have seen that literature has become something that is taught, not actually read. Literature is chiefly a subject of university study. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the universities preserved the best of our literary past, Instead, it is often a case of Professor x writing a book and Professor y teaching it in his classes. The university campus is not real life, but 90% of our writers are connected with universities.”

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Phil Rockstroh

“Stupid is as stupid does, sir…”

In the contest between Stupid and Evil, Stupid reaps far more destruction. Why? Stupid prevails by the sheer force of numbers in its ranks. 

But the argument is moot: Because all too often Stupid is working for Evil…believing it is serving as a force for good…and, I might add, for degrading wages as well.

German born filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) insisted to her dying breath that her 1936 masterwork of visual bravura, “Olympia,” documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, Germany, and funded and promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state, was not a political film nor was intended as propaganda for the Third Reich…as writer/director Christopher Nolan is claiming his “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a political movie. 



Yet, for some reason, the villains of the movie just happen to resemble the febrile stuff of right-wing delusion regarding Occupy Wall Street activists, and the beleaguered victims of the movie’s vengeance-seeking, blood-drunk rabble’s reign of mindless terror happen to resemble the denizens of the One Percent.

But we are told to relax…ruminate on a jumbo bucket of popcorn and suck down the high-fructose soda of our choice…We should allow our limbic system to ascend to the throne room of consciousness…to simply let the spectacle pull us along, as in a trip through a high-tech funhouse.

Historically, a component of fascism has been the visceral appeal of mass spectacle — the drowning of the burdens of Industrial Age selfhood into an intoxicating immersion in the anonymity of the mob. Another aspect is the promotion of shadow projection i.e., the attempt to lessen inner conflict and shame involving dark-tinged, hidden emotions and yearnings by projecting those traits on outside groups e.g., the political use of racism to displace class-based resentment; the caricatures created to demonize the enemy, appropriated by governments and promulgated in popular culture to mobilize support for war.

In “The Dark Knight Rises,” Nolan (perhaps unconsciously…he doesn’t seem all that bright and self-aware) deploys the psychological trope of shadow projection by portraying members of an Occupy Wall Street-type popular insurgency as boilerplate, comic book villains who rise from the city’s underbelly, compelled by murderous grievances, to inflict a reign of chaos, reminiscent of Terror-gripped, late 18th Century/ early 19th Century France, on the city’s economic elite.

What is the writer/director getting at here? 

Whether Nolan is aware of it or not, he has made a fascist epic. Batman, from its inception was always a hyper-authoritarian myth. Comic Books, at their inception and rise during the Great Depression of the 1930s, reflected a middle/upper class unease regarding those popular heroes of the disaffected laboring class such as Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. 

Woody Guthrie’s take on song writing is germane to the subject of movies as well. Woody averred: All songs are political.

Hollywood movies are suffused with capitalist false consciousness? And how could they not be? The “successful” members of the entertainment “business” have done quite well by the system, thus have been bestowed with all the privileges of the One Percent.

Moreover, certain self-appointed arbiters of good taste and social propriety have posited the canard that the recent madman-inflicted, firearm-wrought tragedy at an Aurora, Colorado cinema exhibiting Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises should not be politicized. Nonsense. The assertion, in itself, is political, for it is a (tacit) admonition to refrain from challenging the status quo — and the status quo of U.S. gun culture comes down to this: blood-drenched shooting spree followed by blood-drenched shooting spree.

Withal, the 2nd Amendment is not the word of God writ large across the eternal heavens. It is an archaic notion of a past, rural/agrarian era, and crafted by an assembly of land-holding, powdered wig-clad aristocrats.

Does the uncertainty of these times and the fading of cherished concepts evoke feelings of unease within you? Then how about trying this? Quit stroking your guns and hyperventilating over the depleted embers of dying delusion: Get over the hagiography of this sham democratic republic, and begin to re-imagine and remake the world anew.

Regarding all the bombast and braggadocio of rightist 2nd Amendment true believers, who claim that guns are the last, best hope to stand against government tyranny: Where were these sentinels of freedom when the operatives and enforcers of the U.S. national security/police state brought its brutality down on peaceful Occupy Wall Street dissidents?

Neither they nor the vast majority of people in the U.S. possess any concept of — nor do they give a rodent’s rectum about freedom.

Because the fledgling nation’s solution to what they termed the “Indian problem” was addressed by the use of firearms, the habit of viewing and deploying guns as a solution to societal ills has bequeathed a violent, blood-sodden legacy upon the culture.

To all you compulsive gun-strokers — heirs of the hateful legacy of your genocidal ancestors — I ask you this — how do you like existing under dismal, degraded conditions such as these?

Seemingly, from their graves, my Native American ancestors (My late father was born of half native descent.) have cursed you. But the grim truth is, on a collective basis, through our acceptance of a toxic cultural mythos, the people of this nation have conjured this curse, and have, by their clinging to death-besotted attitudes and attendant actions, seeded the winds of fate.

Regarding gun violence in the U.S., the situation is very simple. The 2nd Amendment is not only antiquated, but is an outright menace to public good. 

Nations that do not fetishize guns, and have said fetish codified into law and imprinted into the public’s imagination are not afflicted by any degree of violent gun deaths.

Although its origins and workings seem to us mysterious and evanescent, evil remains proliferate because our traumatized psyches see it as a force of good. Evil is a deranged angel of self-preservation, convinced his wicked machinations and destructive fury are bulwarks against outside forces aligned to bear his doom.

“A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.” — Carl Jung: “The Philosophical Tree” (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335

To those firearm apologists who proffer the assertion that one should not blame guns for the acts of madmen…let me ask you this? There are unstable individuals residing all over the world, and have throughout every era, what is it about the U.S. that engenders a social milieu wherein so many unhinged individuals go on murderous rampages, and why is the death toll so high therein? The startlingly obvious answer: The easy availability of firearms and a toxic mythos surrounding these weapons that promotes their ownership and drowns out reasoned discourse on the subject.

Restricting the manufacture, thus profit motive, of firearms is a must…to keep them out of the hands of criminals, psychopaths, and idiots, and that includes the cops.

The problem of evil would be more easily remedied if evil people saw themselves as evil. But evil does not arrive in the form of a new computer application (Irredeemable Wickedness, version 13. 13) that foul-minded types can download into their psyches.

Evil creeps up on you when you’re going about the mundane business of the day.

Will we, as a people — inculcated by cultural mythos and saturated by shallow, sensationalist mass media narratives — learn anything about the hideous, tragic nature of non-virtual reality violence from this latest in a long series of gun-wrought mass murder?

In grim contrast to comic book-based, movie-style, violence porn, these repeated incidents of gun violence displayed for us the effects of actual violence. These events should serve as object lessons in the consequences of having large segments of a population, stressed to the point of collective madness and dwelling in a nation that, culturally, evinces demonstrably psychotic attitudes regarding firearms.

Gun-clutching pathology — and sorry, people, that is exactly what it is — is engendered by emotionally displaced feelings of powerlessness. The ridiculous number of guns, combined with racism and wealth inequity, in this deeply troubled nation, contributes to the endless number of firearm-related tragedies that nations that have sane gun laws — meaning tight restrictions — don’t suffer.

You boys and girls can swoon in all the hyper-macho, retrograde, Sarah Palin-level, 2nd Amendment-conflating fantasies that your besieged minds can conjure — but it will not change the reality that it is the people of this country’s sacred illusions and attendant fetishizing of guns that makes worse the very situation of which they live in fear. What a waste of human life and mental real estate.

Accordingly, the work of Hollywood artificers, such as Christopher Nolan, reflects collective pathologies at large in the culture.

All too many big budget, Hollywood action movies, epic in scale and one dimensional in content, are saturated with the empty grandiosity of fascist thought. Carl Jung noted that evil generally comes with an aura of emotional detached coldness.  Apropos: The shop-worn device of the super-villain is fascist conceit — a projection of the coldness and overkill of the U.S. police state/militarist empire on imaginary villains.

Evidently, Nolan has internalized the fascist inclinations inherent to late stage capitalism. His cinematic images are over-wrought, yet cold — a fascist paradox that are catnip to troubled personalities, such as James Holmes, whose inner torments and concomitant actions mirror the collective nature of this violence-worshipping culture.

Only a society as violently (and, I fear, irredeemably) bughouse crazy as the one extant in the U.S. would arrive at the assertion that an individual who carried out a deadly shooting rampage in a packed movie theatre could be feigning madness, or, in the words of a corporate press headline, “James Holmes’ behavior sign of psychosis or faking it, expert says.” http://gma.yahoo.com/james-holmes-goofy-behavior-sign-psychosis-faking-expert-142209134–abc-news-topstories.html

In a nation that, for example, accepts as normal the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, supports state-applied torture, and the slaughter of children by predator drone attack, yet gibbers on about the latest outrage committed by some sub-cretinous, Reality Television celebrity — the standard for psychosis and the standard of so-called normal will dovetail. To paraphrase one wit: Fish should be the last creatures queried regarding the existence of water.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com and at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh

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Posted on The New Yorker by Andy Borowitz

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Customers across the nation who turned out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day were in for a surprise, as the chicken restaurant chose today to launch a new product, Hate Sauce.

Delighted customers mobbed the restaurants to try the zesty new sauce, with many chicken fanciers ordering their sandwiches with extra hate. “It’s so spicy it makes your mouth feel like it’s on fire—like a gay couple in hell,” said Harland Dorrinson, who sampled the sauce at a Chick-fil-A in Orlando.

But even as Chick-fil-A prepared to call its new hate sauce an instant hit, it faced a challenge from an upstart rival, Wing-n-nuts.

The rival chain, based in Falls Church, Virginia, chose today to introduce a new product targeting Chick-fil-A patrons, the Chicken Bacon Bigotwich.

“We think we’re going to take a big bite out of Chick-fil-A’s customer base,” said Wing-n-nuts corporate spokesperson Carol Foyler. “Their founder is anti-gay. But ours is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-woman. When word gets out about that, there’ll be lines around the block.”

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Photograph: Chick-fil-A.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/08/chick-fil-a-introduces-new-hate-sauce.html#ixzz22VmTMBAZ

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By Patrice Greanville

The year 2012 is turning out to be a hard year for the enemies of the Empire and its tegument of lies.  Death is silencing some powerful voices. In June we lost Alex Cockburn, now Vidal.

Protean in talent and interests, Gore Vidal was a complex man who did not fit under one or two labels. Contrarian by nature,  an intellectual lion by any standard, and an early and calmly defiant overt homosexual with some heterosexual frissons thrown in to confuse those who like things nice and predictable, Gore Vidal cast a long and exemplary shadow on American culture for much of the 20th century.  He was that rare bird: a true original writer whose public persona easily overshadowed the legacy of his own books, and he had no real competitors or imitators. Enfant terriblism defined him from the start, perhaps as the natural allergic reaction of a free spirit to the stifling parochialism, priggishness and conformity he found in American society, so it was pretty much inevitable that, despite his own ties to the native aristocracy (such as it it exists in the US), he could never resist shocking the bourgeois and the comfortable, a sport he maintained throughout his 86 unapologetic years of residence on earth.  Mired in philistinism and banality, to a man like Gore Vidal America provided enormous targets.

“Everybody with an IQ above room temperature is on to the con act of our media. They are obeying bigger, richer interests than informing the public — which is the last thing that corporate America has ever been interested in doing.”—Gore Vidal

It hardly needs stating that to most of his legion of conservative critics and defamers Vidal was a degenerate, a shameless libertine, a man without decency or social restraint, a contumacious hedonist… an American de Sade. (He rightly considered such invective a mark of honor). Given this invidious billing, this crowd will probably be surprised to hear Gore Vidal described as a social moralist, but that’s what he was, for at the end of the day a true moralist in the deepest sense of the term is one who fights for the  higher virtues: justice, tolerance, the advance of reason, and the triumph of compassion. All core Enlightenment values. And as Vidal said on a number of occasions (claiming no originality): a social peace not grounded in social justice is suspect.

Intermittently in self-imposed exile in Europe, whose cultural atmosphere he found much less toxic despite the surrounding decadence (which he enjoyed but also criticized), Vidal never lost sight of his self-assigned “civilizing mission” toward his own country and the obstacles that such work entailed.  In this context, the performance of the American media rightly revolted him (see video interview above).  Along with Herbert Schiller, Michael Parenti, Alex Carey, Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman, and the recently departed Alex Cockburn, all pioneers in media criticism in the postwar era, Vidal clearly understood the urgency of tearing down the corporate monopoly of access to the American mind as an indispensable step in the struggle to liberate his compatriots from the yoke of capitalistic mythology.  When Cyrano’s Journal was finally born in 1982 as America’s first radical media review, he was extremely encouraging and supportive. (Eventualy he would become editor emeritus.)

And although the magazine did not survive long for the usual reasons that afflict undercapitalized left publications, he never lost faith in the possibility of its rebirth. Eventually Cyrano was reborn, albeit as an online political affairs monitor. Later, in 1986, another fine publication, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) came to the fore as a dedicated media watchdog serving the left. In part the new outfit, much as Cyrano had been, was a response from the left to the lies and propaganda spread by the odious Reed Irvine and his misnomered Accuracy in Media (AIM), amply financed since the early 1970s by rightwing tycoons to fight what they cynically claimed to be the “media’s leftist anti-corporate bias”—an oxymoron if there ever was one.

The right was correct in assigning great value to the culture wars, and they often strove to foist Bill Buckley Jr. as Vidal’s natural equivalent.  While Buckley, theatrical to the point of self-parody, and blessed with a quick wit and great media connections, was in time recognized as an intellectual provocateur of some merit, he could never begin to match the overall caliber and output of Vidal. (In fact not even Norman Mailer could and he was a lion in his own right.)

In Gore Vidal the American and international left had a unique and honorable champion. Unburdened by false modesty, he saw himself as something of a Voltaire for our age, and in that he was correct.  But by character and disposition, in the sheer pleasure he derived from battling the outsize forces of privilege and obscurantism, I would say he was also very much like Cyrano de Bergerac.  And like Cyrano, he leaves behind his immaculate panache.

Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post‘s editor in chief, and publisher of Cyrano’s Journal Today.

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