Category Archives: Ethics

UPDATED: Sometimes Anti-Semitism is Just Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism, Ethics, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Middle East, Morality, Uncategorized

The bash-Israel business is booming again. I give you the former CIA operative Michael Scheuer:

My long-held position in opposition to foreign aid, in general, and to Israel, in particular, is no different to Scheuer’s. The same goes for my position in opposition to war with Iran.

I’m aligned ideologically with this man’s non-interventionism. Having said that, Scheuer hates Israel. As I said in “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” he believes “poor, little America has been ‘Jewed’ into its foreign-policy follies.”

Scheuer’s hatred for “Israel” and AIPAC (The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) has led him to erroneously conflate the existential realities that confront regular Israelis with the mission of AIPAC (whatever that may be). That’s unforgivable. Most Israelis (and most American Jews) have never heard of AIPAC and the neocons. They just want to live out their lives without being pelted with Qassam rockets from Gaza (where many of them once grew export-quality flowers and vegetables. Gaza now hothouses Jihadis, oops, freedom fighters).

Damn: the stupid Jews are always building things. Why can’t they throw stones like the Egyptians on the studio screen flickering behind Mr. Scheuer. (His host ought to have juxtaposed images of Tel Aviv and Cairo for better effect.) Scheuer, naturally, has never bemoaned the Muslim lobby and the billions we throw at countries who return us the favor with bombs.

“Lobby,” writes a Times Literary Supplement reader in a letter-to-the-editor, “is attached, these days, in a derogatory way, almost exclusively to Jews and their characteristic, so some like to think, habit of seeking/buying/cajoling favors—such as not being murdered—by dubious tricks.” (TLS January 14, 2011)

UPDATE: My own writing is passionately patriotic, but never partisan. I’m pro-Israel, if highly critical of that country. I opposed Israel’s latest attempt to level Lebanon with the same logic and loyalty to principle with which I fought the American war against the Iraqis (starting on Sept 19, 2002). In certain rightist circles, however, a robotic anti-Israel stance is de rigueur.

Thus, over the years—and in the course of writing distinctly patriotic columns such as my latest—I have been both subtly and openly assailed for being a fifth columnist; a person with dual loyalties, a “binational.” I’ve realized that the people who levy such scurrilous accusations against me of all people will never see my work or my words and the flak I’ve taken for unpopular position, which where in the interest of my countrymen, but not its pols and pundits. All they see is a Jew and the attendant stereotypes that attach. For example, in the fact that I’ve lived on three continents, such individuals see a confirmation of the stereotype of a shiftless Jew.

F-ck ’em.

The fulminating Scheuer later went up against Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. During this particular Fox Business segment, Scheuer referred to Shmuley with contempt as “that fellow.” It’s fair to say that the rabbi, with whom I vehemently disagreed, came out on top. Why? Because the rabbi treated his interlocutor with respect. As George Will once wrote, “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

In anti-Semitic circles, Freud has very sinister connotations. Certainly not much store should be put on his theories about human nature. However, I’ve read Freud’s original works, and see him as an immensely creative and imaginative writer. When Freud was once quizzed about his incessant cigar smoking, he humorously chose to sidestep what was, according to the very theory he invented, a manifestation of his own oral fixation. He replied: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

And sometimes, anti-Semitism is just anti-Semitism.

UPDATED: The MEDIA Is The Message (Amanpour’s Anticlimax)

Ethics, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East, Pop-Culture, Propaganda

Good journalism doesn’t assert or hypothesize; it reports the facts dispassionately, and from all sides of a dispute. Alas, I have just heard Neil Cavuto suggest, casually, to a guest on his FoxNews show, that the Egyptian police are probably embedded in the crowds and causing the commotion. The stupidity of the American media’s mindset; the need to see matters in simplistic, either/or dichotomies—this alone should disqualify them from reporting on the news. But inherent in what I’ve said is a presumption of standards. These no longer matter in journalism (and in many more fields of endeavor).

Cavuto’s sentiments, shared by the media monolith, proceed from the assumption that the Egyptian protesters are as pure as the driven snow, and that, therefore, the aggression witnessed must be the handiwork of agents provocateurs. This, even though we don’t have reliable information from all sources to determine what is unfolding on the streets of Cairo. Neil could be right. But good reporting is not a chance affair. In floating assumptions, Cavuto, like almost every other journalist reporting on Egypt, is out of line. They are helping to cement opinion in the absence of facts. Where is Michael Ware when you need him? (http://www.mickware.info/2011News/2011News.php)

Ware is probably too manly for the girls at CNN. Which brings me to that channel’s Alpha Female: the vain, posturing, preachy Anderson Cooper. Remember when this narcissist had his crew film him lugging around an injured Haitian boy? Cooper was roughed up in Egypt (a good producer should have taken him to the woodshed a long time ago). So he turned that into The Story; found a safe haven, where he hunkered down, and whiled-away the evening broadcast repeating what he had endured. Like Cavuto, Cooper also allowed himself to carelessly hypothesize—this time about the possibility of a Tiananmen-Square type occurrence the following day. Quite a few of his colleagues in the “profession” referred irresponsibly (almost wishfully) to the Tienanmen Square massacre, vis-a-vis Egypt.

The American media colors events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism, often creating reality on the ground, instead of reporting on it.

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. Is that still true? It is not the technology that molds the events—technology facilitates and frees information. Rather, it is the jet-setting journalist whose persona and ideology propel his pursuits.

UPDATE (Feb. 6): AMANPOUR’S ANTICLIMAX. Via Larry Auster:

Watching Christiane Amanpour on ABC this morning, it appeared this woman devoutly wished a revolution along certain lines. It had to be a world-shattering, epoch-shaping event. For this media moment, she was brought forth, along with her male counterpart, Fareed Zakaria.
However this breathless, transcendent moment got bogged down in bureaucracy. In her interview with Egyptian Vice-President Suleiman, it became apparent that Muburak would not step down before September, that the Egyptian parliament would proceed in an incremental, step-wise fashion to implement reform, and that the government was asking the crowds to disperse and go back home to their daily lives and jobs.
So much for the orgiastic climax to the days of rage and the revolution. ‘Twas not the consummation devoutly to be desired.

The point being that this is not how news is done.

Politicians Pair Off For Their Big Night (Not Ours)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, Democrats, Ethics, Government, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, The State

Care about principles? Then the only time you want your representative to reach across the aisle is to grab a Democrat or an errant Republican by the throat. What about sitting together at the biggest “Stalinist extravaganza” (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33815) of the season, the State of the Union Address? “More than 60 members have signed up to sit next to one of their colleagues from a different party,” reports CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/25/brazile.congress.sit.together/index.html?hpt=T2). Reporters are giggling and cooing over who’s dating whom. I could not care less about the seating silliness. Let the statists play at symbolism. It’s a matter of time before tea partiers, bar the Pauls, slip between the sheets with their big-spending profligate pals.

Watch the formations—the twosomes and the threesomes into which the pols pair. That ought to tell you something about future alliances.

Pawlenty Palooza

Elections, Ethics, Free Markets, Morality, Politics, Taxation

How is it that in an atmosphere infused with empty prattle about transforming ethics in Washington—as if Sodom and Gomorrah could change without cataclysmic intervention—nobody says a thing about the procession of politicos who use their office to promote themselves and their products? Pelosi abused her abusive political position to flog a best-selling book about … herself. Republican Tim Pawlenty is after the same unjust deserts.

The main title of the former Minnesota governor’s new book is insufferably titled “Courage to Stand.” Pawlenty, I presume, is referring to his own indomitable grit. In a book studded with references to faith and the Almighty, you’d think there’d be some space for humility.

It goes without saying that the man is positioning himself for 2012.

In any event, politicians—all public servants—should be put on a very tight leash and prohibited from exploiting their already exploitative positions for yet more profit. Then again, you know that I believe government workers should be disqualified from voting. For one thing, they don’t pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. (Taxpayers pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy). For another, they are in the position to vote themselves higher and higher wages.

Which they do.

Why do you think “Oink Sector” salaries are double that of productive-sector wages? Market forces?

No; It’s the vote. The vermin have voted themselves the kind of raises you don’t see in the private economy, where productivity—output per unit of labor—dictates pay.

MORE about the Intrepid One HERE.