Category Archives: Media

“Rhymes With Fagin”

Anti-Semitism, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East

That’s the title of the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens article describing last week’s TIME magazine cover story, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”:

“If you’re a reader of a certain age, you might understand the headline.

In May 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected Israel’s prime minister, Time magazine set out to describe the man, beginning with the correct pronunciation of his last name: ‘Rhymes with Fagin,’ the editors explained, invoking the character from Oliver Twist. Modern Israeli leader; archetypal Jewish lowlife: Get it?

The magazine’s other characterization of Begin was that he was ‘dangerous.’ A year later, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.

Maybe there’s something in the magazine’s DNA. This week, readers were treated to a cover story by Karl Vick titled, suggestively, ‘Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.’ That’s one way for Time to address the current state of negotiations between the Jewish state and its neighbors, which otherwise barely rate a mention in the article.

Mr. Vick’s essay draws on the testimony of a pair of real estate agents, a columnist for a left-leaning newspaper, and a few others to explain that Israelis are too blissed-out by the fruits of their economic prosperity to pay much attention to the subject of peace, much less whatever sad things may transpire among their neighbors in Ramallah and Gaza. ‘We’re not really that into the peace process,’ says Gadi Baltiansky, a peace activist quoted in the story. ‘We are really, really into the water sports.'”

It’s hard to say what to make of this, since the article concludes by contradicting its central thesis: ‘For all the surf breaks, the palms and the coffee, the conflict is never truly done, never far away,’ Mr. Vick writes.

Indeed it isn’t: Nearly every Israeli has a child, sibling, boyfriend or parent in the army. Nearly every Israeli has been to the funeral of a fallen soldier, or a friend killed in a terrorist attack. Most Israeli homes and businesses come equipped with safe rooms or bomb shelters; every Israeli owns a gas mask. The whole country exists under the encroaching shadows of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the prospect of a nuclear Iran. How many Americans, to say nothing of Europeans, can say the same about their own lives?” READ ON.

[SNIP]

What TIME cretin Karl Vick is describing, and depicting with the aid photos of good looking Israelis on the beach, is a plucky people engaged in LIFE; working, playing, making money (horrors!), and having fun, in the face of daily existential threats. This is to be admired not condemned.

My daughter, who was decidedly not pro-Israel when she visited there, came back enthralled with the country and its people (she wrote about it HERE). Never before had she met such tough, positive, feisty sorts (and certainly not in the Jewish school she once attended in South Africa. Israelis and diaspora Jews: never the twain shall meet).

As admirable as is the Israeli absorption with the good life, I’m afraid that regular Israelis need to learn to be more guarded with creeps likes Vick of TIME. And maybe to revive some of that founding patriotism, once again.

UPDATE II: Megyn Kelly’s Mesmerism

Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Media, Regulation

Dr. Adam Dorin, president of the Tea Party Doctors, was on with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly to expose the American Medical Association (with its “white-coat representation at the White House”), for selling out America’s doctors to her statists.

Dr. Dorin made some invaluable points about healthscare, such as that the AMA represents at best 17 percent of practicing physicians; that it has an “exclusive [copyrighted] coding deal with the US government,” compelling all doctors to bill in a certain way; that most doctors do not favor this legislation, and that, by legislative fiat, ObamaCare “elevates non-physicians (those big fat, nurses and their assistants we all dread) and other auxiliary staff, to perform the role traditionally performed by physicians. The addition of 30 millions new free loaders, moreover, will necessitate the importation of Third World, non-American trained doctors.

Now Kelly is a sharp lady, head-and-shoulders above your regular Foxette (and isn’t that a gorgeous blue dress she is wearing? Classic.). But she disappointed this time, taking a sudden turn away from the fact-packed, rational discourse of Dorin, to impugn The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons which publishes his op-eds (they once published one or two of mine, as well).

Apparently the AAPS published a piece about Obama’s oratory—which certainly has a fuzzy, hypnotic quality—having induced in voters an hypnotic state. Jumping from that factual observation to the conclusion that Americans were more somnambulist than normal when they elected BHO is nonsensical. It was my impression, however, that Kelly was mocking the former observation rather than the latter conclusion.

Either way, if this article was of interest to Kelly, she ought to have devoted a seperate segment to it, rather than taint Dorin’s perfectly straightforward position by implying he kept dubious company. The Left is praising Kelly. They are wrong. Guilt by association is an error of logic when deployed to refute an argument.

The AAPS is an avowedly pro-liberty organization, whose representatives have appeared on Fox News. Jane Orient, Executive Director of the AAPS, has done an immense amount of good for free medicine in this country.

UPDATE I (Sept. 12): My plucky physician, who had recently gone solo, has just informed me she is giving up her independence to join a group. Managing the business side of the practice had become too daunting, and will become even more so as Obama-Care regulations kick in.

I anticipate notice, any day, from my insurance, informing us of “changes” pursuant to Obama Care. Once the insurance providers and the swarms of attorneys they employ go over the Bill, they are bound to find ways to shove the insured into the government health care gulag.

UPDATE II (Sept. 13): Dr. Orient has responded to Ms. Kelly, and provided a hyperlink at the AAPS to this Barely A Blog post.

UPDATE II: Megyn Kelly's Mesmerism

Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Media, Regulation

Dr. Adam Dorin, president of the Tea Party Doctors, was on with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly to expose the American Medical Association (with its “white-coat representation at the White House”), for selling out America’s doctors to her statists.

Dr. Dorin made some invaluable points about healthscare, such as that the AMA represents at best 17 percent of practicing physicians; that it has an “exclusive [copyrighted] coding deal with the US government,” compelling all doctors to bill in a certain way; that most doctors do not favor this legislation, and that, by legislative fiat, ObamaCare “elevates non-physicians (those big fat, nurses and their assistants we all dread) and other auxiliary staff, to perform the role traditionally performed by physicians. The addition of 30 millions new free loaders, moreover, will necessitate the importation of Third World, non-American trained doctors.

Now Kelly is a sharp lady, head-and-shoulders above your regular Foxette (and isn’t that a gorgeous blue dress she is wearing? Classic.). But she disappointed this time, taking a sudden turn away from the fact-packed, rational discourse of Dorin, to impugn The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons which publishes his op-eds (they once published one or two of mine, as well).

Apparently the AAPS published a piece about Obama’s oratory—which certainly has a fuzzy, hypnotic quality—having induced in voters an hypnotic state. Jumping from that factual observation to the conclusion that Americans were more somnambulist than normal when they elected BHO is nonsensical. It was my impression, however, that Kelly was mocking the former observation rather than the latter conclusion.

Either way, if this article was of interest to Kelly, she ought to have devoted a seperate segment to it, rather than taint Dorin’s perfectly straightforward position by implying he kept dubious company. The Left is praising Kelly. They are wrong. Guilt by association is an error of logic when deployed to refute an argument.

The AAPS is an avowedly pro-liberty organization, whose representatives have appeared on Fox News. Jane Orient, Executive Director of the AAPS, has done an immense amount of good for free medicine in this country.

UPDATE I (Sept. 12): My plucky physician, who had recently gone solo, has just informed me she is giving up her independence to join a group. Managing the business side of the practice had become too daunting, and will become even more so as Obama-Care regulations kick in.

I anticipate notice, any day, from my insurance, informing us of “changes” pursuant to Obama Care. Once the insurance providers and the swarms of attorneys they employ go over the Bill, they are bound to find ways to shove the insured into the government health care gulag.

UPDATE II (Sept. 13): Dr. Orient has responded to Ms. Kelly, and provided a hyperlink at the AAPS to this Barely A Blog post.

Goon Meets Supercilious

Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Pseudo-intellectualism, Republicans, The Zeitgeist

Put evil and supercilious together and what do you get? “Parker Spitzer,” the new current-events program CNN is about to launch staring Eliot Spitzer, whose most elevated job was as a John, and Kathleen Parker, a pseudo-intellectual in the Peggy Noonan and David Brooks mode, also a member of the “Soft Left (otherwise known as Conservatives).”

This just goes to show that statists, and individuals with low moral character and banal ideas will always have a prime place on American TV and in its restricted market place of ideas.