Category Archives: Middle East

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.

Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights, Israel, Middle East, Nationhood, Regulation

The following is an excerpt from my new WND.COM column, “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn” (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=259413):

“Members of the American chattering class have been tripping over one another to show off their solidarity with the popular uprising in Egypt.

After being hammered left and right for his hands-off approach to Egyptians’ demand for democracy, Barack Obama complied, and waxed fat about those universal rights that belong to the Egyptian people.

You know, the same rights sundered stateside by U.S. representatives – who’ve designated for the Great American Unwashed special ‘free speech zones’ where they may lawfully assemble, and who’ve proposed emergency Internet-killing and net-neutrality laws, individual health-care mandates, and on and on. For the edification of Egyptians Against Freedoms Flouted in America, it has been estimated that our federal government may use the criminal process to enforce over 300,000 federal regulations. Hey, you could be an outlaw and you don’t know it!

… What remains of the rights to property and self-ownership in the soft tyranny that is the USA is regulated and taxed to the hilt. …

… More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forebears bequeathed to them are labeled demented and dangerous. I’ve yet to hear liberty-deprived peoples the world over stand up for the tea-party patriots. When they do – I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf. …”

The complete column is “Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATED: Self-Defense Honored In Egypt (Reader Horrified By Hoppe)

Feminism, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Middle East

Not a word has the non-libertarian mainstream media said about the spontaneous order that has sprung from the disorder in Egypt. I’m referring to what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls “the private production of defense”:

“Private-property owners, cooperation based on the division of labor, and market competition can and should provide defense from aggression.” (http://mises.org/journals/scholar/hoppe.pdf)

No sooner had the chaos erupted in Egypt than individuals acted to protect their families and private property.

Volunteers formed neighborhood watch groups to patrol the streets. They also set up checkpoints to stop criminals and mischief-makers from gaining access to private property.

Having endured the disparaging comments of an American policeman while he was fingerprinting me when I applied for my firearm license—I was amazed by the response of the Egyptian military to an armed, proactive citizenry:

“‘The military encourages neighborhood youth to defend their property and their honor,” the army said in a statement.

Honor is central to the macho Arab culture. “It is better to die with honor than live with humiliation,” goes an Arab saying. It is considered cowardly to fail to protect one’s kin and possessions. These, naturally, are timeless truths and values that transcend culture and religions. But men in the US have been neutered (often by their left-liberal women). Some liberal men would sooner see their homes robbed and their women imperiled than abandon pacifism. The most the typical Western man will do to defend hearth and home is to dial 911… and wait… and wait… . (And when tragedy strikes, they become eloquent spokespersons for everything but self-defense.)

There is almost nothing more immoral and unnatural than a liberal male.

As night follows day, the progressive policies enacted by such people lead to a regressive society.

UPDATED (Feb. 2): To the “contemplationist” who is horrified by Hoppe: I’m a minarchist as was Nozick, but I’m also a big Hoppe fan. Hoppe’s writings don’t horrify me; they delight.

The Arab Street: Militant or Moderate?

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Israel, Middle East

The Arab Street has always been more militant than its leaders—that is if moderation is conflated, in the Arab world, with less religiosity and a less belligerent position toward Israel and the US. To some, this might be an arguable point. But as someone who lived in Israel when the heroic Anwar Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset (and paid for it with his life), it seems a fair point to make: Sadat (a hero to many ex-Israelis like myself) was—and Mubarak is—more moderate than the pan-Arabists who preceded them (Google “Pan-Arabism before Nasser”).

The chants that rise above the fists punching the air in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria are often about—and against—Mubarak’s patience with “the Jewish State,” which, naturally, “controls the USA.”

I have no idea who’ll follow Mubarak, but if Lebanon is any indication, then the Islamist faction will be influential given its “persuasive” tactics.

This does not mean that the uprising in Egypt is not democratic and, as such, a legitimate expression of the will of the majority. It is also true, however, that Arab dynastic rulers have, for the most, been more moderate than the seething masses they’ve rules with an iron fist.