Tag: New York Times

To The New York Times , Palestinian Torture Is Just an Afterthought

Last week, the warbloggers were all up in arms when the Aksa Martyrs Brigades — a Palestinian extremist group associated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement — executed 35 year-old Ikhklas Khouli for collaborating with Israel.

Such extrajudicial murders are bad enough, but in this case Ms. Khouli’s son, Bakir, said that he was tortured into providing incriminating evidence against his mother. Photos posted on news sites such as at Yahoo! of Bakir Khouli showed his back covered in welts just as if he had been repeatedly hit with an electrical cable just as he claimed. Khouli said in interviews that by the time the Aksa Martyrs Brigades torturers were done with him, he would have said anything to stop the interrogation. And what he did say — falsely he claims — was that his mother was a collaborator.

And so, being the sort of upstanding movement concerned about human rights, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades gave her a show trial and then took Ms. Khoui outside and shot her dead.

What is interesting is how The New York Times chose to cover the story. Serge Schmemann has a 1,453 word article about Ms. Khouli’s execution and the execution of another female “collaborator.” But rather than a story about horrific torture of alleged suspects by Palestinian groups, the article largely offers the Aksa Martyrs Brigades the opportunity to defend its actions. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades don’t want to torture and murder people, but the Israelis force them into it, you see (a nutty Israeli peace group actually took this absurdity to its logical conclusion by saying Israel was to blame when Palestinians terrorists torture and murder suspected Palestinian collaborators).

In fact, it is not until the reader has trudged through more than 1,300 words of Schmemann’s dry prose that the possibility of torture is even introduced. Even then with three pitiful paragraphs at the end to cover a major part of the story, Schmemann can’t bring himself to actually use the word “torture”. Instead Schmemann frames the story by noting that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades claimed that Bakri Khouli testified against his mother voluntarily, but that the details of Bakri’s own account “tell a different story.”

Can you imagine, even for a moment, what would happen if a photo of a prisoner at Guantanamo was released showing the prisoner’s back covered in welts? Do you think The New York Times would relegate that fact to the final three paragraphs of a long story dominated by comments from Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft about just how guilty they are certain the prisoner really was and that this was the only way to deal with such witnesses? Hell, if Bakri Khouli had been tortured by the Israeli’s rather than by fellow Palestinians, this would be front page news for weeks and by now the United Nations would be calling for at least three international investigative teams to be put together to examine the crime.

It is odd that the Times and the rest of the world seem to think that when the Israeli’s accidentally kill civilians while trying to eliminate terrorists who are illegally placing themselves in civilian populations, that this is worthy of front page news for days on end. When Palestinian terrorists close to the president of the Palestinian Authority decide to torture children and execute women,however, even The New York Times can’t use the “t” word and the story is apparently of little interest around the world since it doesn’t fit the dominant media paradigm of Israeli oppressors vs. Palestinian victims.

Disgusting.

Source:

For Arab Informers, Death; For the Executioners, Justice. Serge Schmemann, The New York Times, September 1, 2002.

Jonah Goldberg on Executing Retarded People

Unlike Jonah Goldberg, I do not support capital punishment, but Goldberg is absolutely right when he argues that the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding the execution of low IQ individuals is inconsistent with the fact that we regularly grant both rights and responsibilities to such individuals. Attacking a New York Times editorial in favor of the ruling, Goldberg writes,

If liberal editorialists want to say that retarded people cannot be held accountable for their actions, fine. But let’s be consistent about this standard. The retarded have voting rights. They can marry, have children and in some cases drive cars.

. . .How can we on the one hand applaud giving major responsibilities to the retarded but on the other hand recoil in horror at the suggestion we hold them responsible when they fail?

Orin Judd on the Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t FBI

The other day I complained that the second-guessing of the FBI’s decisions prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was somewhat unfair because of the mixed messages that the FBI receives from the press and American public. Orin Judd digs up the sort of thing I was talking about by examining a couple of columns by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

In a November 2001 column, after an attack that killed a few thousand people, Dowd warned the public to be skeptical of Ashcroft’s edicts,

But even as we cut the guy some slack, we have to be really skeptical about his assertions of power. It was telling that the first resistance to his edict to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men came from police chiefs objecting to racial profiling. We’re trying to trust someone whose instincts once did not inspire universal trust to rethink the way civil liberties will be treated for a generation.

But then, this weekend, Dowd had this to say about the Coleen Rowley memo (emphasis added),

Now we know the truth: The 9/11 terrorists could have been stopped, if everyone in the F.B.I. had been as hard-working and quick-witted as Special Agent Rowley. Or if the law enforcement agencies had not been so inept, obstructionist, arrogant, antiquated, bloated and turf-conscious — and timid about racial profiling. As The Economist notes, “There is a big difference between policemen picking on speeding black drivers and spies targeting Arabs who might harbor plans to set off nuclear bombs.”

Huh? If the FBI had acted on that Phoenix agent’s memo and began interviewing all Arab immigrants taking flight training, does anybody really think the New York Times and Maureen Dowd would have done anything but scream to the heavens about the evils of racial profiling?

The reaction of civil libertarians about the recent revelations has been very disappointing. Such people commonly throw around Ben Franklin’s adage that “Those that would sacrifice their freedom for safety will find they inherit neither,” and yet the second a few terrorists manage to exploit surveillance holes to carry off a major terrorist attack, suddenly everybody’s running around wondering why the FBI wasn’t doing more intensive monitoring and racial profiling. (And, of course, then they turn around and freak out when Ashcroft says the FBI can do a Google search.)

Personally, I think people like Dowd are vastly overestimating the odds that the FBI would have been able to prevent 9/11 or some version of it. Even if the FBI searches Zacarias Moussaoui’s computer and devotes the necessary agents to search flight schools, would they have been able to stop the 9/11 plot? I doubt it, and even if they had, it is simply impossible to protect an open society such as ours from this sort of terrorist attack. Resources would be better devoted to finding and killing terrorists abroad as well as cutting off the lifeblood of money and supplies that the terrorists need (which, at the moment, still is too politically touchy to do since it would mean isolating a number of states which are officially U.S. allies).

Stop Comparing Videogame Sales to Hollywood Box Office

When anyone in the media wants to make the video game industry appear bigger than it is, they inevitably compare total sales of video games to total Hollywood box office receipts. John Markoff slips in this bogus comparison in an articles in today’s New York Times. According to Markoff,

Sales of game software alone reached $6.4 billion last year, putting the game industry in striking distance of Hollywood, which had box-office sales of $8.35 billion in 2001. And video game executives predict this year will be even stronger.

So what? A better comparison would be comparing game software sold and rented to total revenues from video and DVD sales and rentals. The reason no one ever cites that figure in comparison is that sales and rentals of VHS/DVD totaled more than $16.8 billion in 2001.

If you include video game systems, accessories, software and other items, total videogame-related revenue is at $9.4 billion. Sounds impressive until you realize that Americans spent almost $3.2 billion last year just buying VCRs and DVD players.

There is simply no comparison between the video game and movie industries as far as revenues are concerned. Total revenues to movie studios is in the high $30 billion range.

Source:


Recession? Don’t Tell the Video Game Industry. John Markoff, New York Times, May 24, 2002.

Don’t Blame the Internet for Global Village Idiocy

Writing in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman argues that in some parts of the world the Internet is spreading and promoting intolerance. Friedman quotes an Indonesian working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta who had just visited an Islamic extremist area of Indonesia,

“For the first time I saw signs on the streets there saying things like, ‘The only solution to the Arab-Israel conflict is jihad — if you are true Muslim, register yourself to be a volunteer.’ I heard people saying, ‘We have to do something, otherwise the Christians or Jews will kill us.’ When we talked to people to find out where [they got these ideas], they said from the Internet. They took for granted that anything they learned from the Internet is true. They believed in a Jewish conspiracy and that 4,000 Jews were warned not to come to work at the World Trade Center [on Sept. 11]. It was on the Internet.”

From this Friedman concludes that,

At its worst, it [the Internet] can make people dumber faster than any media tool we’re ever had. The lie that 4,000 Jews were warned not to go into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was spread entirely over the Internet and is now thoroughly believed in the Muslim world. Because the Internet has an aura of “technology” surrounding it, the uneducated believe information from it even more. They don’t realize that the Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer: an electronic conduit for untreated, unfiltered information.

About the only thing that Friedman is right about is that the Internet makes it possible to spread ideas — whether good or bad, true or false — more quickly than at any other time in history. But other than that is it really that different from media of old? Of course not.

Yes, the myth about Jews being warned off the World Trade Center certainly spread faster, but its widespread acceptance was due to the same mix of credulity and bigotry that made the Protocols of the Elders of Zion such a hit among anti-Semites. In fact this 19th century forgery is still regularly reprinted in Arab newspapers who are also not above reporting variations on centuries-old blood libel myths.

Similarly, entirely without the benefit of the Internet, not a small number of people in Latin America believed that rich American tourists occasionally visited their countries in order to receive organ transplants from babies kidnapped for just this purpose. This paranoia fear and mistrust of other human beings long predates the Internet.

Moreover, Friedman is being condescending when referring to the popularity of such bizarre ideas with the uneducated masses in Muslim countries. Has Friedman really missed the popularity of conspiracy theories in American popular culture? Not a few educated Americans believe that Jews were warned away from the World Trade Center. Hell, one of the members of the U.S. House all but said that she believes President George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attack and may have profited from it.

Idiocy does indeed seem to be a global phenomenon, as Friedman describes it, but the blame should lie with the prejudices and lazy reasoning of people that has been a millenia-long problem rather than finding an easy scapegoat in the form of the relatively recent Internet (where such pernicious ideas are frequently debunked for people willing to look at them rationally).

Source:

Global village idiocy. Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, May 12, 2002.

Practice What You Preach

Imagine Dave Winer’s reaction if this press release read,

“We are pleased to offer Weblog creators the ability to post headlines from NYTimes.com with Pyra’s software,” said Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital. “Weblogs are an increasingly popular form of self-publishing within a highly influential community, and are therefore an important distribution channel for our high-quality content.”

I’m sure you can come up with a rant about dinosaurs, clueless old media, lockin and lockout, the importance of standards, yada yada yada.

I should add that I have nothing at all against exclusive deals. If I could arrange for an exclusive arrangement where only I got to run New York Times headlines I would do it in a second. It is not an issue of a particular business deal but rather about hypocrisy about the way to do business in general.