DANIEL GREENFIELD: THAT WEEK THAT WAS PART ONE
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THE DEAD BABY MEDIA
If the text on that one is too small for you, it’s a CNN piece headlined, “Why the Syrian regime is killing babies.”
There’s not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the BBC.
Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East knows quite well that parading around dead bodies is part of the Muslim ceremony of rallying for the next attack. These aren’t funerals, these are corpse parades and the corpses are often of unknown provenance, accompanied by calls for vengeance.
Sometimes the bodies are actually of those killed in an attack. Just as often they died of natural causes or are freshly dug up. Go to any Muslim conflict and you’ll find both sides brandishing bodies and sometimes even pieces of them.
Assad is quite capable of killing anyone, including babies, and has been doing it, but so have the Syrian rebels with the Muslim Brotherhood. And no matter how many dead baby stories the media runs, the regime and the rebels are equally bloodthirsty cretins willing to kill anyone and anything to stay in power.
In the Houla massacre, the rebels and the regime are both blaming each other. The rebels are accusing a civilian militia allied with the regime. The regime is accusing the rebels. There’s no way to know since one group of militia gunmen is much like another. And there’s plenty of Syrian soldiers fighting on both sides.
Obama’s UN Ambassador Susan Rice says that’s a “blatant lie”. It may be a lie, but the only blatant lie here is Rice’s pretense that she definitely knows one way or another. In regard to the regime version, she has said that, “there is no factual evidence … that would substantiate that rendition of events”. That’s true. But neither is there is any serious factual evidence for her view.
All we’re getting is material from biased insiders and confused outsiders. And both have an agenda. The Friends of Syria group and the rebels want a war. Syria, Iran and Russia want to avert a war. Obama and his media lapdogs are firmly on the side of war, which is why we’re getting dead baby stories from the dead baby media.
Don’t have a massacre pic from Syria now, just reuse an old from Iraq. When the goal is propaganda, then the truth doesn’t matter.
In Libya, the media told us that there was a monster on one side and angels on the other. After we got done killing the monster, the rebels turned out to be racist murdering monsters. Who knew?
While the media is foaming at the mouth over Houla, the Islamic Boko Haram group has killed over a thousand people, mostly Christians, over the last two years, in Nigeria.
In Sudan, the war criminal Bashir is continuing a genocidal campaign against South Sudan, and Obama is on the record as refusing to intervene there. Oh the media is “covering the story”, and by “covering the story” I mean it’s running multiple high profile articles attacking South Sudan for the death of a single teenager. Because we do have the best media that Saudi money can buy. And Saudi money is on the side of Sudan’s genocidal regime.
Meanwhile in the US a proposal to ban gender based abortions has been shot down. But some dead babies are more important than others.
There are no CNN pieces headlined, “Why the Sudanese regime is killing babies” or “Why Nancy Pelosi is killing babies.”
Dead baby stories are a tactical weapon used for a very specific purpose. Let’s get in our time machines and flash back to 1990 and the grandmother of all dead baby stories.
“My sister with my five-day old nephew traveled across the desert to safety. There is no milk available for the baby in Kuwait. They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert sand — and help came from Saudi Arabia.
“I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the Al-Idar Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The other women were from 20 to 30 years old.
“While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well.
Dead Kuwaiti babies helped create the argument for war. Except the story was made up. The testimony was faked. There was no Great Kuwaiti Baby Massacre of 1990. Just cowardly medical staff.
ABC World News quoted the director of Kuwait’s primary health care system, Dr. Mohammed Matar, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the maternity hospital, as saying the 312 babies died because no one stayed to care for them.
Apparently the only way we could have saved those Kuwaiti babies was by marching the doctors and nurses back at gunpoint to the hospital.
This isn’t about one massacre, but about a media that is selling a very specific kind of stories for reasons that hardly anyone bothers to question. Too many conservatives are actually jeering Obama for not having already gone to war in Syria. Well he’s going to. He’s just doing it at a slower pace than in Libya. Even the bozos running things now, know that even air bombardment of Syria won’t be a complete cakewalk, especially with Russia and Iran supplying and maybe even playing on the other side.
Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for a No Fly Zone, which under Obama is slang for gaining air superiority and destroying the enemy military on the ground, while operating under a UN mandate to end the violence.
But don’t take my word for it. The “Friends of Syria” group is laying plans on how to rebuild Syria.
The Working Group on Economic Recovery and Development of the Group of Friends of the Syrian People began talks in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi on a rescue plan for a post-conflict Syria similar to the Marshall Plan implemented in post-World War II Europe.
“It is a good time already to start now for a long-term perspective of the country once change comes in Syria. And we are convinced it will come,” the group’s German co-chairman, Clemens Von Goetze, said.
The international community and Syrians must be “well prepared” and the international community must make its “plans for donor coordination” and prepare “plans together with the Syrian opposition,” Goetze told AFP.
When you’re planning reconstruction for after a government that has no intention of leaving falls, you must be either very optimistic about the chances of the rebels or optimistic about what three months of bombings can do to Syria’s military.
This sort of thing is not what people who are helplessly contemplating massacres do with their time.
7. The Co-Chairs declared that they have made preparations to set up a secretariat of the Working Group to support the implementation of the work plans and to facilitate the ongoing activities of the Working Group. The activities of the secretariat shall include in particular, but are not limited to,
supporting the Co-Chairs in the preparations of meetings of the Working Group; coordinating the implementation of the work plans developed by the Basket leaders; and facilitating the cooperation between all stakeholders in preparing for the post-conflict economic recovery and development of Syria. The secretariat will shortly be established, and will be funded jointly by Germany and the United Arab Emirates for its first year of operation. Mr Gunnar Waelzholz has been designated to head the secretariat in its initial phase. The Participants welcomed this step.
8. Members of the Syrian opposition led by the representatives of the Syrian National Council introduced their National Economic Vision for the New Syria. They strongly welcomed the establishment of the Working Group and committed themselves to cooperate closely with it and to jointly prepare for the economic reconstruction and development of post-conflict Syria. All Participants welcomed the work on the National Economic Vision for the New Syria as part of developing a credible alternative to policies and practices of the regime.
This is what you do when you know the war is going to go your way.
Speaking of dead baby stories, Saddam “Baby Killer” Hussein lost his horns around the time that Bush II decided to go after him. Suddenly we were the “Baby Killers”.
THE BEST FOREIGN POLICY SAUDI MONEY CAN BUY
In this week’s Front Page article, I take a look at the Obama Administration’s double standard on Syrian, Libya and Bahrain.
While the Obama administration is dancing around the edges of arming the Syrian rebels, it is also arming the Bahraini government. While the United States participates in the Friends of Syria group, whose goal is to overthrow the Syrian government and replace it with the Muslim Brotherhood, it has renewed security cooperation with Bahrain. While Syrian diplomats were being expelled from Washington, the Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa came to Washington and met with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta—nearly every important foreign policy figure in the administration with the exception of Obama.
The optics of having Obama shake hands with a tyrant while handing out Medals of Freedom might have come off as a little tacky, even from an administration that jumps when the House of Saud tells it to, without asking how high. But while the Crown Prince may not have left with Obama’s fingerprints on his palm, he is leaving with Seahawk helicopters, AMRAAM missiles, F-16 parts, a frigate and an option on some armored personnel carriers, for the next time things get hot down in Manama.
The entire article is available at Front Page as “The Best Foreign Policy Saudi Money Can Buy.”
BRING ON THE BAIN
Some conservative bloggers are celebrating what they see as the failure of the Bain attacks, but the celebrations are premature. This is not the season for populist attacks, this is fundraising season. The Bain attacks alienated some funding sources, so they’re going on hold, but they’ll be back before it’s time to head for the voting booths.
REALITY HAS A WELL KNOWN RACIAL BIAS
The Justice Department is demanding that Florida stop purging its rolls of allegedly ineligible voters because the process has not been cleared under the federal Voting Rights Act…
Earlier today, Secretary of State Kent Detzner sent a letter the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stating the state was still unable to access to the database. He asked Secretary Janet Napolitano to help.
A Department of Homeland Security official said there are a “number of legal and operational challenges” to granting the state access.
Chief among these challenges is the fact that Napolitano’s job depends on not granting that access so her boss can win the election.
But clearly the law is racist because the majority of non-citizen voters identified on the rolls in Florida are… Hispanic.
About 58 percent of those identified as potential noncitizens are Hispanics, Florida’s largest ethnic immigrant population. They make up just 13 percent of the overall 11.3 million active registered voters. Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal, the analysis of a list of more than 2,600 potential noncitizens shows.
In another notorious example of reality having a racial bias, it turns out that (and get this), non-citizens in Florida are more likely to be Hispanic Democrats than White Republicans. The only possible explanation for this outrage can either be statistical inevitability or racism.
I, along with serious thinkers at MSNBC, ThinkProgress and the loony bin, throw my full weight behind the racism explanation, and demand that Florida immediately launch a search to discover an equivalent number of white Republican non-citizens.
But this is even bigger. Statistics have also found that the majority of illegal aliens deported to Mexico are Hispanic Democrats, and only three have been found to be White Republicans. This is a clear case of voter suppression and ethnic cleansing. Until the Federal government brings its racial deportation quotas into line so that the exact same number of White Republicans are deported to Mexico, as Hispanic Democrats, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann will begin spelling America with three KKK’s.
THIS IS KIND OF A THING
Faiz Shakir, ThinkProgress’ longtime Editor in Chief, VP at the Center for American Progress and the new senior advisor and director of new media for Nancy Pelosi… may have helped raise money for Hamas back in college.
It’s an exclusive story I wrote for FPM and it has all sorts of troubling implications.
HIS was co-founded by Yusuf Ibish, the father of Hussein Ibish, who is a veteran pro-terrorist and anti-Israel activist, and Syed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic philosopher and opponent of the United States and Israel, who claims to be able to trace his ancestry back to Mohammed. During Faiz Shakir’s time there, HIS was presided over by Zayed Yasin, who became infamous for his “My American Jihad” speech.
In 2000, The Harvard Islamic Society held an Islamic Awareness Week and Faiz Shakir served as the co-chair for the week’s events. One of those events included a fundraiser for the Holy Land Foundation, a group which acted as the fundraising arm for Hamas in the United States. As co-chair of the week’s events, Shakir would have unquestionably been involved in the selection of organizations to donate to.
BOMBS FOR BROTHERS
Romney has a policy position on Syria. Arm the Muslim Brotherhood. No seriously.
The United States should work with partners to organize and arm Syrian opposition groups so they can defend themselves. The bloodshed in Haoula makes clear that our goal must be a new Syrian government, one that contributes to peace and stability in the Middle East and that truly represents the brave Syrian people.
Hey George, welcome back.
So Romney’s plan is to arm the rebels with some sort of purely defensive weapons and then work toward a goal of replacing Assad with our “international partners”.
That’s already the policy of the Obama Administration, just a more extreme version. Even Hillary Clinton hasn’t been crazy enough to start arming people who are going to be using those weapons against us a few years from now.
It’s bad news when Romney’s proposal is a more extreme version of Obama’s and even more irresponsible. But don’t worry, there’s an even crazier Republican on the loose in Syria.
Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona is a vocal proponent of arming the rebels.
“There’s always, ‘We don’t know who they are.’ I’ll tell you who they are. They’re a direct repudiation of Al Qaeda,” McCain said three weeks ago. “Al Qaeda believes in acts of terror to change governments. These people believe in peaceful demonstration.”
There’s so much stupid here that my head hurts. There’s more stupid here than in every Bush speech about the glories of Iraqi democracy.
McCain’s idea of a responsible foreign policy is arming people who detonate car bombs and are affiliated with an ideology that thought Nazi Germany had a few good ideas, without knowing anything more about them… because he’s convinced that they’re really peaceful protesters. Even though they’re fighting one side of a civil war.
But… but they believe in peaceful demonstrations.
Let’s take another time trip back one year.
The revolt against Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi could stall unless the rebels battling his regime receive weapons and increased air support, influential US Senator John McCain warned Wednesday.
“I think we could do the same thing that we did in the Afghan struggle against the Russians. There are ways to get weapons in without direct US supplying,” he said, referring to US covert action in the 1980s.
No need to worry. The LIFG, affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, were also a repudiation of Al-Qaeda.
Let’s just drop weapons all over the Muslim world. The odds are they would be less likely to make their way into the hands of terrorists than the McCain-Graham “Arms for the Jihad” approach. And Romney really needs to stop taking his cue from hacks who still think the Arab Spring was the best thing since Maliki.
AND I PROBABLY KNOW MORE ABOUT ISLAM THAN OBAMA…
In the meeting, Obama reportedly boasted about his knowledge of Judaism, telling the leaders that he thinks he knows more “about Judaism” than all past presidents. He said he gained this knowledge of Judaism from reading.
“Obama … stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it,”
Do you know how much Obama knows about Judaism? He knows so much about Judaism that he commemorated two weeks too early. (Similar booboos did not occur with Islamic holidays.)
Do you know how much Obama knows about Judaism? He knows that Jews don’t care about Jerusalem.
Do you know how much Obama knows about Judaism? Beats me, but his speechwriter is totally on the case.
Prof. Jonathan Sarna got a call from the White House yesterday morning.
The topic of Sarna’s new book from Nextbook Press “When General Grant Expelled the Jews” was going to be discussed during the president’s speech at that evening’s hot Jewish D.C. ticket—not the party celebrating the 25th anniversary of Congressman Barney Frank’s coming out, but the White House reception for Jewish Heritage Month.
The speechwriter that contacted Sarna wanted to clarify some facts (like where the hell is the military department of Tennessee), but Sarna also suggested that the President note that Grant had made amends later in his life—a suggestion that made it into the speech.
Luckily O has speechwriters to do his readings on Judaism for him. But here’s another book topic, “When Barack Hussein Obama Tried to Expel the Jews from East Jerusalem.”
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