RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the public are asked whether Arabs should be profiled for security reasons, why should it be surprising if a very slight majority of the public think they should be? A large number of terrorist incidents have occurred in the Arab and Western world in recent years.

If, at some point, large numbers of, say, Czechs, Poles and Hungarians had started to export terrorism across the planet, a majority of the public in a country such as Britain might be relied on to call for increased security checks on people of Eastern European origin. In the meantime, the public would appear to be guilty of nothing other than reading the news.

Few newspaper commentaries bothered to wonder whether the people who had decapitated a soldier on the streets of London might not be responsible for the negative sentiments that followed. For Arab News, any such explanation would be an impossibility.

In August, the polling company YouGov conducted an opinion survey among 2,000 members of the British public. The poll, carried out in partnership with Arab News, the Saudi paper owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, was published September 25.

As might be expected from such a publication, the questions asked of the British public, and the answers received, suited a particular line of argument: the survey evidently sought to find evidence of “Islamophobic” attitudes. It duly found that 41% of the British public polled said that Arab immigrants and refugees had not added anything to society and 55% agreed in principle with the profiling of Arabs for security reasons. The Arab News/YouGov poll also found that 72% of the British public think that “Islamophobia” is getting worse in the UK.

Alongside this report came the surprising finding that a similar number of British people (7 in 10) believe that “the rise in Islamophobic comments by politicians and others are fuelling hate crime.”

All of this presents a fascinating as well as slightly confused picture. Why should the same percentage of the public believe that “Islamophobia” is getting worse but that politicians in Britain are fuelling it? Let alone that politicians are fuelling an alleged rise in “hate crime” — the upsurge in which is constantly promised yet mercifully never occurs? It is clearly the aim of Arab News — as with many other media companies from the same region — to present Britain as a bigoted and unenlightened place — a country filled with primitive and medieval views of “the other”. As opposed to, say, an enlightened and welcoming family fiefdom like that of Saudi Arabia, where attitudes towards foreigners and incomers are renowned the world over for their tolerance and good humour.

If it was possible to have genuinely free and fair polling in Saudi Arabia, carried out by a foreign newspaper and without any government interference, then doubtless the world would learn only of the amount that outsiders had brought into the country, and the extent to which security checks on any people coming to the country from outside Saudi should be entirely absent.

The idea, of course, is ridiculous. What is more ridiculous still is the idea — consistent from a range of opinion polls over recent years — that the British people, like those across Europe and America, are in the grip of some profoundly irrational mania. If the public are asked whether Arabs should be profiled for security reasons, why should it be surprising if a very slight majority of the public think they should be? A large number of terrorist incidents have occurred in the Arab and Western world in recent years, and despite the considerable diversity of the perpetrators of Islamist attacks across the globe, a larger number of terrorists in recent years have emerged from the Arab world than, say, Eastern Europe. If, at some point, large numbers of Czechs, Poles and Hungarians had started to export terrorism across the planet, a majority of the public in a country such as Britain might be relied on to call for increased security checks on people of Eastern European origin. In the meantime, the public would appear to be guilty of nothing other reading the news. The central conceit of a poll such as this, however, is, of course, to present the whole issue of terrorism as a misunderstanding by the general public.

When did the New York Times get taken over by the National Lampoon? It happened so slowly I didn’t even notice.

As has been widely noticed, the Times has been running a series of articles related to the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and it is obvious that the Times is still sad that the whole show came to an ignominious end in the early 1990s. (After all, there was one wall that the Times actually liked—at least their Pulitzer prize winning “reporter” Walter Duranty.) The series has produced gems such as this:

Hubba, hubba, comrade.

Monday the Times outdid itself:

Memo to the Times: I suspect the “big dreams” of Chinese women was an end to Communist tyranny, which wasn’t just a “flaw,” but its essence.

Imagine a headline that started, “For all of its flaws, slavery. . .”

“Anthony Bourdain, host of ‘Parts Unknown’ on liberal CNN, said last week that he would poison Donald Trump if the celebrity chef was asked to cater a peace summit between the President and Kim Jong Un….’Hemlock,’ Bourdain simply replied when asked by TMZ what he would serve Trump and the North Korean dictator.”

OK, so Bourdain was joking. Har–Har! But here’s Bourdain from interview right after Trump’s election:

“I will never eat in his (Donald Trump’s) restaurant. I have utter contempt for him, utter and complete contempt… I’m not going. I’m not going.” (Anthony Bourdain, Eater.)

Bourdain sure seems sniffish about patronizing (much less publicizing) restaurants belonging to deviants from his political worldview. OK, fine. That’s his privilege.

But what does this say about the “principled” celebrity chef’s sniveling propagandizing for restaurants owned by the racist, mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring Castro-Family-and- Military-Crony Crime-Syndicate (habitually and grotesquely mislabeled as “Cuba” by Bourdain’s employers at The Travel Channel and CNN)?

“Yes, Go to Cuba!” gushed Bourdain at the end of a show he did from Cuba in 2011. So let’s hand it to this shameless and sniveling hypocrite, to this celebrity who wears his political principles and social-conscience on his shirtsleeve. He’s simply a corporate shill—but for one of the most profitable and unscrupulous corporations in modern history: the Castro Family.

In fact Anthony Bourdain– this “hipster” chef—has headlined several propaganda junkets (his shows from Cuba) to help secure the financial lifeline for a Stalinist regime that jailed and tortured the longest suffering black, female and gay political prisoners in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.

Bourdain’s bootlicking services for the financial welfare of the terror-sponsors who craved to nuke his nation also included –not only a tourism commercial for the Castro family!—but also an official “Tony Bourdain’s Guide to Cuba.” Along with a handy-dandy link from Bourdain’s page to the Castro-regime-owned Hotel Nacional– for quick and easy reservations! But let some celebrity chef plug a U.S. restaurant and Bourdain turns up his nose and sneers at such a “sell-out.”

In case you hadn’t heard, amigos: As Venezuela’s oil subsidies dry up, Castro’s Stalinist regime is increasingly living off tourism. And Cuba’s Intelligence and Military sector owns 80 per cent of the tourism industry, as documented in Congressional testimony by retired Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba analyst, Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons.

Those charming, smiling hosts who escorted Bourdain around Castro’s fiefdom were all regime apparatchiks. Immediately upon applying for his Cuban visa, well before Bourdain even set foot in Cuba, Castro’s intelligence had Bourdain completely sussed and his future escorts completely briefed. The procedure started the day he applied for Cuban visa, as also explained by Lieut. Col. Christopher Simmons. That your official “guides” while officially visiting a Communist nation were regime apparatchiks was common knowledge even to proto-imbeciles all during the Cold War. Bourdain was born in 1956.

The company that manages the Russian news outlet R.T. (Russia Today) announced this week that it had received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice requiring it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The Russian news outlet Sputnik International may be next.

FARA was passed in 1938 to require entities or individuals who represent foreign governments to disclose their relationships, activities, and finances. Registration would not stop R.T. from broadcasting in the U.S. or censor its programs – it is a paperwork requirement – but it would formally label R.T. an arm of the Russian government rather than an independent media source. This, in essence, would tell Americans that news from R.T. should be considered suspect.

As a practical matter, all news – particularly from government-sponsored sources – should be considered skeptically. That includes the British-owned BBC and U.S. government-funded PBS. Trevor Burus wrote of PBS earlier this year in the Daily Beast:

A 1969 memo outlined the administration’s goals: creating a new “public” media network to compete with more independent sources such as NET. That network could be controlled because the White House would ‘have a hand in picking the head of such a major new organization if it were funded by the Corporation [CPB].’ That major new organization became PBS.

Many other foreign news services are strongly government-influenced even if the government does not hold an ownership share. Does Le Monde reflect the views of the French government? Does The London Times have a British viewpoint? Russia and China have a number of news agencies that have operated for years under the guidance of their respective Communist parties; The People’s Daily, Pravda, and Izvestia were never told to register.

But, you say, there was a report in January from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that singled out R.T. as “a state-run propaganda machine,” part of Russia’s attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

This is the heart of the issue – the American government is still trying to blame Russia for the outcome of our election. The Russians were not found to have altered voting machines, cast illegal ballots, or destroyed legitimate ballots, so the DNI was reduced to saying the American public was duped by R.T. programming. Pretty good for an outlet almost no one is watching. R.T. didn’t even make the ratings in a 2015 Nielsen survey of the top 94 cable channels in America. According to the Economist, among its top 15 YouTube hits presently are earthquakes, grisly accidents, and Vladimir Putin singing “Blueberry Hill.”

There are important principles at stake here for the American audience, for bilateral relations, and for journalism.

1. Registration is a two-way street. The U.S. is likely to find its media outlets in Russia ostracized and excluded, maybe even barred entirely. Since the Russian government has a heavier hand with journalists than our own government does, it is not in our interest to let this happen.

2. There are countries presently systematically destroying their own free press. Turkey, a NATO member, comes to mind. If journalists operate under duress and threat of imprisonment at home – as do the Turkish media – why should they be considered independent operators in the U.S.? The Justice Department would have a credible case for warning Americans about Turkish media as propaganda by journalists intimidated by their own government.