RUTHFULLY YOURS

Greg Sheridan doesn’t like Donald Trump and never has, but he really shouldn’t allow that antipathy to frame the incoming US president beneath the ever-dark cloud of his personal contempt. Still, there is some good news: his columns don’t appear daily.
How do we get our news about America? The answer, in my experience, is that we don’t. We don’t get news about America, we get commentary. When it comes to Donald Trump that commentary is almost invariably negative. A measure of that is The Australian. After all, that is probably the best place to go among the MSM to get anything approaching balance. Alas, respected commentators Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan have shown a proclivity to bucket Trump in personal terms at every opportunity. Is it any wonder fear and ignorance about Trump is widespread in Australia.

Greg Sheridan was at it again last week. Under a heading of “Good Trump, Bad Trump” (paywalled) and a split picture of a haloed and horned Trump, Sheridan made a series of (to me) laughable conjectures. His problem began by letting his headline write the story. He presumably awoke with what he thought was a good headline. Now, how can I write something to fit it? He probably mused.

Me, I can’t write headlines. Quadrant Online’s editor writes most of my headlines based on the storylines. Message to Greg: Write your story first.

“Every day will start with the question is today a good Trump day or a bad Trump day?” Apparently this is to be gauged by Trump’s tweets. Put this in context of Abbott stopping the boats and knighting Prince Philip. Who the heck cared about the second, except the precious media beating it up? People won’t care if Trump criticises the press in tweets if he can secure the US southern border, lower taxes, reduce regulations, and create millions of new jobs. Notice something when it comes to criticisms of Trump: it is a policy-free zone.

Then comes the nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. Sheridan finds this “deeply perplexing.” It seems to me that you might not like the nominee, but perplexed? Tillerson is a highly experienced and successful businessman with a record of negotiating international deals. There is nothing perplexing about his nomination.

His company’s drilling in Russia was stymied by sanctions after Russia took back Crimea. He doesn’t like sanctions and thinks they don’t work. So what? His shareholders don’t like sanctions either because they damage profitability. And sanctions have hardly been wildly successful as a means of disciplining despots. So far as I know, neither Cuba nor North Korea has been brought to heel.

It is all quite silly. Representing ExxonMobil means exactly that. Representing the United States means that he will switch teams and loyalties. It happens all the time in the sporting arena and we don’t question whether a transferred player will deliberately start kicking own goals.

But I am not a mind reader. Sheridan is. Apparently Trump is so dumb that he hired Tillerson because of his (Tillerson’s) current “geopolitical thinking”. In turn, Trump thinks that Tillerson is so dumb that he will continue to act as secretary of state as though he represents ExxonMobil. Dumb stuff all round.

At length, presumably to fill up column space, we are told the bleeding obvious that Tillerson holds shares in his company and will benefit if sanctions on Russia are lifted; though, he can remove this conflict by cashing out his shares. Duh! Get this leap of logic from Never-Trumper John McCain, which is given undeserving currency: Tillerson has been awarded the Russian Order of Friendship, hence he is friend of Putin, “a murderer, thug and KGB agent whose aeroplanes are precisely targeting hospitals in Aleppo.”

Then there is the made-up stuff. “Trump upset Beijing by asking why the US should abide by the one-China policy…if Beijing does not give Washington a good trade deal.” This is simply not true; and, pertinently, Trump is not directly quoted. Trump made the point that a foreign country was not going to tell him who he could take a phone call from. Hooray! I would have thought. He further made the points that diplomacy was a two-way street, that China is building militarised islands in the South China Sea, was not sufficiently bearing down on North Korea and is behaving unfairly in trading with the US.

We can never win this “civilizational conflict” if we keep on insisting that Islam itself is blameless.

The Trump campaign against radical Islam doesn’t pull any punches. And why should it? We’re talking about a religion which has tens of millions (or more) adherents who’d love to blow the United States off the map. (That’s after Israel, of course.)

However, according to Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post, it’s Trump and his advisers who believe in “civilizational conflict”. (Presumably after the analysis offered in Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations.)

Diehl says that Trump’s appointee, Stephen K. Bannon, speaks in terms of a “long history of the Judeo-Christian West’s struggle against Islam”. Michael T. Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, is also in favor of “a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people”.

Indeed, Flynn has got the measure of things. He once wrote:

“I don’t believe that all cultures are morally equivalent, and I think the West, and especially America, is far more civilized, far more ethical and moral.”

Jackson Diehl thinks that such “Islamophobic” words are counterproductive. That such words cause — rather than solve – problems. But is systematically lying about Islam a successful policy? Are there fewer Islamic terrorists today than there were twenty or even ten years ago? Are Muslims, as a whole, becoming more moderate? Is there a Muslim “reform movement” spreading across the world or even in Europe and the U.S.?

So let’s start telling the truth about Islam, as Flynn and millions of others are attempting to do.

Jackson Diehl lays his own cards on the table when he says that François Fillon’s book, Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism, is an example of what he calls “anti-Muslim rhetoric”. Diehl even has a problem with the suicidal Islamophile Angela Merkel. He said that she “felt obliged to strike an anti-Islamic pose last week, proposing a crackdown on the minuscule number of German women who wear a burqa”.

Jackson Diehl also has a big problem with Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, whom Trump supports. Did Diehl prefer the Muslim Brotherhood regime? You know, the movement that has traditionally persecuted and bombed the Christian Copts of Egypt?

To be published on the front page of your own newspaper, to open the news on your own television program, you must bring the “kill news”, the news that kills all others, and – more importantly – the news that all other media will copy and paste.

Journalists are obsessed with creating the hound pack of the day and then enjoying lead hound status. In hound-pack logic, there can be only ONE news item a day – repeated and reprinted infinitely.

Poverty can make a headline when data is officially released, but who cares about what poor people think?

The problem begins when people not on the radar screen become the majority of the population and when this majority of the population become “dissidents”. Then, when the invisible people (in the media sense of the term) engage themselves in the democratic process and protest with a vote, it sounds like a bomb: No one saw it coming! No one could have predicted it!

According to the media, the only poor who need help, support, audience are immigrants. Other people who are poor, especially the whites, do not, for the media, exist. And if they did protest, presumably they would have no right to….

“Representing the middle and working classes as “reactionary,” “fascist”, is very convenient. This avoids asking critical questions. When someone is diagnosed as fascist, the priority becomes to re-educate him, not to question the economic organization of the territory where he lives.” – Eric Guilluy, Le Point

Trump understood this disconnect [of the people from the media] well. During the campaign, in fact, Trump spoke to very few of the media: He made himself a media – tweeting every day, obliging mainstream media to amplify his words. The more the lying media treated him as a liar, the more he was trusted.

Sulzberger also launched an appeal to the “loyalty” of Times subscribers – because thousands of people abruptly cancelled their subscriptions. The disaffection with biased information is growing, and fewer and fewer people are ready to subscribe to propaganda, especially when the facts on the ground so visibly contradict it.

Do you know why Google is investing millions of dollars in perfecting a self-driving car? Not for safety, not for easier driving; they are doing it because it is stupid to let millions of people concentrate on a road instead of on surfing the internet.

It is a “zero sum” game: each second on Facebook is stolen from a newspaper or television station.

Democracy depends for its survival that journalists do correctly the job for which they are paid: reporting facts and not stigmatizing people who do not resemble themselves. It is not the “noble” duty of journalists to prevent things from happening. Just report facts and propose analyses, and let people think for themselves.

New media are appearing on the web: Breitbart in the US, Riposte Laïque in France and many dozens in Europe. Their audience consists of millions of readers.