Walking A Mile In Our Own Shoes
The Times of London published a rather astonishing story the other day. It seems that Israel appointed a Muslim, veteran Labour Party member Ghaleb Majadleh, as a minister without portfolio in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s shaky coalition. There was, of course, the customary tired objections and denunciations from the usual Israeli suspects, but the precedent has been established. As the Arab community constitutes 20 per cent of the population in Israel, the appointment of Mr Majadleh is historic, and might eventually lead to an easing of the tensions between Israeli Jews and non-Jews as they enter the government.
One has to wonder if the flap over Muslims entering American government hasn’t reached the point where, because the precedent has now been established, the dinosaurs of American politics will have find something else to rant about besides the real or imaginary religious affiliations of the duly-elected representatives of We, the People.
As one of my faithful regular readers VS-) put it:
What’s there to brag about in the “Obama Madrassa” non-story? Well, not the story itself–with CNN and Nightline pretty thoroughly debunking the Insight Rag story, there is not much to add on that particular subject.
Sure, the Muslim “parents” (father and step-father) and the school in Indonesia were an easy target that I spotted early, as Obama-for-President stories began to boil over a few weeks ago. (I also spotted the “not-Black-enough” angle that I still believe will be picked up by the Right wing media.)
But there is not much noteworthy in the story itself–some conservative rag and Fox News create a tempest in a teapot, making things up, then get slammed for the slime job. Who cares! That’s not news!
And just what is news? Read on:
What is news are a couple of quotations presented in the Nightline program:
Of the first quote, Jeffrey Kuhner, editor of Insight Magazine, responded to the denials by Clinton senior adviser Howard Wolfson of any involvement in the story: “Sue us,” he said.
“If he’s so confident that this is a National Enquirer-style made-up story, he and Hillary should sue the pants off us, because if they’re right, they could make millions and millions of dollars. But then we’ll depose the investigators who have been conducting the investigation into Obama’s background and they know it. This story is multi-sourced … I have never been more sure of a story in my life.”
What’s missing from the reporting on the story is that this is a double-slime job–they manage to slime two candidates at once: Obama for allegedly attending a Muslim school, and Hillary for pushing the story. The former is bunk and has been roundly condemned. But the latter has been mostly ignored. It is important since it matches closely the Right wing portrait of Hillary. It doesn’t really matter if this slander is true. The story is the image that is being painted, not the particular brush strokes.
The second quotation belongs to Obama himself: “About three or four months ago, something started surfing around the Web and it was a pretty scurrilous article suggesting not only that I had gone to a Madrassa, but that my family members were Muslim radicals. And we didn’t make much of it … you can’t control what’s on the Web.
“What was surprising was
that it eventually bubbled up
into the mainstream media.”The last line is priceless! He can’t possibly be that naive! But maybe he really is. The person who sheds some light on this process is the token center-leftist at the American Enterprise Institute, Norman Ornstein:
“There’s now almost a predictable process here. People have learned how to get things covered, even when they shouldn’t be covered. You either start with a revelation in the Drudge Report or Insight magazine, that then gets picked up by the New York Post or The Wall Street Journal and Fox News and by the blogs, and before long there’s enough noise out there and enough buzz that comes from it that everybody from The New York Times, to The Washington Post, to the network news decide they have to cover it.
“And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.”
The irony is, of course, that Ornstein only looks at the media without recognizing how much the faux-experts, such as his colleagues at the AEI, abets this process. I identified this particular chain, along with a few other parts–the network of think tanks from Heritage Foundation to the Pacific Research Institute, as well as a bunch of conservative news outlets that pick up the stories even before Drudge (e.g., Agape Press)–as an integral part of the neocon war on science (which is more properly referred to at this point in time as the War on Expertise) as far back as 1999. It took the Mainstream Media two full presidential election cycles to come to this same conclusion–and even it remains incomplete.
The real question–which ABC does not even begin to address in the Nightline feature–is whether this disinformation network is deliberately coordinated or coincidental. That is, is there a pre-arranged method for developing and distributing fabricated stories, or is this the simple reality of a marginally-competent media?
Although it is reasonable to note that the media is complicit in this process–few news organizations would want to be left out of the feeding frenzy once a juicy story bubbles up to the legitimate coverage level–it should be fairly obvious from recent history that one can deliberately manipulate this weakness of the media in order to widely distribute disinformation. Given that the network of conservative think tanks has been established with some forethought, a lot of cash, and intense deliberation, I believe that this process is well thought out and predetermined. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this is the way things work.
Of course, there is nothing new really here–politicians of all stripes have been planting stories to slime the opposition for decades, if not centuries. The news now is in the reality that it is not politicians who do so, but a highly-organized base of support which stands behind them. Who put this network together? Who is this organization?
- VS-)
It may not really matter to know the answers to these questions. As I wrote to a personal friend who is not involved with blogging (and his to: list), but who does fall for these GOP-flavored smear campaigns sent to him in his email (which he forwards to a lot of us):
I do not support Barack Obama for president, but not because Muslims consider him one of their own. If one is going to follow the “logic” of this religious belief, then one also has to follow that of the Jews, who believe that the son is the same religion as his mother, who was Christian.
I suggest that those of you who oppose Obama find legitimate reasons to do so and leave the stupid smears to those whose IQ is as low as their motives. I know many of you personally, and I know you to be better people than those who started this crap.
At the end of this article, you will find that while the majority of those who signed this letter are Christians, he is also supported by Jews.
Reading this Chicago Tribune article, one sees some of the same points concerning the veracity of the media coverage that my regular reader VS-) makes in his comments above. For instance:
The Washington Times Insight Magazine online edition reports the Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate attended a madrassa, a conservative Islamic school, when he was a kid and his family lived in Jakarta for a time. The source of this revelation, the Web site said, was “researchers connected to” the Clinton camp. Fox News discussed the Insight article on two of its programs. The story spread far and wide through Web sites and e-mail chains.
Actually, none of this touches on the heart of the problem.
It took a few hundred years for journalism to reach the stage at which the best truth one could find was the force behind what was published, broadcast, put before the public. Critics find it hard to believe, but much of what is called “mainstream media” agonizes every day over what is true and what is not, because it is wrong to print what is not provably true.
In that context, what Insight did on its Web site, and what Fox News did in repeating the report, was not ideological at all.
It was unethical, unprofessional and shabby…
It also is a sign of the growing indifference Internet “journalism” presents on the question of truth. Rumor is good enough. Bibles of blogging are created based on nothing more than rumor.
So sure, scan it, scroll through it, read it. But, also, ask yourself:
Do you know who’s giving you your news?
This accountability is one reason why I (for one) go to great lengths to include verifiable links when I create a post. It makes it easier for the discerning reader to judge whether what I write is correct, accurate, or a reasonable assumption based on the facts I have discovered to make my points. We all have read those which barely bother to attempt to do so in their screeds.
The idea that the media isn’t necessarily living up to its obligations to society to report factual news is the focus of this MSNBC-Newsweek post. I would laugh if the topic weren’t very serious, for both entities have been guilty of such violations themselves in aiding and abetting the Bush-Cheney Crude Crusader Cabal through maipulating their news coverage at Al Gore’s expense ever since Gov’ner Dubya announced his intention to run for president in March of 1999.
But I digress.
Political operatives on all sides are worried about the new rules governing their world. Last week, Joe Novak, a Chicago media consultant with a longtime rivalry with David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign chief, launched a Web site dedicated to trashing Obama. (One of his first hits was on Michelle Obama for sitting on the board of a pickle company that closed a plant recently [after promising not to].) Meanwhile, Dick Morris, the former Clinton operative turned Hillary hater, is working on a dirt-filled documentary.
The implications for opposition research are only now coming into view. “If they [bloggers] can finger you trying to drop poison into the well, you’ll be hurt by it,” says Harold Ickes, a longtime Clinton aide getting ready to help Hillary.“ The lesson of Swift Boat [the 2004 efforts to throw mud on John Kerry over his Vietnam service on a river craft] is you cannot let this stuff circulate unanswered.
“We used to whine about round-the-clock cable in ’96—that’s child’s play now,” Ickes adds. “Stuff moves out so quickly that campaigns have to exercise much more control over their negative information apparatus.”
Even the New York Times - whose own record remains spotty to this day thanks to the likes of Judith Miller and Tom Friedman - takes issue with the Obama smear:
In the last two weeks, Mr. [Jeffrey T.] Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.
“I said, ‘That is a sexy story, if you can confirm it,’ ” Mr. Kuhner recalled. [He] declined to say where the contributor who offered the Clinton-Obama story worked. After Insight posted the article on Jan. 17, Mr. Kuhner said, he was disappointed to see that the Drudge Report did not link to it on its Web site as it has done with other Insight articles. So, as usual, he e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC.
The Clinton-Obama article followed a series of inaccurate or hard-to-verify articles on Insight and its predecessor magazine about politics…
To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. “If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.
Maybe the best way to handle this sort of controversy is to emulate Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress.
Ellison was sworn in to office using a Quran that Thomas Jefferson once owned. As The Manchester Union-Leader phrased it:
Last week a newly elected member of Congress refused to put his hand on the Bible while swearing to uphold his oath of office.
And lo and behold, the republic still stands.
Ellison, a Muslim, took the oath of office while raising his right hand and holding his left on a copy of the Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Those who hoped to compel Ellison to swear on the Bible really wanted a religious test for national office, something the former owner of Ellison’s Koran would have found horrifying.
Making someone swear to a God in which he does not believe is as useful as making him swear to the Easter Bunny.
Ellison believes in Allah, and now he has sworn to Allah that he will uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Good. Now we know that he most likely took his oath seriously. Let’s hope he takes the Constitution more seriously than did those who wanted to force him to swear on their religious book.
Those who seek to force the concept that America is a Christian nation - such as Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) who attempted to raise the Righteous Religious Wrath against Ellison’s planned ceremony in a letter to his constituents - might as well have done so against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a Mormon. The Book of Mormon is hardly Goode’s King James Bible, even though the 15 Mormons in the Congress tends to lend superficial support to Goode’s claim that the number of non-WASPs will increase if they are allowed to participate.
But then, if Goode’s so worried about this religious distinction, why isn’t he raising a stink about the four Christian Arabs who won Congressional seats? Isn’t his president’s war against Arab terror? A total of 54 Arab-Americans ran in this year’s elections nationwide, 40 won primaries and 24 won general elections for local offices. Isn’t that more than won elections in 1789 after the Constitution was ratified?
Maybe Goode is afraid to lose what donations he receives from AIPAC, or else he might have expressed concern over the number of Hebrews now in the Congress. The Jewish community elected a record 43 of their faith to the House and Senate.
And what is he to make of the first two Buddhists - Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Hank Johnson (D-GA) - sworn in as Congressmembers? Shold he not be raising the alarm against the Yellow Peril, even though Johnson is Black?
Residents of Virginia may not agree with any of these possibilities that Goode might pursue. In the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia, reader Janet McConnell of Stafford wrote:
Rep. Virgil Goode’s recent comment concerning Rep.-elect Keith Ellison’s desire to be sworn into Congress by placing his hand on the Quran is disgraceful, and he should apologize to Mr. Ellison… Mr. Ellison’s response to Mr. Goode’s statement has shown he has much more class than Rep. Goode.
I haven’t found where Goode did apologize to Ellison, but it’s clear that some kind of rapproachment has occurred between them:
Ellison shook hands with Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., who’d criticized Ellison for planning to use the Quran. Ellison said he followed through with his plan to suggest coffee with Goode, whose district includes Jefferson’s historic home of Monticello. He said Goode had accepted. “I don’t anticipate we’re going to have any problems,” Ellison said. “We’re not holding any grudges.”
Steve Clemons of HuffingtonPost.com wants Ellison to walk that extra lonesome mile:
I just got a copy of this interesting invitation from “Covenant Alliances” for a reception in the Rayburn House Office Building on February 14, 2007 to celebrate the newly established “Congressional Israel Allies Caucus of the United States Congress” and to “discuss the future direction of this body in cooperation with the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus of the Israeli Parliament.”
Congressmen Dave Weldon, MD (R-FL) and Eliot Engel (D-NY) co-chair this new caucus and banded together in August 2006 for a statement of strong support for Israel in light of Hezbollah’s incursion into Israel.
But I wonder if Keith Ellison was invited to this gathering? I have tried to call “Covenant Alliances” and have not been able to connect by phone with their operation.
I wonder if they would invite our Muslim nominee to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad?
I’m not a Black-American and I’ve been invited to Black Caucus meetings. I’m not Jewish but I have been invited to numerous Jewish-American meetings and am invited each year to AIPAC’s annual conference.
These are tough times for the U.S. in the world, and it’s important that bridgebuilding on religious grounds — which can be a good thing — ought to be inclusive of others as well — not exclusive. This kind of activity comes awfully close to questions about inappropriately mixing affairs of church and state, at least in my book.
Congrssman Keith Ellison really ought to drop by — just to make sure that there is a “big tent” approach to our problems.
As Ellison himself reminded us all, “We’re here to work for the American people.”
This is something that Republicans, Christians, and the American media also need to remember - and to live up to - long before there is nothing left of their country to save.