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Last updated on March 6th, 2018 at 12:30 am
The idea continues to spread that Al-Jazeera is a primary force driving the Middle East towards democracy. Forget coincidental events like the liberation of Iraq; it’s those Al-Jazz guys who are getting things done. Here’s Paul McGeough last week:
Now, thanks to September 11 and the much-maligned Al-Jazeera and the other new Arab TV channels, the region is transfixed by the fact that there was an election in Iraq.
Hmmm. Without the removal of Saddam, Al-Jazeera wouldn’t have had any Iraqi election to broadcast. In today’s Sydney Sun-Herald, Miranda Devine reports:
ABC journalist Monica Attard appeared on Richard Glover’s 702 radio program on Thursday to declare the so-called Arab Spring had nothing to do with Iraq, not “by any stretch of the imagination”. Those who claim a link do so because it “suits their propaganda purposes”. So why now? asked Glover. Attard thought the Arab news network Al-Jazeera and the flowering of regional media might be responsible.
The ABC sure isn’t responsible; it’s talked down any possibility of advancement since literally day one of Saddam’s booting. In other Middle East news:
The big protest puppets commonly seen in anti-Bush and anti-Howard demonstrations have found their way to Iran:
Eye-witnesses reported that full-size puppets of high-ranking officials, such as the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the regime’s president Mohammad Khatami, were set on fire by youths at numerous locations throughout the Iranian capital. Trucks belonging to Iran’s security forces were also set ablaze.
(That’s via Bernie Slattery, who has a bunch else to read.) “Would the Syrians dream of doing anything so crude and vicious as this?” asked Robert Fisk after the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Yes, they would, claims the London Times:
The Times has learnt that Mr Hariri had enraged the Syrians by inspiring a UN resolution demanding that Syria stop interfering in Lebanon. US and UN officials repeatedly warned Syria not to harm Mr Hariri in the months before his death.
In mid-January, under pressure from Damascus, the Lebanese Government withdrew his 70-strong security detail, and immediately after his death the scene of the bombing was swept to remove any evidence of Syrian complicity.
- Tim, Tim, Tim — Unless you learn to put the medium over the message, you will never get anywhere in journalism.
Of course it’s more important that the media be there to cover an event than it is for the event to have happened. I mean, be fair. Without home video and supermodels on the chat shows, would there even have been a tsunami?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 03/19 at 02:15 PM • permalink
- So let me get this right. Tim Blair and the many right wing folk posting to his site are against Muslims.
Not just radical, fundamentalist, so called islamofacists but all Muslims right?
They don’t see any sense in providing support to moderate Muslims in order to overcome the extremists, and from posts I’ve read time and time again here they asert that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, is that right?
So a sizeable proportion of the world’s population are just just plain deluded to praise Allah (who happens to be the same God as the God of Christians and Jews), is that right?On the other hand Christian fundamentalists are OK, right? Jewish fundamentalists are OK too right? What about secular extremists, are they OK according to the bloggers of the right?
- Well deduced Salim. This post is clearly nothing but Christian-Zionist-neocon anti-Muslim propaganda. I applaud you for seeing through the thin veneer of puppet and journalist related discussion to find TEH TRUTH!!11!
By the way…
JEWS!!!
Did I scare you?Posted by Drunk Fade on 03/19 at 02:35 PM • permalink
- “So let me get this right. Tim Blair and the many right wing folk posting to his site are against Muslims.”
You were doing just fine up until here.
Posted by Jim Treacher on 03/19 at 03:13 PM • permalink
On the other hand Christian fundamentalists are OK, right? Jewish fundamentalists are OK too right? What about secular extremists, are they OK according to the bloggers of the right?
Good point, now that you mention it. Because the news is just full of fundamentalist Christians and Jews flying planes into skyscrapers. And those secular extremists, always ready to die for what they don’t believe in.
(That was sarcasm, in case you couldn’t tell.)
- The new slogan for the ABC and al-Jazeera:
NO BLOOD FOR BALLOTS.
Posted by Mystery Meat on 03/19 at 04:00 PM • permalink
- So a sizeable proportion of the world’s population are just just plain deluded to praise Allah (who happens to be the same God as the God of Christians and Jews), is that right?
If it is right Salim then it must be also the same God as the Buddhists, Hindus, Rastafarians, Jehovas, Amish, Scientologists etc etc look to.
It’s the social and political delusions that accompany Islam that are on the nose Salim. You can pray to whom you want (unlike Muslim countries freedom of religion is a right in the West) but when religion is used as a pretext for violent oppression you lose the argument.
Get with the program Salim.
- From my standpoint, I might not like a certain behavior from a specific group of people and I will certainly not agree with it. But it takes a higher degree of egregiousness to make me want to go over to another place and stop them.
It’s like having a bad behaving neighbor. He might be a jerk, but as long as he treats my family, me, and our other neighbors fine, I have no intention of doing anything about his behavior. When he starts mistreating the neighbors, he gets my notice, and maybe a few words. But when he begins to mistreat my family, then he gets a butt whipping.
And if he ever ran an airplane into my house … (nods in a knowing fashion).
Posted by wronwright on 03/19 at 05:06 PM • permalink
- I am reminded of an observation somebody made, namely that Al Jazeera did two things when it showed Iraqis demonstrating against the American presence early in the conflict.
1. They showed anti-American demonstrations in Iraq.
2. They showed the Americans allowing anti-American demonstrations in Iraq.
Posted by mythusmage on 03/19 at 05:54 PM • permalink
- So let me get this right. Tim Blair and the many right wing folk posting to his site are against Muslims.
Steady boy, please name names.
Posted by Quentin George on 03/19 at 06:04 PM • permalink
- 1. Is Moderate Islam triumphing over evil extremism a vain wish?
2. If you run a religion along mafioso lines can it ever have an effective moderate centre group?
3. Given that there is one God, whose views about God do you find more convincing? The stories told by JC, and those told by Mohammed, contrast markedly. JC was pretty clear about who would and who would not find closeness to God. I hear many cries about God’s greatness, but I see many who are distant from God.
4. Is there any worthwhile law for moral living present in Islamic teaching which was not already incorporated in the Christian or Jewish traditions?
5. How many examples can we read (and there are many available in the blogosphere)of supposedly moderate Islamic groups either channeling funding to terrorists, or seeking separatist rules within western democracies, before we conclude that coexistence is not in fact being sought by them?
6. Are accusations about people in the west being anti-Islamic merely another tactic playing on an overdeveloped sense of fair play, and is this in turn simply seen as a weakness in our society to be exploited?
- Monica Attard’s comment is easily understood – urban socialists (forrest socialists are essentially the Greenies) believe that ALL opinions or comments made by anyone are essentially politically motivated – ie essentially propoganda.
They are unable to accept bare-faced objective facts as facts. They assume there is always a hidden agenda behind any utterance.
It is impossible to hold a rational debate with such thinking. It is essentially a religious belief, and this thinking style is now being mass produced by the Western education systems.
That does not explain how this system still manages to also produce indpendent thinkers who seem not to have been affected by the “system”.
I think it might have something to do with innate intelligence and the ability to recognise acoustical bullshit.
- So let me get this right. Tim Blair and the many right wing folk posting to his site are against Muslims.
If this is the case, why would we all be so strongly in favour of bringing democracy to the oppressed people of the Middle East?
If we were anti-Muslim, we’d be protesting against the liberation of Iraq from the clutches of a genocidal madman, supporting politicians that favour ‘stability’ over action and inventing conspiracy theories involving the theft of oil…who would be so bigotted and narrow-minded to do such a thing? You could start looking here.
Posted by ArtVandelay on 03/20 at 01:32 AM • permalink
So let me get this right. Tim Blair and the many right wing folk posting to his site are against Muslims.
Well, speaking for myself, I am against Muslims who join terrorist groups, support terrorist groups through actions or finances, supply arms and weapons to terrorists, cut heads off of people, shoot people in the back of their heads and then mutilate the bodies, desecrate graves, blow up buildings, fly airliners full of people into buildings full of people, attempt to shoot down civilian aircraft full of people, machine gun buses full of children, detonate car bombs in crowds of people……
And, thinking about it, I am against anyone (Muslim or otherwise) that does the same thing. I am against the IRA and the white supremacists, for example. It’s just that they aren’t killing people by the truckload, now, are they?
Sod off, Salim. Your “moral high ground” is really a dark spider hole.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 03/20 at 01:44 AM • permalink
- And, for the record, if Al Jazeera
[i}”…is a primary force driving the Middle East towards democracy…”, then Mein Kampf is the Handbook of Democracy.Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 03/20 at 01:50 AM • permalink
- Oh, and one clarification, Salim: If Muslims actively fight against Muslim terrorists, why then I am not against them. That’s why I support the Iraqis…..who are Muslim. Get the point?Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 03/20 at 01:51 AM • permalink
- urban socialists (forrest socialists are essentially the Greenies) believe that ALL opinions or comments made by anyone are essentially politically motivated – ie essentially propoganda
Spot on Louis, I get that all the time, “more propaganda from the uncaring” (ignorant uncultivated greedy warmongers)
When I hear that I feel like going out and cutting down a tree.
Try to engage in a simple discussion of known facts and the eyes roll. But I’m wearing them down, getting the arguments more and more simplified, throw it back on to them.
- So if Al-Jazeera starts broadcasting porn, will young Muslim men stop slapping their mothers?Posted by richard mcenroe on 03/20 at 12:10 PM • permalink
- Before the Iraq war even got underway, the ABC’s Joe O’Brien, who was hosting…very badly…the midday news bulletin, asked one of their usual critics the following question. “Isn’t the idea that you can somehow cause a democratic domino effect in the Middle-East just simply ridiculous?” How’s that for impartiality? To which the ABC’s predictably compliant guest wholeheartedly agreed. Now it’s left to a disgrace like Monica Attard, totally lacking any dignity and integrity, to clumsily rewrite history!
- So we have Jim Treacher on 03/19 at 02:30 PM who things any opinion but his own is not ‘fine’ and david at 02:31 PM, a valiant but ignorant chap who would ignore the long and gruesome history of murder in the name of Christendom.
They’ve obviously not heard of the atrocities of Crusaders or that about 60 years ago a German (and Christian) political force devised a ‘final’ solution for European Jewry. Of course only yesterday’s news “just full of fundamentalist Christians�? robbing, gassing, burning or mass burying Jews. These well informed gentlemen would clearly ignore the long history of Islamic societies sheltering Jews from Christian aggressors, so best not mention that.
I wonder if they’d know who said, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” I’ll give one hint – it was said long before Muhammad lived.
Rog2 at 3.42 PM is quite right that it’s the politics of a few tyrants that is on the nose not the religious beliefs of the masses but he’d be quite wrong if he truly believes that moderate Muslims use their religion as a pretext for violent oppression of other faiths. Indeed if he gets with the program himself he may be surprised to learn that the Qur’an advises against using force to change people’s religion [Qur’an 2:256] or being the aggressor [Qur’an 2:190].In fact all those duped into thinking Islam is a violent faith should pause to consider this:–
Look for the word “kill” in religious texts and you’ll find it 442 times in the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, and 271 times in the King James Version compared to 40 times in the Pickthall Version of the Qur’an and 22 times in the Yusuf-Ali Version.
guinsPen on 03/19 at 03:46 PM it would be great to know why, why, why, why, why, why and why but you’re probably not brave nor articulate enough to grace us with more than grunts as responses.
Wronwright presumably would dish a butt whipping to neighbours of any race, colour, creed etc if they initiated aggression against him or his kin. Fair call and it certainly helps to explain insurgency in the many quarters where Western powers or their puppets have mistreated local populations.
Blogstrop makes the most interesting post on this thread. I’ll ponder his questions and respond later. Time for tea now.
No?
Thought as much.