Iran: Where the Blood is real and "The World is Watching"

The crowds in Tehran and other major cities of Iran are no longer chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Jews”. It is exciting and even hopeful that there is, at least, a sizable element of the Iranian population that seems to want freedom from the Mullahs. The attention of much of the world is riveted on the events in Iran and rightly so. For the first time since 2001 it is possible for the world to imagine that the tidal wave of Islamic fascism that has ravaged the Islamic world and killed so many in the free world might someday soon begin to recede.

The courage of the Iranian people who are today facing riot batons, Kalashnikovs and tanks with their massive crowds and rocks cannot be ignored. There are many lessons they can teach us. Some are obvious- That freedom is worth fighting for- is the most obvious.

There are a lot of other lessons here that may not be so obvious. This blog was started because the screaming mobs and incessant chants of the Iranian street mobs of the early 1980’s brought a dark presence into the life of my daughter who was then only five years old. Because she is Jewish and American the chants of Death to America; Death to the Jews” had inspired one of her little school chums to threaten kill her. So I have been very interested to hear that the crowds are now reportedly shouting out: “Death to the dictator; Down with this falsified, populist government; People why are sitting aside, Iran has turned into Palestine”.

Palestine? Now, I know that for most of the protesters it is just a simple rhetorical device in which the Iranian mob is now equating the rulers under which they have lived for thirty years with the Israeli government and comparing themselves with the Palestinian refugees. It is a sad reminder that the complicity of the pusillanimous western media and the ineffectual Israeli public relations apparatus have allowed Israel to be maligned and used as a symbol of oppression. But there are also subtle resonances and cruel ironies in that chant.

The first and most stark of these ironies is that, in course of a week’s protests, in a country where western media has been largely deported and universally intimidated there has been more convincing evidence of brutality and bloodshed of innocent people by the government than in the entire sixty years of Israeli history.

Compare, if you will, the world famous bloodless blood libel of the al Durah incident with the heart breaking video of Neda, the young woman deliberately shot by government militia in Iran. Note: Before you click on the video from Iran, be advised, it is very disturbing.

The world was so very eager to be shocked by the al Durah incident in which there is never any blood visible either on the boy or the father who were both alleged to have been riddled with bullets:

al Durah


Yet that same world is oddly mute before the real blood pouring out of the Iranian girl from a single wound.


Or compare this photo of a young Iranian man who was shot in the leg
from Gaza.
with an example from Gaza I have already exposed:

Real blood and real pain in the body language of the Iranian makes stark contrast with the smirk on the face of the unbloodied Palestinian actor.

Why was al Durah such a "game breaker" against Israel, a country whose only sin was not defending herself from the libel intelligently enough, and the obviously real bloody murder of this girl is not stirring a tenth of the moral outrage against Iran? Picture an Obama reaction against Israel, had he been president at the time and than think about his treacly "The World is Watching" caution to the mullahs.

The ultimate irony, though, lies in the reports (verification needed) that among the government militias and police that are beating and shooting protesters there are cadres of Arabic speaking fighters. These are widely presumed to be Hamas and Hezbollah militants. It is not so much, then, that Iran has become Palestine. It is more that the morbid Islamist obsession with the destruction of Israel (based, of course, in their fear and loathing of the west) has, ironically, turned the tiny scapegoat into a real threat.

The Iranian people are suffering the result of thirty years of allowing themselves to be tricked into shouting “Death to America; Death to the Jews”. Many Iranians will tell you that they never supported the Islamist regime. But you never heard them complaining very much about the proxy armies of Hamas and Hezbollah that the mullahs trained and financed to surround and threaten Israel. Israel was always the “safety valve” the one thing that, even if they did not agree on it totally, they could find some neutral common ground in deploring “The Zionist Entity”. So, now those proxy armies are in the vanguard against the protesters. Being used to provide brutality against Iranians that fellow Iranians may be finding difficult to apply in the streets of their own cities.
So, yes, in a way, Iran has become Palestine: a place where violence and brutality is committed by Palestinians against people they have no real reason to hate under the mistaken impression that it will solve a problem that they have created for themselves. And they insist on turning their cultural problems into our security problems.

It is, at bottom, a cultural problem and unless we in The West break down our self-imposed prohibition against discussing cultural differences in a critical way, we will never be able to figure out how to protect ourselves. As Richard Landes ( in an excerpt from his forthcoming book now up at Augean Stables) wrote,"One of the more important dimensions of honor-shame self-help justice is the negative premium it places on self-criticism. The tendency of those who have been shamed by others is to blame the other for the insult." We shame them by our sucess and our liberty- they have a deep need to punish us for it.

President Obama told the Iranians "The World is Watching", but is he and "the world" really learning anything? Let's hope we can learn something from the Iranians this time...

Saint Bill or Accessory to Mass Murder? The Dilemma of the Morally Relativistic Media

In the light of my last post and the very acute comments of Truepeers, lgude, Nancy Coppock and others, I have been compelled to take another look at the question of anti-Semitism in Bill Moyers’ remarks about The Bible and the genetics of violence. There was a lot of anguish and recrimination in the wake of that incident and I am just beginning to make sense of it. Mr. Moyers was obviously horrified and felt injured by the whole thing. It seemed, though, that the more he twisted and squirmed, the deeper he got. Just look at his wounded and frantic reply to Abe Foxman (Leader of the ADL). even while he is denying moral equivalency, he says “And although I specifically referred to “the rockets from Hamas” falling on Israel and said that “every nation has the right to defend itself, and Israel is no exception,” Note that he uses a venerable trick of rhetoric, the passive voice, to minimize the impact of the “rockets falling on Israel” (oh dear, another one “fell” just now), while he characterizes the Israelis as “shelling” the Palestinians. So he minimizes the violence of Hamas as they initiate their avowed plan to annihilate Israel and he demonizes Israel’s defensive response. A masterful wordsmith, Moyers is good but the more he talks the deeper he gets.

Neither does he mention that Hamas deliberately uses their own civilians as human shields or that the alleged Israeli atrocities he refers to have both had serious doubt cast on them. It appears likely that they were staged or otherwise faked, as has turned out to be the case with every other allegation of intentional Israeli atrocity in the past- Jenin, al Dura, Kfar Qana- you name it. Yet Mr. Moyers repeats the reports as fact, as justification for calling the Israeli action an onslaught. The characterization of the restrained and careful Israeli actions with terms like “onslaught” and “slaughter” juxtaposed with his blithe gloss of the “falling missiles” is not merely an argumentative pose, it betrays an inner contradiction in Moyers heart.

On one hand he considers Israel to be entitled to defend herself (as if she needed his permission) on the other hand, he wants, from the vantage point of his snug PBS studio to be able to pass judgment on what a fitting (proportional?) defense would be.

Proportionality? Israel’s armed forces always has done and continues to do their best at separating Hamas from their human shields and killing only the combatants. But that is not enough for Bill Moyers. He uses two examples, examples which all media professionals by the time he used them knew to be suspect, to imply that the Israelis are no better than those who want only to murder them. He pointedly ignores the obvious difference in the morality of the two sides. He pretends, as it were, that he has just walked into the room and sees Israel beating up the Palestinians without knowing any of the background. According to him, it is an onslaught and a slaughter and he hurls those epithets at Israel, not the hate-filled murderers who have caused the problem and intentionally placed their own people between them and the tiger they had taunted once too often.

He crowns his assault on morality with the remark that first caught our attention- the one he has already backed away from as “obviously not sufficiently precise”. (Ah, suddenly the man who has traded in words all his professional life has “misspoken? More likely he spoke too quickly and revealed to much) Not only did he state that it was the bible that “genetically encoded” violence in the Jewish people, even if he goes on to say, “A radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth,” he compounds his betrayal of common sense and moral decency by adding “Israel misses no opportunity to humiliate the Palestinians with checkpoints, concrete walls, routine insults” as if he agrees with the Islamist honor/shame formula that their humiliation must be avenged in blood.

Not content with tacitly supporting the blood-revenge paradigm, he willfully misinterprets the purpose of the IDF’s YouTube channel. The IDF posts video on YouTube to try to prove to Mr. Moyer and his ilk that the strikes in Gaza are done with greater precision and care than has ever been shown before by any military in the history of warefare- to show the world that even against a foe that is sworn to murder every Jew and destroy their state the IDF is performing with surgical precision and Talmudic respect for innocent life.

All Mr. Moyers sees is a further insult to Arab honor. He says, “As if boasting of their might, Israel defense forces even put up video of the explosions on YouTube for all the world to see.” This is quintessential honor/shame drama! “For all the world to see!” To him this is a bad thing!?!?

Nor does his attempt to dismiss his “genetic” remark as “insufficiently precise” address the sense in which the remark still stands as a blood libel. Casting the two sides as equally at fault and implying that Israel “humiliates” the Palestinians by having checkpoints and walls, none of which existed until they were reluctantly employed to protect Israelis from suicide bombers! Laying the blame for these things equally on Israel is a deep, immoral wrong.

Deny it though he may, this is moral relativism, leveling the moral difference between two sides of a dispute and then applying spurious “evenhandedness” that injures and impugns the party that is morally superior.
And that is the first key to understanding Moyers’ dilemma. In Moyers’ world, the only morally superior stance is his. He rejects violence without reservation and blames all who employ it equally. He looks down on Israelis fighting for existence against Hamas, fostered and supported by Iran and the Arab world all of whom want nothing less than the annihilation of Israel, and he rolls his eyes in pious disapproval at the violence. As Truepeers has characterized it in a comment to my original post about Moyers, “this is one of the most well-worn of moral failings: admitting the eliminationist nightmare while at the same time giving the blame, or at least some of it, to the Jews. It's a smug righteous way of saying I'm above all that, a pox on both their houses.”

The ultimate insult he offers, though, is the suggestion that he is actually “a friend” of Israel. “From my days in President Johnson’s White House forward,” he writes, drawing himself up in the bogus dignity of a wordsmith who has crossed the line back and forth from “journalist” to “spin-master” enough times that he clearly has lost sight of any difference between the two, “I have defended Israel’s right to defend itself, and still do. But sometimes an honest critic is a government’s best friend, and I am appalled by Israel’s devastation of innocent civilians in this battle, all the more so because, as I said in my column, it is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen. To be so indifferent to that suffering is, sadly, to be as blind in Gaza as Samson.”

The reason they call it “spin” is that is designed to make you so dizzy that you forget which end it “up”. If you were to take him at his word and grant that he is a “friend of Israel”, you would be tempted to believe that he was really an “honest critic” and that Israel was indulging in the “devastation of innocent civilians”. He says he is “appalled “ by it and so you would see it through his eyes as appalling devastation- even as those eyes of his studiously ignore the evidence of Israel’s humanitarian intent. He says the IDF web site is a humiliation for the Palestinians but isn’t it just as humiliating to him? He resents the fact that there is proof that his assertions are false and that his moral compass is not true.

Then, finally, trusting that his double talk has rendered us so woozy and nauseated that we will be powerless to resist its authority, he flashes us the gold plated, jewel encrusted, richly engraved, plain-as-day badge of the hypocrite. He taunts Israel, saying that the slaughter of innocents he so deplores, “is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen.”

But, Mr. Moyers, a truly honest critic would have to ask why Hamas “wanted it” to happen. A real friend of reality, let alone Israel, would have to admit that a political/religious movement that intentionally incites violence against its own women and children for its own gain is an abomination- that is guilty of what amounts to human sacrifice. An honest man whether a critic or not would be compelled to admit that such a movement no more deserves equal respect with a modern, western, liberal democracy like Israel than Hannibal Lechter deserves to be compared with Julia Child.

The real hole in Mr. Moyers’ soul is that the moral relativism he denies so passionately does not only endanger Israel (who can take care of herself), it is that he must avoid knowing that it is he himself who is endangering the defenseless women and children of Gaza. The facts and reality push him to that awareness and he uses all his intellectual power to avoid it.

He is on a slippery slope. He has already acknowledged that Hamas (like Arafat before them) know that, what ever calamity they bring down on their own people, moralistic idealists with a grudge against Israel like Moyers will be unable to resist the temptation to blame Israel. It is he, not Israel who is giving Hamas what they want in reward for endangering their own people.

In spreading the blame for the plight of Palestinian children to the Israelis (who routinely risk the lives of their soldiers to avoid harming Palestinian women and children) and minimizing the responsibility of Hamas (the cowards who hide behind the children and by doing so put them in peril) he is succoring terror. He plays into their cynical game. He becomes a supporter and a participant in the slaughter. In legal parlance he is more than a bystander; he is an accessory.

It is the ultimate irony of Honor/Shame, that it so often results in unavoidable dishonor. In Moyers we see a man who has made the fatal error of staking his honor on a explaination of events that is fundamentally flawed and now cannot face the shame of admitting to his complicity in horrors beyond his intention. Now he'd rather see missiles "falling" on Israel forever rather than have to admit where the real responsibility lies for what he cynically calls the Israeli "onslaught" to stop them.

CNN Cannot be Trusted- Here's Why

My last post about CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman’s July 10th report from Nablus warned that we were working on major aspects of this report and had serious concerns about the honesty and accuracy of it. There is now good reason to believe that Wedeman and CNN have seriously compromised their professional and ethical obligations in this matter.

Ben Wedeman

It has been confirmed to Second Draft by reliable Israeli sources that the short clip of the Kindergarten graduation “festivities” that Wedeman used in that report is actually part of a much longer and extremely disturbing video which we at Second Draft have now posted on YouTube. Here is the whole video-


It has further been confirmed by Second Draft's source that the full length video which had been confiscated by the Israeli Defense Force had been given to CNN as an exclusive with the understanding that it represented clear and undeniable evidence that the Palestinian Authority is not complying with one of the basic responsibilities it has undertaken as part of the ongoing negotiations to stop intentionally fomenting hatred and violence.

The sequence in the YouTube video that begins 6 seconds in is particularly horrific. The camera work is bad but you can clearly see that the children dressed as Palestinian “fighters” are acting out an assault on and murder of children dressed as and playing the role of unsuspecting Israeli soldiers. The “dead Israelis” are then dragged across the stage. The clip Wedeman used showed the dragging (without explanation of the uniforms) without the murder sequence.

This, of course goes a long way in explaining why Wedeman's report seemed so disjointed. He was a very busy little suck-up - trying to serve all his diverse interests by appearing professional, bending over backwards to avoid angering the Palestinians and throwing the merest of bones to the Israelis.

His first priorities (as is the case with our other favorite media villain, Charles Enderlin) are his career, his image and his bank account. He is a favored toady of Hamas and as such, gets lots of juicy goodies ike his field trip to a Qassam factory. Which no reporter that ever said anything negative would ever have gotten (or returned from on schedule or alive, anyway). So he gets a lot of benefits from "being nice" to the Palestinians. On the other hand, the Israelis just swallow all the bias and keep rewarding him and CNN with "exclusives" that they, in turn, feel free to use against the Israelis. This is what we call access journalism.

So, Wedeman used the Kindergarten video, which should have represented a promising opportunity to bring clarity and fairness back into the debate, in such a way as to diminish its positive effect severely and, in fact, to turn it against Israel.

This is also yet another example of the Israelis (who value freedom of the press and will not punish such behavior- even by just taking away press accreditation) being betrayed and libeled by reporters who live in fear of the explicit favoritism and violence of the Palestinians (who stage, exaggerate and misrepresent continually while threatening anyone who does not toe their line). See my post on what Israel and America have in common with battered women.

Wedeman is not just a fool and a dupe, he is so much less than that, he is a greedy, duplicitous liar who is trying to serve too many masters. The savagery of the images which he minimizes and the evil to which he caters on a regular basis all the while pretending to "evenhandedness and professional integrity is, simply, hollow and disgusting.

As I mentioned above, his (and CNN's) first priorities are his career, image and bank account. The only way we can correct the situation is for you to help us at Second Draft fulfill our mission of educating the public to be more informed and discriminating consumers of "the news". If we can do that, the public will lose the undeserved trust they hold for CNN. Then news slobs like Wedeman and Enderlin will lose their jobs and we can begin to build a media we can tust.

Spread the word - CNN is NOT to be trusted!