I've got a Near Eastern Studies degree. I studied Arabic for 2+ years. I still study it today... and to be honest, I frequently pine for Arabic (I cure myself by listening to Fairuz) Likewise, I also extensively studied Jews and Israel (ancient and modern) and remain enraptured by Jewish history and culture. I just LOVE the Middle-East, and it saddens me to no end that there are so many difficulties over there.
But I'm glad that an important video link has been circulating on some of the technical blogs that I read.
1) I'm so incredibly sick of the garbage that the world's media pimps out as news. It's NOT news - and I'm glad to see people railing against that.
2) I'm glad to see cases of blatant mis-representation being exposed - mostly because had I linked to a link exposing this stuff people would just blow me off as some conspiracy nut or crackpot.
So go check out that great link which shows some of the ways in which the media is manipulated. It's a BIG download (40MB), but I promise it's worth your time. But frankly, I think that video is child's play, and just doesn't do enough justice to showcase what is really going on.
Nearly 6 years ago, I - like so many other people in the world, caught glimpses of an image of a Palestinian father caught in a cross-fire screaming [1] to Israeli troops to stop shooting. The images, of course, showed the father's helplessness, and the death of his son. Those images enraged me. I'm pretty sure they enraged the world. But they were part of a gigantic hoax, one that makes the footage portrayed in the Pallywood video mere child's play (well, 60 minutes did say 30 people died, when only 1 died... I guess that's NOT child's play). That's right, a hoax - a total and complete hoax designed to prey on people's emotions. [2]
My big worry? That hoaxes like these are breeding a new type of Anti-Semitism that will, if left unchecked, lead people to believe that Jews are a form of sub-human evil. [3] So I'm very glad to see other people railing against these hideous inaccuracies in the media. Personally, I think it's time we start demanding that the media quit blatantly publishing false-hoods, and that they do a MUCH better job of issuing retractions. (Imagine any other sector being able to 'fix' errors like they do - I couldn't do it with my clients, a doctor sure as hell couldn't tell you with a sticky-note attached to the bill (in 8pt font) that they were sorry - you don't REALLY have cancer, it was just a simple mistake...)
At any rate, sorry to wax political - I won't let it happen too much here. I just feel so strongly that in-accurate reporting is a MAJOR source of the world's problems.
NOTES
[1]
Here's a great, historical, representation of the 'facts' (i.e., a newstory similar to the one most people would have seen):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/952600.stm
[2] But while many people saw those horrible images, very few people saw much about how they were part of an elaborate hoax, that has been decried by a NUMBER of legitimate sources (not crack-pot organizations). For example:
http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=167&x_article=855
Make sure to follow the log at the bottom of that page/story - showing the historical 'unraveling' of this hoax. Note too that it's not some crack-pot, nut-job, web site, but a site dedicated to truth and accuracy in reporting.
Here's another overview of how the hoax was perpetrated:
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~ginsburg/aldura/
[3] It's perfectly okay to disagree with Israel and Jews and still not be anti-semitic. Bernard Lewis argues that it's even possible to HATE and PERSECUTE Jews without being Anti-Semitic. His argument is that true Anti-Semitism comes from equating Jews with some sort of purely irrational hatred - something that equates them with being less than human, or part pure-evil/non-human, etc.
Honestly, take some time out of your life and read Bernard Lewis' thoughts - if nothing else, it will get synapses firing in your brain that likely haven't fired for years - just because he does such a good job of making philosophical and historical arguments to back up his case:
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