THE HANDSTAND
july 2005
Remember your feelings? - the first sunrise
on the first day of this millenium
A few notes on Newspapers:
First of all a letter from JOE
Friends, I posted very
briefly on this last week. It
deserves more attention.
The Financial Times is perhaps the premier business and general
news newspaper of the world. Half of its
subscribers are CEO s. What does the FT do? It
provides objective news upon which business decisions can
be made. It also suggests proper policy for
political stability. Business needs stability.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, FT reported on oil
companies' opposition to the war. Contrary to the
mythology, of the left, Business dislikes war, avoids
risks, is conservative in general.
The Editorial: "When George W. Bush first
sounded the trumpet call for Arab democracy a couple
years ago, some of the reaction was cynical. The
president was seen as trying to find a rationale for
invading Iraq in the absence of any mass destruction
weapons there, or giving in to the US neo-conservative
pressure to make the Middle East a safer environment for
Israel,
or both."
"Yet it is becoming a consistent theme of his
administration." The text describes Condi Rice
in
Egypt hectoring them re their "Pharaonic"
approach to democracy. Further, it remarks Rice's
claim that Bush's 'historical test' will be the success
or failure of establishing democracy in the mIddle
east. Rice also takes on Saudi Arabia. The
Bush administration, so goes the text, also risks
security and oil interests in its democracy quest .
It is also double standarding in its criticism of Iran's
elections..... Egypt's is no better.
The last paragraph points to the possible ironies of
elections resulting in Islamist victories - Shia in
Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebanon. Quoting
Rice, herself, FT states that whatever the
outcomes of electons, they must be respected.
This editorial seems to take the administration more or
less at its word, that it seeks democratic
revolution in the middle east. And perhaps the
editorial writers only set up the 'war for Israel' as
a straw-man to be knocked down by the chat about
democracy building. Perhaps. I imagine
an editorial board chuckling about getting the 'war for
Israel' bit in, even if they then pull the punch.
My reading of it is this: FT is stating the various
claims. To its credit , it states the 'war for
Israel' thesis as a possibility. FT never talks
about Jews per se, and rarely, about Zionism. Is it
setting the stage for later remarks? OK, you said
'democracy' back in '04 and '05, now 2, or 3 years later,
what has been achieved? Nothing but chaos. It
WAS a war for Israel, and this is a disaster both for
international relations and business. FT has been
no friend of the neocons, despite its left-zionist
position in general.
As for the democratic imperialists, the neocons, there
are, of course, a few other areas of the world in need of
democracy, but somehow, the enemies of Israel got top
listing. The much remarked 'noble lie' of Leo
Strauss, another Jew, the King of Darkness, godfather of
the neocons, comes to mind. 'Democratic
Imperialism', the neocon mantra deployed to
befuddle the liberals and neutralize most conservatives,
slouches toward Bethlehem, its loins girded and jangling
with the skulls of Christians and Arabs. Euphrates to the
Nile. Noble lies indeed. Try Jewish
lies.
It took the West a couple millenia to come up with
'the king is not above the law'. Another several
hundred years for habeas corpus, universal suffrage,
etc. The only compensating factor in all this is
that while Israel is exposing the jews slowly; the Iraq
Wars are accelerating their ultimate ruin. Of
course, world war may also come as a result of Jewish
Supremacism. I think it has already
started.
Joe
* * * * * * * *
The Guardian on Mondays publishers a section on the
media. But do the editors ever meditate on the agenda
whether political or social that haunts the inner mind of
their journalists? Infact it would be well to collect for
a week or two some of the incredible remarks that people
make in the Media. Take this for a start: Peter Mandelson
recently referred to the two World Wars as: 'europe's
civil wars.'
Medical reporting:' People could register with
doctors near their workplace rather than their home as a
better reflection of modern lifestyles',or this one
for guff:.......'public involvement in healthservices
can help to counter the decline in trust in modern
politics.'
A senior British anti-terrorism source:
'those trained in terror techniques in Iraq could use
their newly aquired skills in Britain at the end of the
war'.!!!!
just a reminder....
The National Parents Council Primary (schools) is
concerned that parents who are out at work all day and
who may well be commuting long distances may be expected
to get involved in setting up of a "not for profit
organisation" (afterschool daycare)'How about
that?!!!They went on to say that 'other ways of
providing after school care should be explored...'(for
profit?)
Iraq news again 'The rebels who often plant fake
bombs to study the US response.. comes just after it
has been exposed that the US army stop vehicles
occasionally, plant an explosive secretly therein and
then order the driver to a police station where the timer
is detonated. Civil war is the US aim and their
"concern" if they should leave - as the British
say of Northern Ireland - and thus the wretched minions
of George Bush, who excelled in exploding bull-frogs as a
boy, are malicious, cunning and dumb enough to expand
official army war crimes in this fashion.
"We are all marching blindly towards a civil war
in Israel. In the present situation, to the extent that
the Palestinian-Israeli minority grows, the Jewish
exclusivity feels more threatened and endeavours to push
it away from the centres of influence and to reduce its
power. It will only get worse with time. As long as we
are estranged from the Arab minority, it will be
estranged from us. How much longer can we maintain this
logic?" From a centre-right newspaper Mariv....
Can't they get it? With all their talk of globalisation
maybe they should see that "civil war" is
endemic to mankind where the boundaries of survival or
achievement have been closed off by a state, a
government,or an elite,and brought about by the
competitors of force for submission.
I am sure thousands of us turn with relief and often
leave with new knowledge to the Letters columns,
significantly printed in many papers alongside the main
Leaders or Editorials. Meantime because of the Media
Owners political leaning we have all learnt to read
between the lines?In the Guardian under the headline Kant, we love you - yeah,yeah,yeah.
It was a nice surprise to see Immanuel Kant turn up
in a Guardian leader (June 11th), but you made his
philosophy sound irrelevant to everyday concerns. Kant
was not just the super-technician for academic
specialists his commentators so often allow him to
appear. His whole critical enterprise was driven by a
commitment to the social cause of the Enlightment, and
what you call his "great insight ...that knowledge
is inevitably mediated by space, time and forms within
our minds" was a very practical limitation of human
thought to the things we can really hope to know, a
liberation from the unanswerable questions on which so
much mental effot had been wasted for centuries. Kant's
Critique of Reason is an exhaustive version of the
parting shot in Voltaire's Candide:
"We must cultivate our garden."How Close this
is to urgent modern concerns is plain in Kant's
defionition of the fanatic: "A madman with an
imagined direct inspiration and great familiarity with
the powers of heaven" There's a lot of that still
about, on more than one continent.Jim Reed,The
Queen's College, Oxford + from William Hutson,
Nottingham:
You write that Kant is "in philosophical terms,
Elvis and the Beatles rolled into one." Really? How
is it possible to compare one of the greatest thinkers of
all time to a bloated drug addict and four over-rated
musicians? Can't the media refer to great things without
constant comparison to the Beatles? Next, you'll be
calling God the Lennon and McCartney of supertemporal
omnipotent deities.
Here on a lighter note is an Irish letter : I can't
understand all the fuss.(Smoking Ban) In Ireland the ban
didn't need policing, since most people simply accepted
it. the day it happened they went into the pub as usual,
had a drink and a bit of craic and didn't smoke. End of
story. A few absent minded people lit up but there was no
"smoking rage", few arguments, no ash-police,
no bar-end snoopers.......There has been a drop in pub
usage but that's more to do with the fact that you can
buy a terraced house in Hartlepool for the price of a
round of drinks;....the set of gutless gombeens, New
Labour, are prepared to bomb Iraq but are terrified of
upsetting a few thousand smoking voters. Strange. M
Harding, Connemara.
With regard to Africa two letters to the Guardian
are clear measures of the valuable human resources that
individual compassion and knowledge can convey:
(1)It is not necessary to wait for a government to
take action. With four friends I helped to establish the
charity SHINE-Africa and raised money to build two
nursery schools and distribute 2,000 mosquito nets in
Gambia. We are representative of a large number of people
who, impatient with government indifference, have taken
matters into their own hands. We are not a religious
organisation and are not attempting to change Gambian
culture. We deduct nothing from contributions; every
penny goes directly where it is needed.Our reward is
seeing the children happy in their schools.Tom
Ireland, Appleton.Cheshire
(2)So much for the G8 plan of action to tackle
African poverty. From 2006 Brussels expects to cut the
minimum sugar price by 42%.African, Caribbean and Pacific
countries, with an annual import quota into the EU of
1.5m tons of raw sugar, can then expect to receive
£145m-£175m. But if they converted this raw sugar into
automotive bioethanol and exported it at 40p a litre they
could make three times that amount.Ed Jackson
Westcliff on Sea, Essex
Tax payers in Ireland, we have just been informed, are
paying £10,000 per day for the supervision of flight
shifts of American military aircraft (that is, not the
soldiers themselves who travel in hired civil aircraft,)
that are taking place over Ireland. Aid and debt relief
are financed by taxpayers in the West "Who are
these tax payers? Largely they are the less well-off. In
every Western country the rich pay lower taxes than the
poor as a proportion pf their income, and international
corporations pay little or no tax anywhere."..J
Fox, London ...."There is appalling ignorance -
or obfuscation - of what constitutes aid. Gifts or loans?
Loans from private banks of governments? Or from the IMF
and World Bank? Export credit guarantees? If Africa is a
scar on the conscience of the world, as Tony Blair has
said, then it is because it has been plundered, and
continues to be plundered, by Western Corporations. Not
to speak of its strategic importance during the Cold War
when it was flooded with armaments and governments were
knocked down to suit one side or the other. We called it
neo-colonialism then and neo-colonialism it remains. The
imperialist imperative remains strong in Brown and
Blair's vision." B.Veldsman Warrington.John
Pilger's article in this issue gives the rap to the
fraudulent manouveures of Bob Geldof and Bono on this
one.
Where did I read that the new grants to Palestine are
infact loans that must be paid in 20 years?And we see
that NATO and Britain are to launch "separate"
Darfur,Sudan, missions as we also learn that one
"new" citizen of England, bought in 2003 all
Darfur Oil Rights. Freidhelm Eronat swapped his American
passport for and English one just before the deal. He has
since tried to sell some of those blocks to China but the
foggy foggy dew is drifting over the scene and the
ownership of the Cliveden Sudan oil exploration group.
Would this map of exploration blocks I found for the
recent May Issue of the Handstand Picture Post essay on
Darfur be of any interest I wonder?!
Jocelyn Braddell, editor.
**************************************************
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted
vision of the corporate media
May 17, 2005
MEDIA ALERT: BBC SILENT ON FALLUJAH
"We have not yet heard back from
Helen Boaden...."
The BBC Has Failed To Respond To Doubts About Its Claims
On US Atrocities In Iraq
"The truth is replaced by silence, and the silence
is a lie." (Yevgeney Yevtushenko)
Last week, the editors of Media Lens wrote to the BBC's
director of news, Helen Boaden, about her failure to
respond to public concerns over BBC misreporting from
Iraq:
10 May, 2005
Dear Helen Boaden,
We trust you are well. As you may recall, Media Lens
issued a media alert on 18th April: 'Doubt Cast on BBC
Claims Regarding Fallujah'. This was in response to your
Newswatch article at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/newsid_4390000/newsid_4396600/4396641.stm
Our media alert* noted that your article failed to
address the many specific and detailed allegations of
atrocities committed by US forces in their assault on
Fallujah last November. Moreover, statements made to us
by Human Rights Watch cast doubt upon your firm assertion
that HRW could "compellingly" rule out the use
of banned weapons by US forces in Fallujah. Both of these
points surely merit a reply from the BBC.
We note that around 100 people - perhaps more - emailed
you, [BBC reporter] Paul Wood and [BBC news online
editor] Pete Clifton with their deep concerns about the
Newswatch article. Nobody has yet received a reply, as
far as we are aware. Could you possibly tell us when we
might expect a BBC response, please?
best wishes,
David Cromwell & David Edwards
* See: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050418_doubt_cast_on_bbc.php
We have not yet heard back from Helen Boaden.
The BBC relentlessly proclaims its commitment to
"providing trusted and impartial news and
information that helps citizens make sense of the
world" (Letter from BBC chairman Michael Grade to
David Cromwell, 21 March, 2005). Such grandiose
statements are delivered as if on tablets of stone, to be
received with gratitude by the multitudes. Thus, Grade
again: "I know that BBC News, led by its new
Director Helen Boaden, is passionate about delivering a
news service that is independent, impartial and accurate
and that commands the confidence of licence payers."
(Ibid.)
In the real world, the BBC diligently diverts public
attention from the responsibility of western governments
for the horrendous suffering of the people of Iraq. In
1998, Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian coordinator in
Baghdad, resigned in protest at the devastating western
sanctions which had led directly to the deaths of over a
million Iraqis, half of them children under five. His
words should haunt those who facilitated such a tragedy,
and who continue to apologise for power now:
"History will slaughter those responsible."
(Quoted, John Pilger, The New Rulers Of The World, Verso,
2002, p.54)
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality,
compassion and respect for others. When writing emails to
journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a
polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Write to Helen Boaden, director of BBC news
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk
Ask why her Newswatch article does not address the BBC's
failure to cover reports of alleged US war crimes. Ask
her for further details of what the BBC discussed with
Human Rights Watch (HRW), and of the
"investigations" that HRW supposedly undertook
into the use of banned weapons by US forces.
Copy your emails to the following:
Pete Clifton, BBC news online editor
Email: pete.clifton@bbc.co.uk
Mark Thompson, BBC director general
Email: mark.thompson@bbc.co.uk
Michael Grade, BBC chairman
Email: michael.grade@bbc.co.uk
Please send copies of all emails to us at:
Email: editor@medialens.org
The 35th General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS)
The U.S. opened the sessions by highlighting its key goals: “strengthening democracy,” and “promoting free trade.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice referred to these themes in her opening speech, and these concepts were carried as the headlines in media coverage of the Assembly’s first day. What the soaring rhetoric obscured were two specific policy initiatives that reflected narrow geopolitical and corporate interests: a U.S.-led initiative to transform the OAS Democratic Charter in order to isolate the government of Venezuela, and a big push for approval of CAFTA - the U.S.-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement - a trade deal that would actually increase huge and costly trade barriers on medicines and other patented products. CAFTA, if enacted, would pave the way for the proposed “Free Trade Area of the Americas” that would encompass the entire Hemisphere, save Cuba. The fact that these initiatives failed to move forward is merely the latest example of how the U.S. is out step with the rest of the region. It also highlights the Bush administration’s declining influence in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Dan Beeton is International Policy Analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research (http://www.cepr.net) and an analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org).
just to remind you, the
first day of this Millenium.
