Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Our friend Richard Landes is quoted here: 'Israel slander corrupts human rights'
"When anti-Semitism marches under the banner of anti-racism, as in the Durban conference, human rights are corrupted," he told The Jerusalem Post on Monday evening after his speech to the Forum.
"Israel is delegitimized, if not demonized, by the ascription to it of the two most scurrilous indictments of twentieth-century racism, Nazism and apartheid the embodiment of all evil," according to Cotler. This has the disingenuous effect of turning an antisemitic indictment calling for Israel's dismantlement into a moral imperative; and to seek to give it the imprimatur of the United Nations and international law...
...Prof. Richard Landes of Boston University spoke of the ways in which anti-Semitism is easily spread by mainstream Western media. "Muslim political culture uses the media as a theater of war," he told the Post on Monday evening, echoing his speech to the 160 delegates from Israel and the Diaspora who participated in the Forum. "The western media is inexcusably credulous and therefore allows this sacred public trust to be exploited."
Landes urged Israel to "stand up [for itself]. In the same way the media behaves in a submissive way [in the face of] Muslim political culture, the Israelis behave in a submissive way toward the mainstream media. They don't want to confront them.
"So you have a death-lock in which the Muslims present vicious propaganda and get the media to present this as real news. As it is, Western Europe is not resisting the onslaught of Islamism. Part of the reason is that they don't know how to defend themselves. Israel could provide an example for this [defense]."...
A good example of that latter portion is the credulity with which the MSM treats the insane rantings of the Muslim World with regard to Israel's work at the Western Wall. Muslim riot and rave and threaten and the media simply report their complaints straight with no examination of whether they have a serious factual basis on par with the reaction.
[h/t: isirota1965]
Pathos devoid of intelligence will eventually, if not immediately, devolve into a self-serving, slobbering emotional regression, together with erosions of coherence; intelligence devoid of pathos will devolve into abstractions, manipulations, a triumphalism of a brute will, etc. The only genuinely fruitful response, one capable of being sustained, to all the b.s. being faced - fruitful in the sense of prospects for sustained strength and resolve and carrying things through to a desirable end - is one that rightly marries intelligence and pathos and therein, humanity itself is sustained and, despite all the post-modern rhetoric and attacks to the contrary, identity is sustained and formed as well.
The irony is that such is not even terribly profound as there is more of a commonsense aspect to it all. Yet the demons of the present era serve to obscure and seduce. What weariness there is under the sun.
One should not be shy about coming to terms with such as this, it is only these comprehensions and formative acts which will in fact achieve what needs to be achieved. That too is more commonsense than anything else and that too is what is being obscured and defamed.
Thanks for the hat tip!
The MSM just reports the insane and delusional rantings of the Moslems because objectivity and reporting of the actual facts are irrelevant to it. What matters is the agenda of portraying the Palestinians as poor, oppressed and victims of evil, brutal Israeli aggression. Everything is secondary to this overriding goal.