Ollie's coming to the White House, and one can only wonder what nice mess he and Bush will put the world in. You might think the focus would be on what these warmongers might be planning for Iran, or on the complicity of the US in Israel's ongoing flouting of international law. NPR instead focuses on the domestic corruption charges facing Olmert (important enough) and manages to slip in "expert" opinions on the "peace" process from a Zionist extremist.Eric Westervelt is selling this story from Jerusalem. Of Olmert we learn that "critics said he badly mismanaged Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon." Yep, killing over a thousand civilians and dropping a million cluster bombs is definitely what I'd call "mismanagement." Only when Olmert's sleazy conduct regarding bribes and payoff is brought up does he come in for moral condemnation. From political scientist Rubin Hazan Hebrew University, we learn that Olmert's corruption "borders on the criminal."
The most maddening part of the story is when Westervelt talks about the death march of the "peace" process: "Olmert's trip to the US...and a meeting Wednesday with President Bush will focus on US initiated peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. The talks were going nowhere, even before Olmert's latest crisis says political studies professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Elan University....Bush's promise for a settlement within a year: 'It was always oversold, the hype, the constant visits of the Secretary of State, the President himself, those things are way overstretching what the traffic will bear.'"
NPR presents Gerald Steinberg as just a "political studies professor." Let's consider a few of the kindly professor's statements and activities:
- On Israel's 60th anniversary: "The primary goal of Zionism was and remains the re-establishment of sovereignty and self-determination for the Jewish people in our homeland. In addition to fulfilling the 2,000-year-old desire to return to Eretz Yisrael."
- He attacks human rights groups such as B'tselem because they "take down every Palestinian complaint at face value and write inflammable reports castigating Israel as the aggressor. They do so by leaving out essential context..." And those really "radical" Israeli Arab groups "poison any reasonable dialogue by demonizing Israel, for example by drawing parallels to the apartheid regime."
- Steinberg also runs a "monitoring" group to keep an eye on extremist NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
3 comments:
From NPR's position, Did Olmert "mismanage[]" the 2006 Lebanon attack because his country killed more than twice as many civilians as combatants, or because Hezbollah ("If a lightweight fights a heavyweight and gets a draw, the lightweight wins", to quote an Israeli commentator) won?
I'm afraid to criticize NPR's pro-Israel stance too harshly since opposing hard Zionism usually leads to one being condemned as an anti-Semite, but I'll say it's stories like this (and the ones showing NPR's third-grade economic understanding) that usually lead to me switching the radio off less than a third of the way in.
On a different topic, I heard sometime around 7:15 EDT in a discussion about Obama being automatically defeated by McCain since Obama is 'unelectable', they ran a brief quote from a woman who said, "I was an Obama supporter until I heard the quotes from his pastor, now I've gone from being a Liberal Democrat to a Conservative Republican."
I want to know more about that piece, for it sure sounded like NPR's on-air people were in agreement that McCain will win.
And I want to know more about that woman whose belief structures are so thin that edited and doctored quotes from Rev. Wright caused her to embrace the architects of the destruction of America for the last 7 years.
Why did NPR feel the need to go find this one person that loves the grandson of the biggest Nazi financier of WWII (president Bush and his appointed heir McCain) more than the values of the Democratic Party?
Why are open and unashamed Nazi-lovers getting such disproportionate amounts of airtime? (Hypothetical question, I know the answer: the Media is under orders from their corporate owners to legitimize the imminent declaration of Martial Law in the US, to facilitate the completion of America's transformation into a totalitarian fascist corporate-controlled police state.)
I heard the same 'Liberal Democrat to Conservative Republican' statement, a propaganda plant if there ever was one. The absurdity of it threatens to over reach even the cleverness of the turbo-Goebbelses of today. However, we can expect much more of this sledgehammer approach, which, despite the absurdity, works very effectively on a non-thinking population, as countless examples have shown us.
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