Troubling Pro Israel Propaganda

Not different from the hate propaganda disseminated by Bin Laden.

Seen on Richard's Blog

Al-Qaida's hate propaganda: Disgusting

This organisation is a shame the Islamic world would have to bear for a long time. Their speech is full of manipulation, hate, and bigotry. And no, Islam and Muslims are not like this bunch. In fact, I think that Al-Qaida is responsible for the anti-Muslim wave across the western world, for Guantanamo, for Iraq, for Abu-Ghraib, and for what is happening to the peace process in Palestine, as much as Israel, zionists, the US, and the neo-cons are responsible for these 21st century moral stains.

I can't bear these cave dwelling mercenaries anymore, and I think it is justified that the news shut them out, they are a venom to Humanity.

Media Frenzy About Palin: Nauseating

The media frenzy around republican VP nominee is just nauseating. Again and again the media are irresponsibly falling in the trap, and many citizens are being brain-washed by this frenzy and distracted from the real issues.

Israel, Israel Army Radio, and Haaretz: Spinning the threat of a nuclear war in the ME

Few days ago, I wrote that Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, has become the mouthpiece of the Israeli government in what looks like an attempt at spinning a nuclear war in the ME while coming out safely, in terms of the impact on public opinion, on Israel's military nuclear program. Now that's official. The Haaretz article below, published yesterday, wrongly cites a Canadian poll commissioned by the Canadian
Institute for Strategic Studies (CISS) revealing a massive support of Israeli public opinion for a nuclear strike on Iran. In the Haaretz article there is no link to the source of the poll. Haaretz's only source is the Israel army radio. On the CISS's website, there is no mention of the poll.

I called the CISS. They said someone called them from Reuters Jerusalem asking them about the poll. The CISS answered that it is not theirs and they know nothing about it. They did not order or commission the poll. They suggested maybe another Institute, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) commissioned the poll, and Haaretz might have mixed the names. I called the IISS. The IISS is not the source of such a poll.

Now either Haaretz is not verifying such a crucial information, or they are consciously reporting the propaganda of the Israel Army Radio. It is clear by now, as I wrote few days earlier, that Israel is manipulating middle eastern and international public opinions about a nuclear war in the ME. This propaganda could not have as a result a halt to Iran's nuclear enrichment neither a push toward consensus between Iran and the international community. The only result of this propaganda is to increase tension and rally Iran around its contested leader in accelerating its nuclear enrichment activity.

Here is an example of a short spin sequence:

October 1st, 2007. This information, published by Haaretz, has been verified by the author of this blog and proved false or, at best, unsourced.
"72% of Israelis back use of nuclear arms. The poll also showed that 75 percent of Israelis would feel safer if they knew with certainty that Israel has atomic weapons Israel has maintained an official veil of secrecy on rumors that it has in its possession nuclear weapons."

September 26, 2007. Israel lobbying to import nuclear material.
Read here my opinion about this piece of information.

May 19th, 2007. "71% of Israelis want U.S. to strike Iran if talks fail to halt Tehran's nuclear program, according to a new poll. The survey, commissioned by Bar-Ilan University's BESA Center and the Anti-Defamation League, found that 59 percent of Israelis still believe the war in Iraq was justified, while 36 percent take the opposite view."

And from Naj: "To add to the repository of Zionist lies"

Haaretz has been recently publishing, about the nuclear threat, either false polls or internal Israeli polls whose objectivity we can doubt if Haaretz, Israel, and the Israel army Radio, have been handling internal opinion polls the way they handled this last unsourced information. Not that I have any doubt about Israel's public opinion going in this direction. This is a country obsessed by its own security and strategic status in the region in total disregard for the ME and the rest of the world. But how are we to interpret the rush to elevate such a propaganda to the level of mainstream information in the present context ?

I have come to the conclusion that, at this stage, Israel is pushing Iran toward acquiring a military nuclear program. In a second stage, which may come before we realize that Iran,s nuclear capabilities are far from representing a threat to any country other than Iran and before we realize that the first propaganda stage was just lies, Israel will strike whatever Iran does or does not have as nuclear facilities, citing national defence worries. A rehearsal of this scenario was realized by the Israeli army on Syria earlier last September. In the meantime, the propaganda serves another purpose, legitimizing Israel's hidden military nuclear program in the context of an alleged Iranian nuclear threat on Israel.


UPDATE: On the day I published this post, I sent a comment to Haaretz on the unsourced article, follwed by another one the day after. They did not publish my comments as of October 4th, thursday, 8.pm, local time, and I bet they won't, but they published other comments since. Among other readers' earlier comments they published one which caught particularly my attention: it is from Petra in the USA, comment number 20.

"Title: Bomb Terhan and Mecca Let God sort them out
Name: Petra
City: State: usa
It worked for the USA against Japan. Now, Japan LOVES US!"

The Blogosphere: Beyond Manners

A call for manners in the world of nasty blogs.

The blogosphere should not be a free for all place where nastiness is the rule. Moreover, rules for the blogosphere should go beyond pure manners and strive for standards abandoned by mainstream media.
It is important for example to stress the difference between politeness and censorship. Censorship is when we try to hide or supress facts and well crafted arguments and points of view that challenge ours. I don't consider supressing an ill intentioned information or willful propaganda as censorship. I don't consider supressing insults as censorship.
Secondly, arguing is an art that has rules and ehtics and any argument that does not follow some basic logic and honesty about actual facts is not an argument. Propaganda is based on flawed logic and a disregard for facts.
Thirdly, moderation is not a middle of the road position, Aristotle defined it as a point somewhere outside a line formed by the two extremes and not the middle of the line joining the two extremes. True moderation is creative.

Today's political correctness has corrupted the rules of arguing and informing about facts, and the ethics of information and communication. Today's political correctness considers fairness as giving voices to all sides, even though some of them may be lies and pure fabrications and dangerous rethorics. Otherwise how did we come to be poisoned by the Malkins, the O'Reillys, the Hirsi Alis, the Coulters, the Bin Ladens, spitting their hate and their propaganda on mainstream media. On the other hand, today's political correctness in the US leftist and 'liberal' blogopshere condemns censorship except for the criticism of Israel which it censors as 'antisemitic'. Today's political correctness has corrupted our view of the world to the point of putting propaganda and truthful information at the same level obscuring real information in a web of lies and unleashing hate where dialogue should be fostered by objective and respectful information.

Mainstream news outlets have their commercial imperatives, their political allegiances, their corporate interests, and sometimes their hidden political agenda. We, in the blogosphere, have only our conscience to guide us. We should practice freedom of expression with conscience. We should be open and forward coming about our political agenda. We should be ready to offend when it is justified to offend and we should refrain from offending when the only result of the offense is to offend and nothing else.

As a blogger, I encountered some serious problems with some commentators visiting my blog. Insults, manipulation attempts, distortion attempts, propaganda attempts. I finally decided to moderate, and, when not moderating, to erase any comment that does not respect the basic ethics of communication, information and arguing. It was a difficult excercice in the beginning but from the practice emerged some simple rules. No lies, no propaganda, no disrespect, no insults, no faulty logic (this one is tolerated to some point when it is only due to weakness of the intellect and not ill intentioned, after all we are not machines, we are also humans with emotions), and most of all, no manipulation of the information we, bloggers, slave to put on our blogs.

UPDATE: Francis Pisani from Le Monde has a post and a summary of the new code of conduct for bloggers that is being prepared under a wiki form and can be found as a draft that can be commented on this blog.

Main points of the code of conduct:
1) We are responsible of all material published on our blog, posts and comments.
2) We should never publish things online that we cannot state in person.
3) Conflicts should be resolved in private (by email) before becoming public.
4) We should act if somebody attacks unjustly another person on our blog. In private first in order to convince him of changing his wrongful attitude.
5) We should not permit anonymous comments.
6) We should ignore trolls.

From The Guardian: Web Gurus try to banish bad behaviour from the blogosphere.