Friday Afternoon Roundup - Spot the Narrative

Wouldn't it be terrible if we lived in some kind of dictatorship where a tiny group of powerful men controlled the broadcast media and used it to justify abuses of power by the government?

Isn't it great that we live in a country where we don't have to worry about that kind of thing?

Yeah me too.



(Please note: Due to the Shavuot holiday, this blog will be on hiatus until Monday night)



THE NARRATIVE

It all starts with the narrative. Coverage of the lawsuits can be minimized as much as possible, but sooner or later it has to be reported on. The media is as lazy, as it is corrupt and stupid, so they usually garner their talking points from liberal talking point distributors like Think Progress and Media Matters.

The narrative on the Catholic lawsuits is problematic because it's a clear case of religious freedom being infringed on. That means this problematic fact has to be countered by...

Talking Point #1: The lawsuit isn't religious, it's political.

Talking Point #2: The lawsuit isn't from the Catholic Church, but from a small group of extremist bishops.

Talking Point #3: Most Catholics love abortion and the Catholic Church is out of step with modern American Catholics.

Talking Point #4: Both sides need to compromise. Obama has already faked a compromise. Not the Catholic Church needs to give in.

Talking Point #5: Molestation

You can see all four talking points in just the headlines of the news stories on the screenshot above. I didn't choose this screenshot, these are the first listed stories, which also tells you something. You have to click outside to find the fifth one, but it's there.

It's pretty sad when the propaganda is not only this obvious... but when you don't even need to read past the headline to see it.

This shows how much contempt the media has for us and for its own profession. This isn't between the lines stuff. This is talking point headlines. It's the journalism equivalent of a cop selling crack to crack babies. It's a level of treason to one's own integrity and professionalism that there's nowhere lower to go except printing actual press releases without altering a word.

I'll even go you one worse. Only one of the outlets listed is the Huffington Post and it has the mildest headline of the bunch. What does it tell you when HuffPo looks moderate compared to the Star Ledger or the Palm Beach Post?

Three words. Cancel your subscription. Don't take out ads in these papers. Kick the propagandists out into the cold hard new media world. If the Obama Administration is going to have a propaganda arm, it should be the one paying them out of its campaign coffers.



VIVE ISLAM

The Hollande victory is quite an ugly thing and as I mentioned last week, I covered some of the key figures in a piece at Front Page entitled, France's New Burqa Friendly Government.

But there's also this rather important point.

Hollande certainly did not discourage the estimated 500,000 Turks in France from coming to such a conclusion. A few days before the runoff election he sent out a letter which stated that he was very attached to the relationship with Turkey and that if elected he would increase the closeness of that relationship.

“Europe,” he wrote, “which has agreed to begin negotiations for full membership of Turkey, remains true to its principles “to bring together different peoples, cultures and beliefs.”

Hollande, who lost the Catholic and Jewish vote, but won the Muslim vote, has not done that; instead his government reflects the Leftist-Islamic alliance that brought him to power. It is a government, that for all its assurances, is likely to turn a blind eye to the burqa, a knowing wink to the repression of women, and a blind eye to the preaching of Jihad on French soil. And it will do its part to open Europe’s door to Turkey, which will mean the end, not only of France, but of Europe.

THE ARAB SPRING IS ALMOST OVER

The Egyptian election is about to wrap up with the likely runoff two to be a Muslim Brotherhood thug and a regime proxy. The election will come down to what it was always about, a showdown between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government.

The Twitter activists that neo-conservatives fell in love with are weeping and wailing, but they're really nerving themselves up for the inevitable-- throwing in with the Muslim Brotherhood and assuming the true role that they always held as the enablers of an Islamist dictatorship.

Iran 2.0. Now in Egypt.

If the regime wins, the Brotherhood will retreat snarling to its corner while the US and the EU pressure the Egyptian government into more "democratization". If the MB wins, then game over. The mask will hold up for a little bit, long enough to harvest infidel money and tighten its grip on the military. And then Egypt will turn into Iran.

Either way the great obscene lie of the Arab Spring is dead, its rotting stench is filling up the pages and sites of the media that propagandized it. The rest will be devoted to explaining why the MB is the best and most democratic choice for Egypt, with op-eds written by the Twitter activists to explain why they're backing the MB because "it can be influenced" and will mean the end of the old regime.

This is exactly what I predicted from the start, and there's no great credit in that, because plenty of others did too. It's just a matter of learning from the past and looking at a thing as it is, rather than as it should be.

The MB has the innate organization and numbers to win an election, but the regime will likely have voter fraud in its corner, and quite a few Egyptians who never wanted a revolution, and just want things to go back to an orderly and peaceful system.




ORTHODOX JEWS ARE THE NEW CATHOLICS

Ever since Orthodox Jews took a public stand against gay marriage in the New York State election for governor and then in the battle for Weiner's seat and SD-27 seat that Lew Fidler lost to a Russian Jewish Republican, but in true Democratic fashion is trying to steal anyway, there suddenly seems to be a rash of attacks.

It's almost as if Orthodox Jews are getting the Catholic treatment.

There are now constant stories accusing the Orthodox Jewish community of being a gang of pedophiles. Here's a snapshot of the media coverage.

Who knew Goebbels was still around?

The parallels with a similar campaign run against the Catholic Church are a little too obvious. While stories on Muslims spin positive, Orthodox Jews are being hit with an aggressive smear campaign. Come out against gay marriage and for traditional values, and suddenly Anderson Cooper is screeching that you're all a bunch of pedophiles.

While the media refuses to discuss Jihad, it turned Deborah Feldman, a compulsive liar, into a media star for a string of lies attacking Orthodox Jews. While her 15 minutes are long up, CNN just ran an op-ed from Feldman trying to jump on the pedophile bandwagon.

This is now the narrative. Any mainstream media coverage of Orthodox Jews will now have a "sidebar" accusing them of not coming to terms with "sex crime problems". People like Feldman, will be kept around to pop up out of the box and provide a quote for the occasion. The New York Times already uses people like Shmarya Rosenberg as their source for the Orthodox community. That would be of using Christopher Hitchens as their source on Catholics or Wafa Sultan as their source on the Muslim community, which no liberal paper would do.

This is hard-coded bias and it's a message, just like the redistricting aimed at ending Orthodox Jewish political representation.

You don't get this kind of treatment for carrying out multiple terrorist attacks in America. You do get it for refusing to accept men marrying each other in public ceremonies. Liberals were willing to mostly ignore Orthodox Jews, so long as they didn't challenge their hegemony. But now it's a new ball game.



THE MUNIR MAN

On the website for CROE-TV, the Coalition for the Remembrance of The Most Honorable Elijah, Muhammad’s broadcasting arm, which puts out several television shows featuring Munir Muhammad, such as Muhammad and Friends, former listed guests include Valerie Jarrett, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Barack Obama.

There are also lesser lights like former Chicago mayor and brother of the former Chief of Staff, Richard M Daley and Senator Dick Durbin, alongside Louis Farrakhan; powerful men and women who have in their time come to sit down and chat with Muhammad Munir, opposite the red and white crescent flag of the Nation of Islam leaning against the wall in the corner of the studio.

Illinois politicians didn’t just give Munir Muhammad lucrative policy gigs, they donated thousands of dollars directly to his organization. An organization whose reason for existence is promoting the ideas of a bigot, whose views, aside from skin color, have little to distinguish them from those of Aryan Identity groups.

Governor Blagojevich had doled out some 50,000 dollars in state money to Munir’s hate group and even proclaimed February 12, 2006 to be “Coalition for the Remembrance of Elijah Muhammad Day” and encouraged citizens of the state to recognize the organization for its “ongoing commitment to ensuring the legacy of this influential African-American leader”—an influential leader who had described white people as devils and “born murderers”.

That's an except from my article on Chicago's Hate Connection



THIS IS YOUR BRAIN, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON LIBERALISM

Studies show that New Yorker approval for Mayor Bloomberg goes up when they forget that he exists. It goes down whenever he opens his mouth to express exactly the kind of ideas that you expect from an out of touch billionaire.

Bloomberg, for those who have spending time in the real world and forgot that he exists, has been on a campaign to bring "issues" to the attention of the establishment and get past all that partisan bickering. Which usually means ramming through policies so liberal even Obama won't touch them.

The report noted that Canada allows its provinces to set different immigration standards to attract the type of employees each region needs.


The mayor quickly endorsed a similar proposal for US states — and then some.


“There’s no reason why you have to have a common immigration policy for all of America,” he argued. “You could let each state do it differently.


“I would argue the federal government should go one step further. They should deliberately force some places that don’t want immigrants to take them, because that’s the only solution for these big, hollowed-out cities where industry has left and is never going to come back unless you get some people to move there.”

There's a break here, from an almost sensible proposal, to let states run their own immigration policy-- it's not really sensible, because immigrants can just enter states that are immigrant friendly and move to other states, and all it takes is one open borders state to flood the country-- but Bloomberg doesn't actually seem to understand that proposal.

Instead Bloomberg uses a proposal that states control their own immigration policy as a jumping off point to proposing that the government forcibly ship immigrants to states that don't want them.

Who exactly benefits from this arrangement, except the Democratic Party? Do states benefit from having people they don't want forced on them? Do immigrants benefit from going to places that don't want them? What's the point of punitive immigration except to make people like Bloomberg feel good about themselves?

Also don't we already have this exact policy. It's called federally mandated affordable housing. If you aren't building it, your town is guilty of racism, discrimination, hate crimes, crimes against humanity and other fun stuff.

Bloomberg caused a ruckus last year during an appearance on “Meet the Press,” where he proposed opening the door to immigrants on the condition that they agree to live in Detroit for five to 10 years, restoring that struggling city by starting new businesses.

Does this really make Detroit a better place or a worse place? Is Detroit's problem that it doesn't have enough people on welfare?




URI L'TZEDEK HATE GROUP STILL HATING

I wrote briefly about Uri L'Tzedek and Elisheva Goldberg two weeks ago in my piece on them. Uri L'Tzedek is a radical left group targeting the Orthodox Jewish community, intimidating small businesses and trying to get its "inspectors" in all over the place.

Elisheva Goldberg is the "Rosh Beit Medrash" there. She's a radical left-wing activist who works for Peter Beinart and conducts Anti-Israel activism at the Open Zion blog. The Uri L'Tzedek website makes no secret of her other job and clearly supports her activities there.

Goldberg's job is generating attacks on Israel as an illegitimate racist settler state, etc, you know the drill. She celebrated Yom Yerushalayim with a rant about "Greater Israel".A Jewish school is attacked for not promoting the terrorist perspective. It's just non-stop hate and lies.

A typical example is Goldberg lying and claiming that Netanyahu tells American audiences one thing in English and another thing in Hebrew. She claims that Netanyahu tells American audiences that he will give up Yerushalayim, but tells Israeli audiences in secret JewSpeak(TM) (Hebrew) that he wouldn't. Clearly this is a major breaking story.

Elisheva Goldberg unknotted her Keffiyah and as a knower of JewSpeak(TM)  rushed to transcribe Netanyahu's secret remarks in JewSpeak (TM), where he said such things as,

"I will continue to say to them that Jerusalem will remain forever the united capital of the State of Israel and the united capital of the People of Israel."

Shocking stuff. The great investigative journalists at Open Zion had uncovered that Netanyahu secretly supports an undivided Jerusalem. And by secretly I mean he says it all the time. It was the opening to his 2012 speech to AIPAC... in English.

 Thank you for the warm reception. It could be heard as far away as Jerusalem – the eternal and united capital of Israel.

And even more covertly Netanyahu said it in a speech at the UN.

I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That's like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we're called "Jews"? Because we come from Judea.


In my office in Jerusalem, there's a -- there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. That's my last name. My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin -- Binyamin -- the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Sumeria 4,000 years ago, and there's been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.


And for those Jews who were exiled from our land, they never stopped dreaming of coming back: Jews in Spain, on the eve of their expulsion; Jews in the Ukraine, fleeing the pogroms; Jews fighting the Warsaw Ghetto, as the Nazis were circling around it. They never stopped praying, they never stopped yearning. They whispered: Next year in Jerusalem. Next year in the promised land.

It's right here in English. No Double Secret Translation necessary.

We are often told that Arabs say different things to domestic and international audiences. In fact, they are notorious in pro-Israel circles for doing so.  But yesterday Bibi showed us that Israelis are guilty of exactly the same thing.

That's what Elisheva Goldberg claims. What she proves is that Israelis say what they mean. But Elisheva Goldberg and Peter Beinart lie compulsively, just like the Islamic terrorists who benefit from their advocacy.

But this isn't about one of Beinart's Anti-Israel trolls. It's about Uri L'Tzedek and the kind of people who play leading roles in them. If you are uncomfortable with Elisheva Goldberg's Israel bashing, then you should also be uncomfortable with Uri L'Tzedek and any restaurant that uses their Tav HaYosher seal... and you should tell the owner that.



THE PRISON FROM HELL

Israeli prisons are as we know horrible hellholes where poor terrorists have to go on hunger strikes, just to get some headlines. You can see some truly heartbreaking photos of their degradation here. I don't know how they get all that food down.

But now a Muslim journalists/activist has become a connoisseur of Israeli and Muslim prisons and it turns out he prefers Israeli prisons.

 Ozkose spoke to the AP at the office of Milat, a new newspaper with an Islamic background. The 33-year-old journalist was on board the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish aid boat bound for Gaza that was the target of a deadly raid by Israeli commandos in 2010, and he was held with other passengers in Israeli detention until they were deported.

In the interview, Ozkose described the Israeli detention center as “five-star” in comparison to the Syrian jail, where he slept on a concrete floor, saw naked prisoners and sometimes heard people crying out in anguish.

Oddly enough prisons in the Muslim world actually are bad. Hunger strikes there don't work too well because it's not a strike if they're not feeding you anyway.



REBUILDING AND UNBUILDING

In light of my recent piece on the Post-American Skyscraper, Edward Cline has reminded me of the essay collection on the failure to rebuild the WTC.



HOW STONED ARE WE?

Frame Seven: "How stoned am I? Look into my eyes, dude. I mean, man, check it out. This is visionary weed, man. I can see, see the future. I see myself as, whoa, President of the United States, man. How far out is that? Hey, don't bogart that...."

It would actually almost be better if the last three years had been a haze in the mind of an undergrad.



ISRAEL IS ALSO THE NEW ARIZONA

The US also viewed negatively government officials' use of the term "infiltrators" to refer to asylum seekers, as well as officials who directly associations asylum seekers with the rise in crime, disease and terrorism. Interior Minister Eli Yishai was specifically flagged as an instigator.

...I guess "infiltrators" is the incorrect term for people who infiltrate your country. Maybe they should be called "Undocumented Infiltrators".