The brutal reality that cannot be spoken, lest it undo the fanciful authority of our appeasing elites

Fitzgerald: The New York Times, and That Business At the Cathedral In Cordoba - Jihad Watch - Hugh Fitzgerald, quoted below, tells us what happened, at the end of his long but worthwhile account of what the New York Times will never talk about....

A deliberately-planned display of Muslim force took place in the cathedral of Cordoba on April 2, in the very middle of Holy Week, the holiest time of the year for Christians. Nearly 120 Muslims from Austria slowly filtered into the cathedral, so as not to attract the attention of guards and, using walkie-talkies, arranged to meet at a certain time, in one of the naves of the cathedral. There a number of them began, in the hush of the Christian services, to turn toward Mecca and prostrate themselves, and to loudly chant in unison. When asked by the security guards to please stop, they refused, and began to threaten the guards who, in turn, had to call for reinforcements from the Spanish police. When the Spanish police arrived, thus further disrupting the holy hush of ancient sacrifice, and the spiritual tranquility of the Christian worshippers, they found the Muslims unwilling to stop. At least one pulled out a knife, and at least two of the Spanish guards, one policeman and one from the cathedral detail, were wounded sufficiently to go to the hospital.

And here's Phyllis Chesler also telling what the MSM won't.

Radio Memories: The Sound Of Evil

We can see evil, but can it be said that human beings also possess an ability to sense evil? Does evil exude a stench, an aura, a feeling, detectable to a sixth sense seemingly combining many of the other five?

Roger L. Simon eloquently discussed how he felt he was in the presence of pure evil in his provocative “Talking Through My Hat” piece for PJTV last week, which I listened to this morning courtesy of the re-broadcast through Pajamas Media’s PJM Political podcast.

Roger’s piece reminded me of an occasion where I felt I was listening to evil, as I heard for the first and only time the cold, clinical voice of Stalin’s apologist, the nefarious New York Times Columnist Walter Duranty.

Every Sunday we take a break from current events in order to pull up a chair, dim the lights and partake of some Radio Memories, lingering echoes from a time before television, when radio was king.

In previous Radio Memories posts we’ve listened to many forms of radio drama, from situation comedy to western adventure, even news dramatizations. This week’s offering slides into game shows, as we feature the unique quiz program Information Please.

Panelist John Kieran, a sports columnist for several New York newspapers at the time, reviewed his long participation as the highly-rated program's resident sports expert in his 1964 memoir, “Not Under Oath”:

“Until [producer] Dan Golenpaul came along with his format for Information Please, the popular quiz shows on radio featured a glib master of ceremonies directing questions at volunteer victims on stage or persons picked at random from a studio audience. Anyone who answered correctly was suitably rewarded… But too often the exposure of the utter ignorance of the persons to whom comparatively simple questions were put was embarrassing. The Golenpaul scheme was to reverse that process. Have the public direct questions at persons who might be reasonably expected to give a good answer.” [chapter V, pgs 63-64]

There were two regular panelists on the quiz show: the aforementioned John Kieran, able to field questions on subjects as varied as Shakespeare, flowers, baseball, birds, and poetry; and literary giant Franklin P. Adams, to help fill in the gaps on theater, literature and songs. Infrequent panelist Oscar Levant handled musical questions, and was often requested to play his answer on his medium of choice, the piano.

The fourth seat on the panel was to be filled by a series of guests. Among the experts who made an appearance were Cabinet officials ("[W]e had Postmaster General James Farley who directed that his fee for appearing on the program be divided into three parts and turned over to Catholic, Protestant and Jewish charities and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes who did not", as Kieran puts it in his autobiography), state governors, US Senators and Congressmen (including future Vice President Alben Barkley); theatrical, literary and sports figures; novelists, columnists and famous-for-being-famous types such as energy spokesman Wendell Wilkie, who parlayed his memorable appearances on this and other radio programs of the period into an eventual (and unsuccessful) candidacy for US President on the Republican ticket in 1940.

It took a lot of perseverance for listeners to send in questions that could outwit the regulars in their areas of expertise. Clever fans took to low blows such as asking the panelists the names of their Congressional representatives (only Kieran got his right), quotes from poems or books the panelists themselves had written (often forgotten by their authors), even the date of a wife's birthday (which was answered incorrectly!). Every once in a while the listeners would get their facts wrong; they were expected to provide the correct answers to their questions as well as the difficult questions themselves, and producer Golenpaul's screening process let in an occasional mistake, much to the consternation of the frustrated panel, and to the embarrassment of host Clifton Fadiman.

Coincidentally, one such error produces some genuine tension and hurt feelings in this week’s episode, which was originally broadcast July 4th, 1941… two short weeks after Hitler launched the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia on June 22.

Regulars Kieran and Adams are joined by noted world traveling journalist John Gunther, famous for his “Inside...” series of books chronicling global affairs continent by continent (my personal collection of them helpfully provides the "cover" for this week's embed); and the notorious Walter Duranty, at that time a well-respected foreign affairs columnist. It remained for later writers to expose Duranty’s perfidious dance with the truth in his reporting on Stalin’s embrace of mass starvation as government policy, and other malevolence enacted for "progressive" reasons.

The unscripted nature of the show gives us a rare oral history of the time period; not many discussion programs of that era have survived..! Sometimes guests would be asked for impromptu comments on current events, whether it was baiting baseball coach Leo Durocher to go on the record with his World Series predictions, or, as happens after the question at the 12:50 mark in this program, Walter Duranty's insider's opinion on the outcome of Operation Barbarossa.

If you’ve ever read about the fate of the kulaks, if you've heard about the ongoing controversy surrounding Duranty's reporting on it in the pages of the New York Times, you will probably be amazed to listen to the sound of Duranty's voice throughout this broadcast. It answers many of the questions you may have had, about what kind of a man could see all that he saw, know all that he knew, and yet still say what he did in his articles as a foreign correspondant writing about the "advances" of the Soviet system.

You can sense it in his voice: it is the sound of evil.

Previous Radio Memories posts:

The Aldrich Family: Cleaning The Furnace
Tom Mix, Terry and the Pirates VE Day broadcasts from May 8 1945
You Are There: The Capture Of John Wilkes Booth
Fort Laramie: War Correspondent
CBS Radio Workshop: Son Of Man
Great Gildersleeve: Easter Rabbits
Dimension X: Time And Time Again
An American In England: Women Of Britain
Cavalcade Of America: Bob Hope Reports
The March Of Time: Feb 10 1938 broadcast
Hear It Now: Coming Home From The Korean War
Escape: Vanishing Lady
Rogers Of The Gazette: Rewinding The Town Clock

Buying liberal media is an act of genocidal hatred

The Associated Press: Jewish group denounces political cartoon

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A Jewish human rights group is denouncing a Pat Oliphant political cartoon as anti-Semitic, comparing it to the cartoons in the 1930s that led up to the Holocaust.

The syndicated cartoon published Wednesday in newspapers across the country depicts a goose-stepping uniformed figure wheeling a fanged Star of David that menaces a small female figure labeled "Gaza."

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights group with more than 400,000 members in the United States, says the cartoon denigrates and demonizes Israel and mimics the Nazi propaganda.

It called on The New York Times and other media groups to remove the cartoon from their Web sites.

A message was left Wednesday night with Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Oliphant's cartoons. Oliphant won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967.

New York Times, Washington Post Cut Jobs as Ads Fall (Update1) - Bloomberg.com

Truce in Gaza, a little of the truth trickles out

We all know that when it comes to war, the MSM will leech onto any horrific propaganda and repeat it often if it fits their pre-conceived narrative. But this does not make it any easier to accept that we are being lied to - whether or not those uncritically feeding lies to us know what they are doing - especially when it comes from the likes of our tax-payer funded CBC where I have heard many claims that Israel is using white phosphorous on civilians.

Anyway, the New York Times is now covering itself for past misreporting, in the final paragraphs of a recent story on Gaza:

Mr. Kellenberger of the Red Cross said that Israel had facilitated his trip to Gaza and added that he had seen no evidence of the use of white phosphorus, an obscurant used in military conflicts that can be dangerous for civilians under certain circumstances. Palestinians say Israel is using it in Gaza.

Last week, the Red Cross issued an unusually harsh condemnation of Israel for refusing to allow its personnel into Gaza to rescue people trapped in battle. On Wednesday, Mr. Kellenberger said that although the situation remained critical, rescue missions had not been entirely shut down. The organization rescued 100 people trapped in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, on Tuesday.

This news was discussd by Marty Peretz in his blog (ht:contentious centrist), one of whose anonymous commenters writes:

As a Navy Seabee veteran with experience on 60mm and 81mm mortars, I have fired my share of white phosphorus ("willy peter") shells. WP was used during vietnam for illumination for night fighting and for brush clearing, and rounds were fired directly at the enemy as well. WP burns at 5000 degrees F. and will not extinguish until it completely burns up--it will even burn under water. If it gets on you it will burn right through you. Hence the danger to civilians "under certain circumstances."

Having seen the footage in question I can say that in my estimation, having seen WP up close and personal many times over, Israel is NOT using WP based on that footage.

Wouldn't it be nice if our media could fill their stories on war with a few sober military experts and not the sentimentalization of (and hence encouragment to produce more) victims that we get from the NGOs?

New Obama Times: Running on empty.

US-POLITICS Summary

New York Times endorses Obama for president NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for U.S. president on Thursday, saying he had "met challenge after challenge, growing as a leader and putting real flesh on his early promises of hope and change."

Yeah, and now for some news:

New York Times Company sinking faster - http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/10/new_york_times_company_sinking.html

Thomas Lifson
The death spiral accelerates, as NYTCo earnings fell by 51.4% in the third quarter. As AT predicted would happen after it was raised, the company now recognizes it is unable to sustain its dividend. That's critical because Sulzberger family members control the board of directors, and many of them depend heavily on dividend income for their lifestyles.

"Our board of directors plans to review our dividend policy before the end of this year to determine what is most prudent in light of the overall market conditions," the company's chief executive, Janet Robinson, said in a statement.

Pinch Sulzberger hiked the dividend from 17.5 cents to 23 cents a share to buy family support, whatever the cost to then company's ability to cope with the maelstrom of economic forces it must navigate. He clearly put his own tenure in office above the survivability of the company, in effect liquidating it in slow motion.

When the brighter among the staffers of the New York Times realize that Pinch has sacrificed the viability of the company in order to keep himself in office, they will turn on him. But that will probably be after the family tosses him out (it will be called voluntary retirement), now that (presumably) they have caught on themselves that Pinch has been scuttling the Good Ship New York Times through decades of disastrous business decisions. Those smaller checks are really going to pinch, now that the stock market and real estate are down.

Anticipating the dividend cut, investors are dumping the stock and it is below $10 for the first time in many years.
****

Yes, many people have stopped subscribing to the NYT for the simple reason that they use the Internet to read at Covenant Zone instead; but many must be plumb fed-up with the pimping for Obama that the Times tries to pass off as news and intelligent editorial. More than Obama: people are likely just disgusted by the leftard vision the Times presents as the way of sophisticated people. It ain't; and in a world where people have to choose wisely how to spend their limited time, they are decreasingly opting to spend their time and money on the NYT. The market tells, the smart money seeking new visions, regardless of how "stupid" we are, those of us who have abandoned The New York Times.

There will always be the NYT, but it'll be an obvious joke, like a fancy version of a street-corner give-away paper. The people speak. They say: The Times, they are a'collapsing.

K'Dylan Times

It looks like a happening musical trend. Move over, Brittany; heave-ho Lindsey, (no, please, not really); outta the way, McDonna: it's disco time for the old Timers. Break a hip.





The whole thing here:

http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=2332

Decline and Fall of the Times

First we dump Manhattan, then we dump Berlin.

I suspect many people I don't know and don't know of feel much like I do, that the "mainstream media" is ugly and disgusting, like an old friend who has degenerated into drug-abuse and mental illness, and one who, though a long-time friend, must be cut loose.

I watch now as the New York Times dives into the pavement from such a height, and it is fascinating to watch, the thrill of the up-coming crash something to fear and thrill at. The end of an era, the end of a saga of greatness, and the final end of a toilet rag that the NYT has become. It is also the end of a way of American poseur-thinking, of the Europeanization of America's elitist-wanna-be population.

There must be those conformists who will stay with the failed regardless of all objective conditions, conformity and loyalty and unthinkingness being essential to normal life in communities. There must be unthinking adherence to the failed because otherwise panic would set in at each and every failure and chaos would reign in the short experience of life as Man. People cannot easily give up and change, not in the real world, no matter how terrible conditions are: change is disruptive and terrible for society, and it only comes about slowly and from the reluctant in times of genuine dysfunction. The drag of those who continue to hold fast to the ruined save the revolutionary from causing more harm than one might expect. Too much good all at once is little good. Even revolutionaries need a long period of adjustment to a new reality. So, slowly falls the Times. I'll try to avert my eyes when it hits the ground and splashes across the city and the nation in a gush of muck. And then I'll continue reading news of a better sort.


September 18, 2008

Newspaper death spiral accelerates some more

Thomas Lifson

The decline in advertising revenues at the NYT accelerates again, and now the largest newspaper in New Jersey, the Star-Ledger of Newark, is threatening to shut down next January, if its employees do not voluntarily accept buyouts and unions do not agree to concessions.

Editor & Publisher obtained and posted a copy of the email from the Star-Ledger publisher to employees. See it here.
The NYT is not threatening to close yet, but advertisers are deserting it so fast now that its business model can be considered broken-to-year, advertising revenues for The New York Times Media Group decreased 15.1%.

The panic which must be spreading through the ranks of print journalists can be expected to weaken their hold on mental equanimity.

Expect press misbehavior to accelerate.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/newspaper_death_spiral_acceler.html

The Times, It is a Changin'

The last time I looked at the site meter here I saw that the New York Times still gets more readers than we here; but I see today that it's only a matter of time before Covenant Zone buries the Grey Lady. What? You want proof? Well, that's what we're here for. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth except some of the things I make up sometimes.

Thomas Lifson, "More bad news for the New York Times... tick tock, tick tock."

Moody's Investor's Services, the bond rating agency, has notified the New York Times Company that its bond rating may decline, according to Editor & Publisher. Without changing the current Baaa3 rating (at least for the moment), NYTCo's outlook has been downgraded from "stable" to "negative."

"The change in the rating outlook to negative reflects Moody's concern that a continued deterioration in the company's advertising revenue could make it increasingly challenging for the company to bring metrics in line with the rating in 2009 as anticipated in the prior stable rating outlook," wrote senior analyst John E. Puchalla and Corporate Finance Group Managing Director Alexandra S. Parker.

A Baa3 rating qualifies as investment grade, enabling many funds to hold its unsecured debt. If the rating were to decline to below investment grade (and it is perilously close now), many funds would no long hold NYTCo's debt securities, and their prices would decline. This could make refinancing that debt, as it expires and must be rolled over, much more expensive for NYTCo.

...the ratings firm added that it is currently operating at levels more consistent with a rating lower than Baa3. The investment grade rating, it added, is predicated on better performance in 2009.

In other words, if NYTCo fails to improve its performance, the current "investment grade" rating is in peril. So far, the decline in advertising is accelerating, while cost cutting efforts have not realized their announced goals.

The clock is ticking.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/07/more_bad_news_for_the_new_york.html

The Marketplace of Ideas is actually a market that has some cash money involved, the real test of things. Who will invest their time in the Times? Who will invest the time it takes to make a few bucks to pay for the paper? Who will invest their time in reading a paper that tells things they don't want to know, time that could be well spent on learning better things? The Gray Lady is bleeding to death before our eyes. Does it matter at all? The Times will survive regardless of money. Some wag suggested George Soros would buy it to inflate his already sizable ego. It's not going to be buried, but it won't be a paper of any record worth spinning. Elitists can crank out as much vile propobama as they choose, but the people who count, those who count their dollars and cents and spend them freely by choice, they have made the final word count where it counts.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Lee Harris

You can't say the forces of freedom are making no progress when, of all places, the New York Times allows Ayaan Hirsi Ali to review Lee Harris' new book, The Suicide of Reason. Here's a bit of her review:

Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.

I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.

Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism. My reasons for reproaching today’s Western leaders are different from Harris’s. I see them squandering a great and vital opportunity to compete with the agents of radical Islam for the minds of Muslims, especially those within their borders. But to do so, they must allow reason to prevail over sentiment.

I think Ali is right that we have to engage in a war for the minds of Muslims (but also for those in the West trapped in the irrationalities of White Guilt) and that over time we will find that more and more of them will want to be free like Ali, and not slaves to traditional forms of society, especially when they see that is not tribalism that can hope to feed them and keep them comfortable and healthy, but only our global modernity, without which the human population must greatly diminish.

However, Ali, and perhaps also Harris, though I haven't yet read his book, continues to pit reason against faith in objectionable ways. Of course there is a lot in the Western tradition of unreason to oppose. This blog never tires of berating the Gnostic left and its incoherent preaching on multiculturalism, for example. However, Ali seems to be largely unaware of how Western individualism has been in good part an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian religion, and Romanticism, and not simply of the "Enlightenment" which is best understood as a secularization or codification of what has always been a potential of a Western religious tradition that separates the moral and (the tribal) ethical, emphasizes individual moral conscience and conversation with God, as well as a history of progressive, unfolding revelations into our humanity to be discovered in human time. Furthermore, ours is a religion that, especially in the case of Christianity, calls on us to maximize human reciprocity, to see individuals as sacred centres/traders in their own right, freed of any particular social hierarchy or periphery, in a way that has led us to the free global market of secular modernity.

Similarly, the Romantic movement cannot be seriously summed up with a one-sided, good or bad, polemic, however much violence has arisen from it, both in the form of leftist political movements and resentful individuals defining their humanity against "the system" or the establishment. The modern individual, who uses the arts of consumer society, and also some reason, to endlessly differentiate individual sacred centres within a larger free market modernity, is as much a Romantic figure as is the anti-modern philobarbarist or supporter of one or another totalitarian fantasy. Furthermore, Romantic interest in the primitive can be a form of anthropology, a mix of reasoning and art that attempts a better understanding of our human origins, an improved understanding that can have liberating potential in our modernity. It is all too simple to see Romanticism across the board as an unquestioning embrace of the primitive.

It is incumbent on us to work through such contradictory possibilities in the major intellectual and artistic currents of the modern West, to foster the positive forces therein, so as to defend our modernity. This defense cannot be seriously achieved by those who would simply write off large parts of our cultural heritage as unreasonable. The Enlightenment's caricature of Reason is not alone the salvation of anything. It leads to forms of positivism which become crude Gnostic religions in their own right: see Marxism, or the French Revolution, for example, where reason and romanticism embraced in ways I don't think Ali yet knows how to separate.

I greatly admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali for showing the West what Islam is, for being a whistle blower, an informer, for insisting we hear the kind of stories that can only come from those who have lived under the oppressive tribal codes of the Islamic world. And while she seems to be someone whose escape from Islam has left her faithless and unsure how to deal with the human need for good faith, as the guarantee of our freedom, of our ability to perform for others an act of good faith, an acting that "reason" alone will never conquer, she may at least give us the courage to fight harder against those, like Mohamed Elmasry, who are actively targeting the forces of freedom in the West, as in Elmasry's recent campaign to silence Mark Steyn, or to make him unpublishable in Canada. Elmasry is the man who was widely quoted in the media for claiming that the murder of Aqsa Parvez was just a "teenager issue":

"I don't want the public to think that this is really an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue," said Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. "It is a teenager issue."

Thanks to voices like Hirsi Ali's, fewer and fewer Canadians are falling for such rhetorical sleights of hand. Islam is an inherent part of certain tribal societies and tribal society is arguably an inherent part of Islam, though whether there can be some kind of accommodation of Islam and modernity remains to be seen. We will only begin the serious work of finding out what can and cannot be made of Islam and modernity when we stop listening to and appeasing the anti-freedom Islamists like Elmasry, who is invited to all kinds of conferences by leftist Canadian elites, and champion those Muslims who so desperately want greater freedom for their people. Ali has rejected Islam, others are trying to reform it. Let that debate play out, let's give our attention to those Muslims interested in change and progress, and not in a defense of tribalism masked as a denial that Islam is profoundly allied with tribalism.

The debate we need will be well served if we renew our interest in Western culture and history so that it does not become a sources of easy polemics and caricatures for those fighting for freedom and modernity. We only really defend freedom and modernity when we are not unnecessarily casting out parts of it, but grasping the greater mystery by which so much has and can be held together as a network of free individuals making their lives sacred in any number of ways.

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