The Big Lie

The Big Lie - How the Sydney Morning Herald sells the biases of its newsroom as reportage.

A long time ago, in Israeli elections around 1990, someone put together a party called Bli Busha" (= shameless), to try and expose the flaws and vagaries of the political process, where much is promised and little delivered. Bli busha would be a good way to describe the way the SMH has approached its coverage of the "Free Gaza To Attack Israel" flotilla. It used an embedded partisan "reporter" (i.e. propogandist who articulates his personal predjudices under a thin veneer of reportage) someone who, like Robert Fink, Norman Finkenstein, and that other pulpit bashing professional do gooder whose instantly forgettable name and work escapes me right now, but I think he was given the City of Sydney peace prize recently in keeping with Mignon McLaughlin's observation that "Every society honours its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers." so paul McGeogh uses his negligible talents as a creative writer to systematically demonise and dehumanise Israelis, while whiteashing and sanitising one of the ugliest, most reactive and resentment driven causes of the 21st Century - the desire to establish an Islamic State in Gaza where personal freedoms are non existent and the glue of national identity is emnity towards Israelis and - lets cut the crap now - towards Jews simply because they're Jews.

So after the SMH's reportage has been exposed as full of distortions - the Israeli boys were armed with paint ball guns, not machine guns, they didn't attack first, the "activists" were neither peaceful or seeking peace, and the ommitted context was the state of war that Gaza's elected governemnt has declared on the state it dosn't even recognise as existing - it has learnt nothing and continues to try and shape the debate rather than simply inform it.

If the SMH's reporters still have the remnants of a sense of integrity they'll look for work elsewhere and condemn the editorial decision makers (and here I paraphrase the editorial which lectured, from a dizzy height, the Australian Jewish community about what stance it should take re Israel) which have turned the SMH into a tabloid gazette unless they're happy being part y hacks bleating along with the herd... and if the SMH's readers have any desire to be given a picture in the round, they'll be taking out subscriptions to other newspapers. Because if the SMH is systematically and programatically misrepresenting and manipulating re Israel, where else are they doing it - these things are impossible to contain and localise - having fashions run the newsroom spills over into every site of contention upon which newspapers report.

Allah bless Israel, HaShem bless Palestine

I feel most comfortable in the middle...not first ( too much pressure) and not last - (too much opprobrium) but in the middle. And to paraphrase David ben Gurion " we must resist Jew hatred as if there was no Jewish unconsciousness, and we must fight Jewish unconsciousness as if there were no Jew hatred."

Headnote: I suppose there must be a reason the Bhuddists say all identification with name and form is the root cause of suffering - whether one identifies as Israeli/Palestinian/Jew/Moslem/Progressive/Conservative one immediately takes on an identity based on not being the other, with its automatic exclusion and delegitimisation of everything that is not I... I hope this post won't just be another addition to the great unconscious clouds swirling around this loveless debate, where people seek to justify mentally held positions and make the other wrong...if only riot control police could spray clouds of clarity and open hearted compassion over everyone...

I don't agree with the definition of Israel as the Jewish State, and with the Jewish fundamentalists who would turn it into that, I see Israel as the State of the Jews, not the Jewish State, i.e. a democratic pluralist state in which minorities are equal before the law and there is complete separation between synagogue and state - something which only partially exists at this point in time.

Perhaps the people who have accused Israelis and Jews of all sorts of "crimes" over the last week on forums around the world are really trying to repress the "Jew" within them (I'm not talking about level headed, blanced and rational criticism of Israeli policy, I'm talking about the mediaeval Jew hatred which many forums have descended into )...because, as Sylvia Plath intimated, we are all Jews.

So like the homophobe who must ruthlessly repress their own homo-erotiism by going out and bashing some gays ( what we ruthless repress in ourselves we cannot bear to see others owning or acting out) - think the end of the film American Beauty - the Jew is asigned the role, in some people's inner cosmology, of carrying the parts of themselves they can't bear to own... just as the white American South attributed an exagerated and fanciful sexuality to African Americans, as a displacement and projection of its own represssed sexual energy...this, I suspect, is the mechanics of much newspaper reportage, and I would like it to be exposed as such, so that people become more conscious about the unconscious agendas that shape opinion about, and preocupation with, a particular subject.

And yet I will resist Jewish / Israeli reactivity with every fibre of my being as well - from Jewish victimology which reduces our history to only a sorry tale of persecution and misses out on all our golden ages and creative symbioses with other cultures and traditions, to the triumphalist discourses of Israelis living in Beit El and Hevron and Schem whose discourse has no space for the other... the Palestinians are our brothers and sisters and we can and must look beyond the conflict to the time when we will be forced to work together to manage scarce resources such as water and arable land. To borrow an idea from Amos Oz, May HaShem and Allah bless Israel and Palestine with a Checkovian compromise rather than curse them with a Shakespearian tragedy

The latest craz(e) this winter!

Are your underpants a bit tight? Are you struggling to find work? Or in a job already but don't like your boss, or fellow workers? Want to meet some pretty girls? Or just generally bored and wanting to make your day? Then come and protest outside your nearest Israeli embassy. Its fun! Its easy! Everyone's doing it! Its the latest craze this winter. Hang out with friends, find people who agree with you and do stuff you can't do at home - throw rocks, spit, and vent your anger, rage and frustration. In fact, several leading mental health professionals recommend demonstrations outside Israeli embassies. Quentin Quisling, a psychologist, explains. "Its a quick, easy and cost effective form of catharsis. In Roman Times people had gladiator bouts and public crucifixions. In the middle ages there were stoning and the auto de fe - the public burnings of people the Catholic church felt threatened by. But modern people have to maintain this veneer of civility. We're starved for places where we can jeer and taunt and express our more primal emotions and the frustrations of modern life. Which is why when a safe, easy venue and a target that is essentially powerless to respond is offered to us on a plate, we should take full advantage. So come on everybody, lets get dressed up in our kafiyot, and feel important and good about ourselves."

The Mashat - The Flotilla

When I get life shocks that set of thoughts that make me anxious, I sometimes try to write - or think - my anxiety away. Generally the anxiety fades after a while, whether because of the passage of time or because of the writing...I image more the former. I also speak to people, to try and moderate my mind -talk (self-talk)

When I see posters calling for demonstrations against Israel, and using charged inflammatory language clearly designed to fan resentment and indignation, I get scared. This is not the language of peace or of people seeking solutions - it is the language of resentment and unconscious baggage and manipulation and aggression.

I anticipate that the Israeli point of view will not be considered and, as has happened on many campuses around the world, actively supressed. When I see posters showing the entire State of Israel covered with a Palestinian flag, I get scared at the way people calling for the obliteration of a country can do so with so little condemnation. Imagine a map of Australia entirely covered by an Indonesian or Malay flag, or of India entirely covered with a Pakistani flag.

There are long term ideas and short term ideas that well up in response to the responses to the flotilla.

The Semantics of Israel Reportage

We live in a reactive world...people on all sides continue to dump their own psychic garbage and projections on the nearest available conflict. Here is a pic of one of the peace activists on the Turkish - Greek-Irish-Cypriot Flotilla.



mmmm...feel that peace eh

NGO and Not For Profit Bullshit

Like it says on the side of my blog, one of the G?d(s) I worship is balance and so, in the interests of balance, here is a compilation of bullshit terms that are common currency in civil society, amongst money making "spiritual' rackets, non governmental organisations etc etc

"Donation $10" - if its a donation then why is the price stipulated?

Business Bullshit and Art Bullshit

Many kinds of business - in fact most I suspect - are about lying to yourself and other people so frequently that eventually both you and they believe it... not in the depths of their being, but believe it enough to buy it, both literally and metaphorically. I will collect some choice example of business bullshit in this post over the coming weeks, perhaps along with suitable translations in truth-lish. Let's start with a few mild ones, and then progress to some bigger whoppers.

"We are currently experiencing high call volumes" (even if you phone the call centre between 3:00 and 4:00 am in the morning, when only thieves and night shift workers are awake)

"Coles really cares about you"

"For best results make sure you only use Epson genuine ink cartridges" i.e for the best share results for Epson

Our core business is getting and keeping people Healthy (Adrian Gore, CEO of Discovery health, ie. money has nothing to do with it, although we can't help making millions of it on the side, but that's incidental - and who knows, maybe it really is?)

We're changing things at Telstra (we're spending even more on marketing so that tens of thousands of dissatisfied customers with no-one to talk to can be replaced by a new cohort of suckers)

For further examples from the world of management see Rodney Marks's blog http://comedian.com.au/blog/


Art bullshit


"In her work she interrogates the ideas of / the artist explores the notions of fakery and fraudulence..."

Translation: this person, like many of us, has a few thoughts about issues that are in the public domain, and, not being able to formulate a coherent and directional theis about them, through out a few random phrases - leaving the burden of meaning and interpretation on us - this stunted articulation of not very interesting observations is a royal, a mega, cop out....beginning of note to Heckler?