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August 28, 2006
Two Weeks Future, And Forty Years Past
The media coverage of the recent Israeli military action against the Hizbollah jihadists illustrated once again just how far the concept of radical chic has infiltrated into the mainstream media stream. It seems to me that our observations on our lives--and therefore our appreciation of history--is built upon increments: days, weeks...maybe months at the most. Our lives are busy, the information stream unrelenting, and it's very difficult to track the long-term incremental changes in the atmosphere of the MSM.
Bookworm has provided us with a sense of perspective: she's highlighting the Life Magazine coverage of the 1967 Six Day War (hat tip to American Thinker):
The magazine opens by describing Nasser’s conduct, which presented such a threat that Israel had no option but to react. It’s interesting to read in part because it assumes a legitimacy to Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike. After describing how Pres. Abdel Gamel Nasser, speaking from Cairo, demanded Israel’s extermination, the Life editorial board goes on to say this:The world had grown accustomed to such shows [of destructive hatred towards Israel] through a decade of Arab-Israeli face-offs that seasonally blew as hot as a desert sirocco. Since 1948, when Israel defeated the Arabs and won the right to exist as a nation, anti-Zionist diatribes had been the Arab world’s only official recognition of Israel. Indeed, in the 19 years since the state was founded, the surrounding Arab states have never wavered from their claim that they were in a state of war with Israel.But now there was an alarming difference in Nasser’s buildup. He demanded that the U.N. withdraw the 3,400-man truce-keeping force that had camped in Egypt’s Sinai desert and in the Gaza Strip ever since Egypt’s defeat in the Suez campaign of 1956 as a buffer between Egyptians and Israelis. A worried United Nations Secretary-General U Thant agreed to the withdrawal, then winged to Cairo to caution Nasser.
He found him adamant. Plagued by economic difficulties at home and bogged down in the war in Yemen, Nasser had lately been criticized by Syrians for hiding behind the U.N. truce-keeping force. With brinksmanship as his weapon, Nasser had moved to bolster his shaky claim to leadership of the divided Arab world.
So, a few things haven’t changed — the UN has always been craven. Egypt demands that they withdraw and, voila, they withdraw. The other thing that hasn’t changed, although it’s no longer spoken of in polite MSM company, is the fact that the Arab nations have always used anti-Israeli rhetoric and conduct to deflect attention from their failures and as a vehicle to establish dominance over other Arab nations in the region. In other words, if there weren’t an Israel, the Arab nations would have had to invent one.
Now, here's some perspective--imagine the astonishment that would detonate through both the conservative and left wing camps if a mainstream media outlet offered such a bald-faced acknowledgement of the self-evident facts of the situation. The incremental creep over the past 40 years has blinded us to the massive shift in the basic outlook of the media. What has happened to the forces that set our national media agenda when the obvious is steadfastly ignored? Bookworm, again:
In contrast to the fevered, irrational hatred on the Arab side, the Life editors are impressed by the Israelis. Under the bold heading “Israel’s cool readiness,” and accompanied by photographs of smiling Israeli soldiers taking a cooling shower in the desert, listening to their commander, and attending to their tanks, Life has this to say:With the elan and precision of a practiced drill team, Israel’s largely civilian army — 71,000 regulars and 205,000 reservists — began its swift mobilization to face, if necessary, 14 Arab nations and their 110 million people. As Premier Levi Eshkol was to put it, “The Jewish people has had to fight unceasingly to keep itself alive…. We acted from an instinct to save the soul of a people.Again, can you imagine a modern publication pointing out the vast disparity in landmass and population between Israel and the Arabs, or even acknowledging in the opening paragraph of any article that Israel has a right to exist? The text about Israel’s readiness is followed by more photographs of reservists preparing their weapons and of a casually seated Moshe Dayan, drinking a soda, and conferring with his men. Under the last photograph, you get to read this:
The Israelis, Dayan said, threw themselves into their hard tasks with “something that is a combination of love, belief and country.”
Astonishing. There's a very fundamental question that must be asked: why has our mainstream media changed in its outlook from one that could celebrate vigorous self-defense of democracy to one that champions thuggish terrorism--indeed one that doctors and stages photographs to prop up its chosen side. What has happened in the last forty years?
As a commenter to Bookworm's post said:
Searching back into my own memory, I can recall news film of destroyed school buses that had been shot from the Golan Heights by Yassir Arafat’s PLO, hiding behind the skirts of the women and children of the Palestinian refugees. [...] Am I the only person on Earth who remembers all this? Why do so many people, especially in the MSM, have a memory span that seems to go back only about two weeks?
The fifth anniversary of 9/11 is two weeks from today. That's also longer than two weeks.
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