'Wrong Man Fattah' Does it Again

Hassan "Wrong Man" Fattah, the New York Times reporter and Hezbollah sympathizer famed for the famous Abu Gharib wrong man screwup, is at it again. This time his journalistic genius is turned to the always heart wrenching tale of the poor, poor Palestinian refugees.

As Wrong Man would have it, these are a group of deeply wronged pacifists who would be more than happy to start other lives elsewhere. In Fattahland, not a single word is given to the destruction of Israel.

Forget everything you've been reading. All Israel has to do is to admit that it is to blame for their "plight" -- Israel and not the Arab nations who kept them in camps for six decades. Then that will make everything nice and go away.

What's amazing is not that the pro-Palestinian Times runs this pap, but that it does so from a reporter with a proven record of incompetence.

The Times Hugs 'Mayor Moonbat'

Mayor Moonbat pressing the flesh at hate-America rally

The New York Times today gave a big fat hug - in the form of a front page puff piece - to what must surely be the oddest mayor in America, the Moonbat mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson.

Kirk Johnson says, "Rocky Anderson may not be the most liberal mayor in America. But here in the most conservative state, he might as well be."

"Liberal" seems a mealy-mouthed way of whitewashing a mayor who is guest of honor at an "anti-war" rally where anti-American slogans were shouted. That rally followed a "death to Israel" rally that was even worse.

This is typical of the mainstream media's coverage of states like Utah, where Republican sentiments and support of the war run strong. The media focuses on the small handful of nuts and moonbats, no matter how grotesquely unrepresentative.

The Best of 2007

Mediacrity has been named among the Best Blogs of 2007 by the Jewish Press, alongside the New Republic, National Review, Instapundit, our friends at Israpundit and other notables.

Does that make us a "titan," as we were kindly called by Sultan Knish?

Absolutely!

The Times Inaugurates 'Palestine'

The pro-Palestinian prejudice of the New York Times is so deeply ingrained that it can be found in articles on the arts and now, even otherwise good articles on the Middle East.

We see that in an article that ran on the front page today, on a new gang of anti-American terrorists operating out of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon:

The arc of Mr. Abssi’s life shows the allure of Al Qaeda for Arab militants. Born in Palestine, from which he and family were evicted by the Israelis, Mr. Abssi, 51, said he stopped studying medicine. . .

Apparently "Mr. Abssi" is from Palestine, Texas, and his family had an Israeli landlord who evicted them from their apartment. It has to be. In 1956, when "Mr. Abssi" was born, there was no place name called "Palestine" on any map available outside of the Arab world.

Maybe the Times meant Jordan or Egypt, but that would remind the reader that those two esteemed Arab countries did not give Palestinians the statehood they suddenly thirsted for after 1967.

Also there is the question of this "eviction." How did that happen? Did Israel just serve an eviction notice on the Abssi clan or did they just pick up and leave during the Six-Day War?

The point is that there was and, thank heavens, is no "Palestine," thanks to the bloodthirstiness of "Mr. Abssi" and his ilk.

The Times Sanitizes a Muslim Extremist

The New York Times today contains a lengthy front-page article on how foreign-born and native Muslims are getting cozy with each other and interacting. Isn't that just grand? What the Times leaves out, however, is the sordid background of one of the main players in this intrafaith reconciliation: Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid.

An expose on this man in Discoverthenetworks.com points out all the things the Times left out. He organized an anti-war demonstration while the wounds were still festering on Sept. 22, 2001, and has authored some extremist polemics described in the article.

The prospect of unity between foreign-born and domestic Muslims also has implications for the war on terrorism that the Times doesn't touch. Domestic Muslims were indicted last year in a terrorist plot, and studies have shown that terrorist influence among imprisoned Muslims.

And this the Times celebrates?

More 'Scare Quote' Bias

One of the ways the media puts across its agenda is through the use of "scare quotes," which are quotes that surround words and phrases to convey a kind of raised eyebrow.

The perennially biased French news agency AFP uses scare quotes constantly in slanting its Middle East coverage, as happened today in a dispatch about Israeli patrols of the Dead Sea:

JERUSALEM (AFP) - The Israeli navy last week reportedly completed trials on the possibility of carrying out regular patrols on the Dead Sea.

The tests were conducted in a bid to prevent infiltration by "terrorists" and the smuggling of weapons from Jordan, the country's privately run Channel Two television said.

The word "terrorists" is put in scare quotes so as to convey the view that Israel isn't interested in terrorism, but in flexing its muscles for no good reason and putting a scare in the poor poor Arabs.

Kerry and Swittboats, Again

The mainstream media is again giving John Kerry a pass on the thorny issue of his dissembling about his Vietnam War record.

An outstanding analysis can be found in the Democracy Project, in an article by Mediacrity contributor Bruce Kesler that I am replicating below:

Hardly anyone pays any serious attention to John Kerry anymore, having repeatedly demonstrated his buffoonery.

However, John Kerry is still a United States Senator, holding powerful committee positions for the Senate’s majority party. The liberal allies of his points of view in the media are still the dominant chroniclers and influencers of public views. Thus, Kerry still has substantial influence on current policies and opinions that will shape our future.

The latest example is the Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on the nomination of Sam Fox as ambassador to Belgium. John Kerry demanded that Fox, who donated $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, renounce “the politics of personal destruction." According to the Associated Press report, “Kerry said the incident raised questions about Fox's fitness to serve as an ambassador.” The AP report continued:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a presidential hopeful and chairman of Tuesday's hearing, said he found Fox's responses "unsatisfying." He said he would have preferred if Fox admitted it was a mistake to contribute to the Swift Boat group.

The AP reporter inserted his view that the Swiftee charges against Kerry’s military record in Vietnam were “unsubstantiated allegations.”

Kerry, Obama, and the AP reporter, thus, perpetuate one of the most egregious misrepresentations of history in modern journalism.

With extremely little exception, the major media refused to investigate the testimony and depositions by almost all of the veterans who served with Kerry in Vietnam. Despite certain Kerry claims, like his invented Cambodia excursion, being absolutely proven false, and substantial evidence that many of his other self-exaggerations were also false, the major media during the 2004 campaign and since have adopted the word “unsubstantiated” to describe the Swiftees’ charges and evidence.

Investigative columnist Thomas Lipscomb detailed much additional evidence substantiating the Swiftees’ charges. Lipscomb, who was also the founder of Times Books, which published the hardcover edition of the Pentagon Papers, brings an important perspective to this media malfeasance. In an interview with me, Lipscomb says:

When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, it cost the New York Times a fortune in running the complete records in newsprint and, subsequently, in a published book edition. The New York Times thought it in the best interests of the public to draw its own conclusions from the evidence the New York Times had compiled.

The strange case of the John Kerry military records, which he had promised to release publicly, is that three great news organizations conspired to withhold them from the public. Not only did Kerry not make his military records public as promised, but three of the largest news organizations in the world gave him protective coloration by withholding them. All the public received were summaries in the opinions of the three news organizations, which had already shown an appalling inability to analyze the Kerry military records.

There’s nothing more dangerous to the future and to history than the failure to reconcile the facts of the past.

In an age when it is practically free to publish on the Internet the records as given to the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, it is even more disgraceful to withhold them, against every tenet of modern and transparent journalism.

The public still doesn’t know whether John Kerry released his complete military records. John Kerry has refused to release his Vietnam diary. John Kerry, rather than go into a court – if he believes himself slandered -- and be subject to discovery, just along with his allies in the media hide behind their unsubstantiated charge of “unsubstantiated” against the Swiftees who exposed Kerry’s lies and exaggerations.

As Instapundit’s law professor Glenn Reynolds recently wrote:

”Swiftboating" seems to mean the disclosure of truths that are, er, inconvenient for Democrats.

One might add, inconvenient to the history of defeatism that congressional Democrats are currently trying to write into our history, as they did in Vietnam.

— Bruce Kesler