Critic’s choice
The “No Exit” cartoon by Andy Singer in your October 14 issue is certain to provoke complaints. As well it should, of course—apart from Israel and the United States, very few countries are ever compared to Nazi Germany. This is frustrating because it suggests that if Israel is bad, it is bad in the way, and to the extent, that Nazi Germany was bad. Obviously this is going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who has ever tried to think about what the Holocaust was actually like, for Jews and non-Jews alike.
But alongside that predictable (though not any less serious) complaint, one might also point out that there are other, more accurate forms of criticism of Israel. The peace movements inside Israel, and some critics outside it, seem to have lots of ways of critiquing the state—many quite stinging—without appealing to the Nazi analogy. Perhaps those forms of criticism, by being less ridiculous, may even be more effective. Some of us, who actually want to change people’s minds, hope so.
Furthermore, it’s especially ironic that the Warsaw Ghetto analogy that Mr. Singer offers—a people isolated in an urban enclave, then slowly annihilated by military force therein—actually applies rather more aptly to several other Middle Eastern states. As Kanan al-Makiya points out in his Republic of Fear, Saddam Hussein did on occasion level whole communities in reprisal for resistance to his regime. And of course Hafez al-Asad killed more than 20,000 men, women and children in the city of Hama over several weeks in 1982, paving over many of their bodies with asphalt and cement. (I won’t even go into the bloody cost of the “war”—more like a two-way genocide—against Islamic radicals in Algeria throughout the 1990s.) So far as I know, there’s little evidence and in fact not even any claims that Israel has ever worked up atrocities of this magnitude. But for some reason Israel seems frequently uniquely the target of accusations of this sort.
Of course Singer’s grotesque use of the Nazi analogy, and your approval of it by publishing it, would be worse were it based on a perverse and malevolent desire to obfuscate clear thinking about the criminality of various states and their policies. But it retains many of its damaging effects even as it is instead based, in his case and in yours, on plain old ignorance.
Charles Mathewes
Charlottesville
That’s infotainment!
A good addendum to Kari Lydersen’s September 30 article “Not necessarily the news” is the recent media study from the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). The report, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” found that the more network television news you watch (Fox News, in particular), the more you are likely to be misled about the Iraq War and its aftermath. In nationwide surveys PIPA found that:
48 percent of the public believe U.S. troops found “clear evidence in Iraq that Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda;”
22 percent believed troops found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (20 percent also believed that Iraq had used chemical/biological weapons during the war);
25 percent believed that world public opinion supported Bush’s war with Iraq.
All three are wrong. The study found that viewers of Fox held the most misperceptions—45 percent believed all three misperceptions—and NPR/PBS held the fewest (4 percent believed all three misperceptions). The study also reported that Republicans were substantially more likely to hold misperceptions than Democrats. Bush supporters who said they follow the news “very closely” were found more likely to hold misperceptions.
This correlates well to another independent media survey given to me by a Madison Avenue friend. It culled Internet chat rooms to find out what networks people were watching during the war and their perceptions of those networks.
Interestingly, Fox viewers—the majority of those surveyed—admitted that what they were watching was false, even going so far as to use words like “propaganda.” However, they said it appealed to them because it told them what they wanted to hear. Many Fox viewers said that if they wanted to know what was really happening, they’d go to BBC (available to Charlottesville listeners every day on 91.1 WTJU at 4pm) or even Al Jazeera.
So it’s not just that stories are censored. The stories that do get broadcast/published are often false, largely due to a public that actually doesn’t want to want the facts. What sums it up best is phrase I keep hearing from a good friend of mine, a pundit on Fox News: “Brian,” he says, “this isn’t news, it’s entertainment.” Somehow, I’m not amused.
Brian Wimer
Charlottesville