Tuesday, October 22, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: How the Media Has Globalized the Intifada
Seth Mandel: How the Media Has Globalized the Intifada
Everyone has their own reasons for distrusting major media, so Gallup’s latest polling isn’t surprising. The new survey finds trust in media at a low point, tying the nadir it reached in 2016. And although modern media giants recoil at the suggestion that they have only themselves to blame, an honest rendering of history reveals that simple explanation to be the accurate one.The Weaponization of Medical Misinformation and the War in Gaza
Take, for example, an issue with as much resonance today as a century ago: conflict in the Middle East. Reading Yardena Schwartz’s superb, meticulous and hauntingly detailed account of the 1929 Hebron Massacre—Ghosts of a Holy War, which was published earlier this month—I was struck by some of its minor sections on the role of the media then and now. This isn’t the focus of the book, which knowledgeably traces the causes and legacy of the massacre that wiped out a millennia-old Jewish community in its place of birth and set the mold for the next hundred years of Arab-Israeli conflict. But it is a key part of the story.
And it is the part of the story that highlights a test that media companies passed in 1929 but continually fail today. Reversing those failures, as the book shows, is a matter of life and death for Jews around the world.
The Hebron Massacre, which set the stage for everything that followed it, was part of a Palestine-wide campaign of violent riots. The prime mover of these riots was deliberate incitement by Arab leaders, specifically the Al-Aqsa Blood Libel—the lie that Jews were going to seize the mosque compound built by imperial Muslim conquerors atop the site of the ancient Jewish temple as a demonstration of supremacy over the land’s original inhabitants.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the first Palestinian Arab nationalist leader (and later well-paid Nazi recruiter and envoy to the Muslim world), was Jerusalem’s grand mufti and had been chipping away at Jewish prayer rights at the Western Wall. Contradicting the city’s own official Islamic guides to the area, Hajj Amin began claiming that the Western Wall was a Muslim site, not a Jewish one. British suppression of Jewish prayer services gave the mufti the opening he needed to widen the propaganda war and mobilize a pogrom. The mostly Arab police force either stood by or joined the slaughter.
The gruesome scenes, as Schwartz notes, would be echoed on Oct. 7, 2023, the next time the Jews in their homeland would be subject to that level of barbarity on such a scale.
The British response to Hebron was to further empower Hajj Amin and the Arabs of the Mandate while arresting Jewish self-defense volunteers and restricting Jewish immigration. Thus rewarded, Hajj Amin’s Palestinian nationalists had established a blueprint they would return to time and again, and the contours of the conflict were set.
In the images from the New York Times story, a bullet appears to rest within the skull and neck of a child. The damage inflicted by any bullet is dependent on the mass and the speed of the bullet. As a rule, the higher the kinetic energy, the higher the wounding capacity and lethality. Any Increase in mass and velocity of the bullet will result in a higher kinetic energy. However, for practical purposes, there is always a limit on how high the mass and the speed can be for any weapon to remain portable.Christine Rosen: Mao-Maoing the News Anchors
The IDF uses the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO cartridge. The bullet fired from this cartridge is very light and designed to inflict damage by fragmentation within the tissue (terminal ballistics). To attain this, this light bullet must strike the target at a very high velocity. The bullet has different variants, each designed to fulfill an intended purpose (antipersonnel, barrier penetration, tracer, etc.).
The muzzle velocity of the 5.56 mm round, when fired from the standard rifles used by the IDF, like the American-made M4 or Israeli-made IWI X95 (Tavor), depending on the barrel length and the variant of bullet, is between 2,900 and 3,100 f/sec. The capability of the bullet to fragment decreases significantly when the bullet speed decreases below 2,500 ft/sec, which is approximately 150 and 200 yards of travel in the air. However, a bullet traveling at that speed is very likely to still pass through an adult human torso and not get lodged within the tissue.
The bullets in the radiograph showed minimal to no deformation and were lodged in the soft tissue. This would suggest they were likely fired from a long distance, possibly at least 500 yards. However, beyond 300 yards, the accuracy of such a light bullet, like the 5.56 mm, is seriously compromised and can be affected even by minimal wind. While it is true that accurate shots with 5.56 x 45 mm bullets are still possible at long distances, this requires a very steady platform and exact calculations of distance to target and wind speed and direction. These conditions are far from those encountered in a war scenario, where rapid target acquisition while avoiding being shot at tends to be the norm.
Although it is technically possible to shoot a small target the size of a child’s head at a distance for the bullet to remain lodged within the soft tissues, to do this consistently, as the authors suggest, is extremely unlikely, if not impossible particularly when considering multiple other variables, like the fact that a child is doubtful to remain stationary, wind conditions in an urban environment, and the expectation of incoming fire.
If one assumes by an extraordinary circumstance that a fired bullet should lodge within the head of a child, it cannot be known with certainty who fired that bullet and why. The IDF uses the standard NATO rifle that shoots a 5.56-round. Hamas favors an AK rifle, but some variants also fire a 5.56 bullet. Also, on occasion, Hamas has been able to obtain NATO-style weapons. So-called celebratory gunfire is the shooting of a bullet directly into the air in celebration. Such practices are known to occur in parts of the Middle East. In the US, celebratory gunfire is generally illegal because it can be associated with severe injuries, including head injuries from falling bullets.
For the healthcare worker in Gaza, politics are prevalent. Israel has just barred six medical NGOs from operating in Gaza. One of these groups, the Palestinian American Medical Association, had members in the New York Times report. No one disputes that children are being injured and killed in Gaza. Still, healthcare workers ceased to be effective advocates for health and safety when they speculated or lied about the nature of injuries they claimed to encounter. Medical accounts of injuries and deaths in an active war zone are critically valuable in making sense of the risks to the civilian population in the battle space. Medical personnel risk acting as purveyors of disinformation when departing from impartial accounting.
One cannot imagine the shooting of innocent children is in the strategic interest of the IDF. Further, the ballistic facts make such targeting impossible. The medical profession must be unbiased. The banning of medical NGOs might be the final straw after a series of pernicious NGO-generated propaganda. In this war, the patients are the losers. The media, with a publish now, retract later approach, has created confusion in the desperate pursuit of a story. Now, more than ever, a calm and impartial appraisal on the part of healthcare and the media is desperately needed. When the war ends, as it indeed will, an accounting of the facts by combatants, including Hamas and its enablers, will seek to identify any crimes committed, and punishment will follow crime accordingly.
The CBS meltdown is notable for a few reasons. First, we learned that CBS News personnel (with the rare exception of legal correspondent Jan Crawford, who defended Dokoupil’s tough questioning) are more conversant in the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the popular mental-health tropes of trauma and phobia, than they are in the common standards of professional journalism.
Second, despite some small signs of sanity in recent years, mainstream media clearly have not yet retreated from “peak woke” madness. It was new but unsurprising information that CBS News employs a Race and Culture Unit, distinct from the network’s traditional Standards and Practices division, with a mission as Orwellian as its name. The unit, created in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd four years ago, boasts that it has a “four-pronged role at CBS News and stations as a reviewer, an incubator, a producer and a library.”
Its “primary role” is the one it exercised in the Dokoupil–Coates fracas, and that was to “review”—which sounds innocuous but is in fact anything but. The unit functions “in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone and intention.” This includes working “with CBS News network shows, the streaming network and stations by reviewing scripts and screeners as well as providing input in the ideation stage of story ideas.”
The Race and Culture Unit is itself part of a broader “Content for Change” program sponsored by CBS News’s corporate parent, Paramount Global. That program is described as “a global companywide, cross-brand initiative that seeks to use the power of the company’s content creation ecosystem to break down the narratives that enable intolerance, hurtful stereotypes, and systemic racism to exist and grow.”
If the Dokoupil incident is any guide, while CBS News is intent on preventing “systemic racism” from gaining purchase, it has no problem seeing journalistic standards wither. Amid the Dokoupil meltdown, Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes. A short social-media clip of the interview featured an answer by Harris to a question about Israel and Gaza. But when the full interview aired, a different answer by Harris was used—prompting questions about whether CBS had edited her remarks to make her response better. According to CBS’s own standards, “Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response.”
And yet, that appears to be what CBS has done—and it’s doubtful any of its staffers objected. The once-hallowed network is no longer known for its reporting but for its falsehoods, staff tantrums, selective editing, story suppression, tone-policing, and tape-splicing.
The chief of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, clearly is not with her own company’s program. She told reporters that Dokoupil “did a great job with that interview” and provided “a role model of what civil discourse is,” adding, “I was very proud of the work that he did.”
She could make changes at CBS News that reflect her views by disbanding the Race and Culture Unit and punishing the chiefs of the division for their surrender to the Maoist DEI regime that was determined to punish Dokoupil…but she just sold the place.
As for Coates, he told a podcast host that he might well have participated in October 7 himself had he been a resident of Gaza. So who’s to say he might not have murdered Jews and raped Jews and kidnapped Jews and burned Jews alive by the thousands?
That would seem to warrant a follow-up question, no?
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