Excellent Analysis Of Journalists Covering Islam.

Note: this posting is a useful listing of the types of journalists covering islam and muslim matters. They are the source of most of the information for regular people. It is helpful to have an understanding of the types of journalists... journalists are not always exactly as they may seem...

Read and learn...


Fitzgerald: Journalists covering the Middle East: A taxonomy
Journalists covering the Middle East can be divided into seven groups:

1) Those who are afraid of Muslim threats, express or implied. Long before the Dadullah threats, journalists covering the Arab-Israeli dispute from Gaza or the West Bank were made well aware that they had better play ball; ditto those reporting from southern Lebanon recently.

2) Those who sympathize with the Arabs and Muslims and who, in turn, can be divided into the antisemites (who naturally have a higher representation among those involved in such coverage -- they even seek it out, naturally gravitate to it) and the anti-American brigade. Of course these two groups naturally reinforce, support, and overlap each other.

3) Those who know nothing about the history of Islam and the Middle East, and are easily swayed by what they see before them -- those aggrieved Arab or "Palestinian" faces and tales of woe. Knowing nothing of the history of the area, not merely the history of previous wars, but the actual demographic and castral history, knowing nothing of Islam, having no context whatever, they are easy prey for the Arab propagandists. Of course this group of the ignorant who remain willfully ignorant also includes some, but not all, of those in Groups #1 and #2.

4) Those who know very little but are willing, slowly, to begin to find out. This very small group may actually, over time, begin to realize the influence of Islam on the beliefs, attitudes, and atmospherics of those who grow up in societies suffused with Islam.

5) Those who constitute a subset of Group #4, and who are even able to begin to figure out the motivation for such islamochristians as Hanan Ashrawi and Naim Ateek.

6) Those who have in fact once been posted to the Middle East, and who begin to read, to study, to fill in all the gaps -- not linguistic gaps so much as gaps in their knowledge. These people may even go so far as to investigate Islam and the islamochristians who often share or reflect Islamic perspectives, and to begin, often after their tours of duty are over, to realize what it all means. This group is very small.

7) Those who understand perfectly the role of Islam as the defining feature of Muslim life, and who may in their reporting may actually do semi-justice or even justice to the Israeli attempt to justify Israel’s existence and actions. This attempt is often awkward, not well-explained, and imperfectly understood by most Israelis -- who, contrary to rumor, are not much cleverer in this regard than any population of Western Infidels anywhere else, though one keeps wanting to believe that in fact they do know more. Israelis themselves do not call, and do not recognize, that what they are facing is an implacable Lesser Jihad, a Lesser Jihad that is conducted by means of all the instruments of Jihad (and this is quite instructive for other Infidels, facing a similar problem from the Muslim presence in their midst). Some of those conducting Jihad are adherents of the Slow Jihad, wishing to use diplomacy and attempts to break America's support for Israel in the same way that support for Israel in Western Europe was broken, in order to force the Israelis ever back into ever-more vulnerable borders, without control of invasion routes, without control of the aquifers on which Israeli life depends, and put constantly on the defensive. Others conducting Jihad are adherents of the Fast Jihad -- no nonsense, no sweet and plausible words, not nearly as much about the "Palestinian people" and their "legimitate rights" and far more about Islam and the Arabs, and the outrage that Infidels, and yahudin at that, should be able to maintain their own sovereign state on territory once part of Dar al-Islam. Of course, in the end, whether Infidels live in Infidel states or territories called Israel, or Spain, or Sicily, or Bulgaria, or Greece or Rumania or most of the Balkans, or much of France and mainland Italy, they live in what rightly belongs to the Dar al-Islam. But since the entire world must submit to Islam, since Muslims must rule everywhere, Infidels who are relieved to think that their turn will come last, after those territories are recovered by the Muslims, should not be so relieved. It is entirely unclear, for example, that Spain will necessarily be the object of a Muslim takeover before France -- even if Al-Andalus should, theoretically, come first.

Do any journalists in the Western world know this? Does Tom Friedman, who, if he knows anything at all, is supposed to know about the Middle East? Isn't that what brought him fame, and that Pulitzer Prize, and that job as a columnist which someone of intelligence, knowledge, and wit could do so much with? Isn't that the subject that allows him, essentially, to charge business groups, eager to "understand" the world, and to derive that understanding from that Great Man Tom Friedman, some $40,000 per lecture? Does his colleague Nicholas Kristof know this? Kristof is so ostentatiously impassioned about "the tragedy of Darfur," but has not shown the slightest recognition of how the Arab assault on non-Arab Muslims fits into Islam, how it reveals so well the Arab supremacist ideology within Islam. Nor does Kristof give any signs of recognizing the role of Islam in the assault on Israel -- a country for which his want of sympathy and understanding is palpable, perhaps most when he chooses to lecture and hector Israel as to what it must and must not do.

Those are the "journalists" -- the mere reporters who never learned to report on anything except what is in front of their noses, and which they could not, and cannot, make sense of, for they know so little, are so uneducated. While they have all the time in the world, they prefer to deliver those lectures than to sit at home and read a bit, and begin to comprehend that world that they presume to have opinions about, that they dare to instruct us about.




Comment: Naturally, the inadequate policy response of the Australian government to the Islam Question means that there is no proper information program available on this Question to help local muslims integrate more easily. Nor is there any effort made to inform the non muslim Australians that the problem is NOT the muslims they meet, but the poisonous imams and self appointed 'leaders', financed by Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. It is these enemies of integration who are the problem.

Is anyone awake in Canberra?