Ed Sherman Published Nov. 19, 2015
Archive for November 24th, 2015
ISIS Killed More Americans in Beirut (Borj Barajneh) attacks than in Paris: Role of Hometown papers to spread the news
Posted on: November 24, 2015
ISIS Killed More Americans in Beirut Than in Paris: Role of Hometown papers to spread the news
The debates continue over whether last week’s ISIS terror bombing in Beirut was undercovered by the media or just unappreciated by an uninterested public — even though, as Jim Naureckas pointed out on Tuesday, US news outlets overwhelmingly skewed their coverage toward the next day’s mass killings in Paris, in quantity, placement and level of sympathy for the victims, not just in number of Facebook shares.
(As of this morning, the New York Times had run 130 stories mentioning Paris and terror attacks since November 13, versus 20 mentioning Beirut — with much of the Paris coverage being front-page news, while Beirut was mostly relegated to brief mentions deep within the paper—often in articles that were primarily about the Paris violence.)
Habib Battah shared this link
“…as David A. Graham put it in The Atlantic (11/16/15), “People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.” When the media pick and choose who is considered “ourselves,” little wonder that readers end up caring more about some victims than others.”
ISIS Killed More Americans in Beirut Than in Paris: Role of Hometown papers to spread the news–but Only Their Hometown Papers Noticed
fair.org
It’s tempting to argue that it’s natural for the US news media to have more concern for Paris because those attacks hit closer to home; as McLurg’s Law has it, people care more about tragic deaths when their neighbors are the victims. Except for one thing: More Americans were killed in last week’s Beirut bombings than in Paris — yet only a handful of US papers even bothered to mention them.
Leila Taleb and Hussein Mostapha, of Dearborn, Michigan, were visiting the shopping district of Beirut’s Bourj el-Barajneh suburb when a pair of suicide bombers set off explosive belts; the husband and wife were killed instantly, and their three-year-old son was badly injured and witnessed his parents going in flame.
Leila Mazloum, another Dearborn resident who had recently received her US green card, was on a visit to help her family members emigrate when she was also killed in the blasts.
As the Village Voice (11/18/15) noted, the only major US news outlet to report on the three deaths was the Detroit News (11/13/15), which ran the story on page one.
(Dearborn is a heavily Lebanese-American suburb of Detroit.)
The death of Cal State Long Beach student Nohemi Gonzalez in the Paris terror attacks, by contrast, received widespread attention, including multiple mentions on television news (CBS Evening News, 11/15/15, 11/16/15; NBC Nightly News, 11/14/15, 11/15/15, 11/16/15; CNN, 11/14/15, 11/15/15, 11/16/15, 11/17/15).
None of this, it should go without saying, takes away from the horror of the loss of Gonzalez, or for that matter of the 128 Paris dead who weren’t American.
But it’s hard to truly mourn a stranger unless you can hear their story, and put yourself in their shoes — as David A. Graham put it in The Atlantic (11/16/15), “People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.”
When the media pick and choose who is considered “ourselves,” little wonder that readers end up caring more about some victims than others.
is a contributing writer for FAIR, and runs the stadium news website Field of Schemes
One journalist’s journey from ESPN to shining shoes
‘I can’t pay you, but it’s great exposure”
For the bulk of his professional life, Jeff Bradley has spent his summers at a Major League ballpark.
He had high-profile beats covering baseball for ESPN The Magazine and the Newark Star-Ledger.
But last summer was different. Struggling to make ends meet ever since being let go by the Star-Ledger in January of 2013, Bradley worked as a clubhouse attendant at a country club near his home in New Jersey. He shined shoes, vacuumed the carpet and kept the bathrooms clean.
Bradley likely is the only clubhouse attendant who also has written about Derek Jeter for national publications.
A few times, Bradley was mistaken for being a member. On other occasions, he ran into people who knew him as “the sportswriter,” prompting the inevitable questions of what happened?
“Sure, it was embarrassing sometimes,” Bradley said. “But most people, if they have heart, say, ‘I respect what you’re doing. You’re doing what you’ve got to do [for your family].”
Bradley decided to write about his situation on his website last week. In a phone interview, he said he didn’t rehash the frustrations and hardships he has endured so “people could feel sorry for me.”
“I just felt like this is what has come to for a lot of people who used to work as journalists,” said Bradley, whose resume also includes stints at Sports Illustrated and the New York Daily News.
Indeed, the comments to Bradley’s post depict a depressing snapshot of an industry where long-time sportswriters find themselves in no-man’s land. Several veterans commiserated with Bradley by sharing similar experiences after being jettisoned from their jobs.
Rachel Shuster, formerly of USA Today, writes: “I drive for Uber, where if I happen to mention, no, this is not my life’s dream.”
Diane Pucin, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, writes: “This is pretty much my story…Even been rejected for a grocery store checked out job.”
David Andriesen, once the national baseball writer for the now defunct Seattle Post-Intelligencer, decided to become a kindergarten teacher. He writes: “I remember telling my wife, ‘I can’t switch careers now. If I went back to get a Masters to teach, I wouldn’t even start until I was 43.’ She said, ‘You have 20 more years to work, and you’re going to be 43 whether you’re a teacher or not.’”
Wendell Barnhouse, formerly of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, recently lost his job with as a correspondent for the Big 12 website. He writes: “I doubt seriously I’ll find anything involving sports.”
Filip Bondy, who recently was laid off from the New York Daily News, writes: “Seems as if, in our business, 50 is the new 66.”
Bradley wasn’t surprised by the reaction. “I know there are a lot of us out there,” he said.
At age 51, Bradley said it has been more than a year since he had a meaningful job interview.
He continues to contribute to SI.com and the New York Times, among other outlets. However, life as a free lancer is hardly lucrative these days.
He writes in his post: “The reality is that I’d have to write 300 stories per year for those two outlets to make half of what I used to make at ESPN The Magazine. It’s impossible to write 300 stories per year. If you crushed it, you could write 150, which would mean I’d make a quarter of what I used to make. I have not crushed it. So, maybe that explains why I became the locker room guy.”
In our phone interview, Bradley, like most journalists in his situation, has heard the “exposure” angle one too many times.
“You hear, ‘I can’t pay you, but it’s great exposure. You’ll get a lot of page views,’” Bradley said. “It’s insulting. I’d rather clean toilets and golf shoes and get paid than write for free.”
Bradley said working as a clubhouse attendant became a necessary alternative this summer. His wife is a special education teacher [“She’s the rock star,” he said], and they have a college freshman and a high school senior.
“Every month, there are bills to be paid,” said Bradley, who earned $15 per hour plus tips at the club.
“I’m not bringing in enough freelancing. As stupid as it sounds, I knew I was getting a check every week.”
The club, though, is closed for the season. Bradley continues to look for work and writes when he can.
He believes he has the talent to make a contribution somewhere. The comments section to Bradley’s post included a note of support from John Papanek, his former editor at ESPN The Magazine.
Papanek writes: “Please do me a favor. Next time you find yourself with a foot inside the door of someone who needs a proven professional, versatile and excellent communicator, tell them to call me.”
Bradley, though, isn’t holding out hope that his phone will ring for a full-time position any time soon.
Regarding the journalist business, he says, “I believe there are assignments out there [for free lancers willing to work for low fees], I just don’t believe there are any jobs out there.”
As for his future, Bradley has a firm grip on reality. He is willing to return to the country club next spring, adding, “if they’ll have me back.”
Happy 80th Birthday, Fairuz.
Dear Fairuz,
My first experience with Arabic music — perhaps music in general — came to me through you.
My mother used to sing “Yalla Tneim” to me, to put me to sleep, when I was still a toddler.
It was the only lullaby that would calm me down (and I was a particularly temperamental child, although my mum would probably deny this).
Incidentally, the timeless song still eases my racing, muddled thoughts, even though I’m well into my adulthood.
I’m fairly certain I speak to similar experiences for thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — when I share this.
My four brothers and I grew up in Ireland and the United Kingdom in the 1980s, but were frequently transported to Lebanon by way of the folk songs our mother would nostalgically play for us.
Florence of Arabia shared this linkFairuz turns 80 this weekend. I write a ridiculously cheesy love letter to her and pick some of my favourite Fairuz artwork and images from over the decades.
Mother often played your whimsical music from a small cassette player in the kitchen whilst cooking, telling us, proudly: “hayda Beirut. We’re in Beirut!” (We were, in fact, in the West Midlands at the time).”
#Lebanon #Fairuz #Beirut #Music #MiddleEast
zahrahankir.com
This was how she — and so many others — connected with the wondrous and oft-overwhelming complexities of the motherland, even when it was in the midst of a brutal civil war.
We didn’t understand what conflict was, hadn’t the faintest idea what a “sect” was, or what it meant to be Lebanese or Arab, but we believed there was something special about our identity because of you.
I saw you once, more than ten years ago, at the American University of Beirut — from a distance — when you were awarded an honorary doctorate.
You were shy, quiet and reserved. You were physically there to accept the award, but you asked someone else to speak for you. I later learned this was not unusual.
We weren’t graced by your piercing voice at the time, but your presence struck the entire auditorium, nonetheless.
When you walked on stage, the applause was so loud, and so lengthy, you seemed gently perturbed by it. Almost like you didn’t want to acknowledge, or own, the legend that you’d become.
Almost like you were embarrassed by it.
At that particular point in time, when I naively subscribed to the tenacity of Lebanese patriotism, “Li Beirut” became one of my favourites, in all of its unabashed drama and intensity.
Your music took on the role of a soundtrack to my late teens and my early twenties as I left south Lebanon for university and discovered Beirut (my family had returned to the country after the civil war subsided in the early 90s).
In this volatile coming-of-age context, your songs routinely pulled me toward romanticism and idealism.
For years, I was infatuated with “Ba3dak 3ala beli” and “Ahu Dalli Sar.” When I left the country again in 2006 — with a very heavy heart — I listened to your ballads on Arab nationalism almost every day.
On the gloomier the mornings in Manchester (and there were many), your music helped me get out of bed and face the day.
A decade later, you continue to keep me company, mostly when I’m weighed down with homesickness.
As I sit in a bagel shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, writing this post, I’m listening to you sing “Ana ‘Aandi Hanin,” and I can’t help but think of the narrow, twisty and charming alleyways of Beirut.
Of the (once pleasant) scents and sounds of the bustling streets of the capital. Of my experience as a student at AUB, where I discovered liberalism along with the left-wing ballads of your son, Ziad.
And of Sunday lunch at my grandfather’s bistein in the South, which almost always involved ma7shi and argeeleh.
[These thoughts almost render the bearded, skinny-jeaned hipster to my left invisible].
It’s a wonderful, palpable type of cognitive dissonance that I’ve grown accustomed to, as a [slightly reluctant] member of the Lebanese diaspora, over the years.
Earlier today, I listened to “Zahret Al Mada2en,” your dramatic, melancholic love letter to Jerusalem, on repeat.
The violence, the hatred, the political nuances: It all melts away with your voice.
In one of your songs, you ask your listeners to “visit” you, at least once a year. This is my way of doing just that (even though I listen to you several times a week).
Herewith is a collection of incredible photographs and images of you, spanning the decades, that I fell upon when scouring the internet. Call it my little Fairuz Shrine.
For this is what you are! A work of art — a Levantine opus — that continues to grow, year on year.
Happy Birthday, Nouhad Haddad.
I adored you as a child and as a teenager, and I continue to adore you as a young woman who pines for her homeland, just like my mother did, back in the eighties.
Adonis Bouhatab shared a link.
دقيت طل الورد عالشباك طل الورد عالشباك وينها؟ اتلبك وماعاد يحكي ماتت؟.. لتشو تخبي؟ انا وياك انا وياك انا وياك واحدنا يا ورد رح يبكي انت وانا يا ورد.. واحدنا …
youtube.com
Saudi Arabia Wahhabi monarchy: The real ISIS that has made It as a recognized State
Posted on: November 24, 2015
Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It
The West is targeting the effect rather than the cause of this ultra-puritanical form of Wahhabi Islam)
By KAMEL DAOUD. November 20, 2015
Black Daesh, White or Green Daesh (ISIS or WISIS Wahhabi Islamic State in Syria and Iraq).
The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims.
The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things: This Islamic State of Saudi Arabia.
In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other.
This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.
Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina.
Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws.
That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.
The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture, the Wahhabi brand, wrongly classified as Sunni Islam).
The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were Not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.
One might counter: Isn’t Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh?
May be the monarchy and its dynasty, but Not the Wahhabi brand of Islam.
But to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability — and also, increasingly, for its precariousness.
The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher.
The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.
Interactive Feature | Lire en français (Read in French)
One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women, rural areas. Islamist culture is widespread in many countries — Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania.
(Actually, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates own most of the media channels and dailies in the “Arabic World”)
There are thousands of Islamist newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government’s laws and on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated.
It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris.
The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam.
Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews.
The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to seduce the masses. (Pragmatically, the Palestinians are totally ignored, inside occupied lands and in refugee camps)
Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime against humanity.
This totally schizophrenic situation parallels the West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia.
All of which leaves one skeptical of Western democracies’ thunderous declarations regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism. Their war can only be myopic, for it targets the effect rather than the cause.
Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?
Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter? Hardly.
Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games playing out in the Middle East.
It is preferred to Iran, that gray Daesh. And there’s the trap.
Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium. Jihadism is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives.
Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq.
But it also has a father created by England and the USA also, Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex.
Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.
The attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our consciences.
Adonis Diaries 