US: Muslim states, UN fuel anti-Semitism
There has been an upsurge in anti-Semitism over the past decade, much of it a new form whose “distinguishing feature” is criticism of Israel, according to a State Department report released over the weekend.
The 94-page report on 2007 criticizes many Muslim and Arab countries for encouraging anti-Semitism, and an entire chapter is devoted to anti-Semitism at the United Nations.
“Motives for criticizing Israel in the UN may stem from legitimate concerns over policy or from illegitimate prejudices,” the report reads. “However, regardless of the intent, disproportionate criticism of Israel as barbaric and unprincipled, and corresponding discriminatory measures adopted in the UN against Israel, have the effect of causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general, thus fueling anti-Semitism.”
The report lists forms of anti-Semitic crimes including terrorist attacks against Jews, desecration of synagogues and destruction of cemeteries. In addition, it cites anti-Semitic rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and other propaganda.
While the report notes that traditional forms of anti-Semitism continue to be found across the globe, “anti-Semitism has proven to be an adaptive phenomenon.”
The new forms often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism, but “the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that – whether intentionally or unintentionally – has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.”
While this new anti-Semitism is “common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe,” it is not confined to these populations, the report finds.
The document’s introduction singles out Iran and Syria for their demonization of Jews, and adds, “Venezuela’s government-sponsored mass media have become vehicles for anti-Semitic discourse, as have government news media in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.”
It names Britain, France and Germany as European countries where “anti-Semitic violence remains a significant concern,” but also lists other Western nations as experiencing recent increases, including Argentina, Australia and Canada.
The report, a follow-up on one issued in 2005, compiled data from government and NGO sources around the world.
This year’s report was dedicated to the late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman who passed away last month. A Holocaust survivor, he co-sponsored the legislation creating the Office of the Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism, which issued the report.
“Today’s report provides evidence of a disturbing resurgence in anti-Semitism around the globe,” the new House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Rep. Howard Berman, also of California, said in a statement issued Thursday.
“All too often, legitimate criticism of the State of Israel can veer into naked anti-Semitism characterized by vile hate speech,” Berman said. “And all too often, it goes unchallenged. When hate speech arises, we should call it what it is – and do what can be done to stop it.”
The report was welcomed by the Anti-Defamation League, whose national director, Abraham Foxman, said, “The report not only focuses attention on the problem, but sets important benchmarks and criteria for foreign governments as well as for US monitoring and diplomacy.”
“We hope that this call to action by the United States government will encourage countries to do more to monitor and combat anti-Semitism,” he said.
source: The Jerusalem Post
I Google myself, therefore I am.
I have a confession to make: I Google myself. A lot. I’m not proud of it, but I do. Like a nervous tic. Not quite as much as I check my e-mail, but uncomfortably close to it. Almost every time I go on the Internet. It has become part of my online routine: Check e-mail, read news, Google self. See what comes up. After all, who knows who could have mentioned me or my writing in the last half hour?
Why do I do it? I ask myself that even before I’m finished typing my name. Why do I want to see the same results (or more or less the same) time after time after time? I tell myself it’s so I can see what’s happening with my work — who’s publishing it, who’s quoting it, who’s commenting on it, who’s linking to it (usually no one). But I know this isn’t the real reason. Deep down, I know that Googling myself is a pointless, vain, embarrassing and existentially bankrupt exercise. Yet I can’t help it. Am I just profoundly insecure? Am I just a hopeless egomaniac? I’m a writer, so I guess I’m both. And, in the Internet age, those are horrible — and horribly common– things to be.
According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, I’m not alone. Almost half (47%) of people who responded to the survey have Googled themselves at some point, a 22% jump from just five years ago. Apparently, however, I’m in the minority: Only 3% admit to Googling themselves regularly. This could be because I’m among the 11% of people who have a job — freelance writing — that requires them to promote themselves online. It could also be because I have a unique name that lends itself to Googling. (I assume the Joe Smiths out there don’t bother Googling themselves often.) But it could be for other reasons, too.
I started Googling myself years ago, back when search engines were like giant combines lumbering down some Midwestern road, compared to the Ferraris that cruise today’s Internet autobahn. Yet even then, with the few meagre results that came up, it was exhilarating to see my name out there in the world, to imagine my few small stories appearing on the computer screens of strangers across the globe.
At the time, it was fresh and wonderful. I got such a kick from seeing the things I had created out there, living their own lives and, of course, dying their own deaths. But as time marched on, the thrill wore off, and still I Googled. Once in a great while there was some payoff, like when I found out that I’d been runner-up in a contest I’d entered years before, or when I located an old family cemetery in Iowa, or when I came across a scathing review of L. Ron Hub-bard’s Dianetics that my great-uncle wrote in 1950.
But these discoveries are so rare that I don’t think they can explain why I keep on Googling. They can’t explain the hollow feeling it gives me now. They give no clue about what I’m really looking for. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I suspect that Googling myself must meet some profound need, some deep-seated desire. Sometimes it almost feels like I’m checking to make sure I’m still out there.
When I was a boy, I loved throwing rocks into calm water and watching the waves flow out toward the edge– the bigger the rock the better. This eventually led me to take giant boulders up on a bridge and drop them into the river below. When that wasn’t enough, I just threw myself off the bridge. And while times have changed, I think that urge remains very much the same, only today the Internet is the water, the waves are electronic and the stones are the things I write. I Google myself to see what kinds of waves my life is making in the world. Isn’t that why writers, artists and other insecure egomaniacs obsess over the Amazon rankings of their books, the comments on their blogs, the hits on their Web sites?
As society becomes more isolating and we have less contact with the lives of the people around us, the more we need the Internet to tell us what our communities used to: that our existence means something to someone else on this planet. What we used to see reflected back in the eyes of the people around us, we now look for on the computer screen. That’s why the number of self-Googlers will continue to rise. The Internet, fickle and shallow as it is, has become a giant Narcissus’s mirror. Does the world love us? That is the question at the heart of Google’s mysterious algorithm, and the search result we most crave: that we are out there somewhere and that, somehow, it matters.
source: National Post via Frank Bures, Featurewell.com
Dueling Human Rights Reports
Every year, the U.S.-China exchange of human rights reports is one of my favorite events to observe. Not only does it invariably produce some amusing bureaucratic sniping, but of late, it’s also become one of the best front seats from which to witness the increasingly awkward dance that ensues when the U.S. tries to take on the role of human rights cop abroad.
This week, the countries traded their usual flurry of barbs: the United States censured at China for being repressive, while China, indignant, hammered back against the U.S.’s own record with gusto. While the exchanges are always testy, in recent years, with the persistence of secret prisons and Guantanamo, as well as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, China’s had an especially rich vein of cases to mine. (It didn’t help that the White House formally endorsed torture as a form of official U.S. policy just days before releasing its China report.)
I’m no apologist for the Chinese regime, but whatever moral currency the U.S. could once claim on human rights has long since been squandered. (Or as the French foreign minister put it yesterday: “The magic is over.”) When a PRC bureaucrat looks at America and sees a country that incarcerates 1 out of 100 people and accounts for two-thirds of child executions worldwide, it’s no wonder the force of U.S. scrutiny seems somewhat misplaced.
source: thenation.com
The Clout of the Media Giants
Our media landscape is very, very heavily dominated by just a handful of gigantic media corporations, transnational corporations. The most important ones are Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, the News Corporation and Universal-Vivendi.
We now have all of our culture industries, from movies and TV and radio to music and book publishing and the web, dominated by corporations that are all-powerful in all of those fields. They are all-purpose media corporations.
One often hears that we all enjoy many more choices as viewers and listeners and readers than any generation of human beings ever enjoyed before. Well, that’s actually not the case. There’s a seeming multiplicity, a great ostensible diversity out there; but behind the surface of that apparent vast range of choices, there’s really not all that much in the way of true difference or true diversity. There’s a handful of owners behind most of those products that you see at the newsstand or on cable or on the web, you know? A handful of owners and the same commercial imperative at work, no matter where you turn. You talk about newspapers, magazines, movies, TV shows, radio. It’s all alike, calculated to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.
Now, most of the media industries have always been commercial above all. There’s no question about that, although some were more commercial than others were. Book publishing, for example, was historically not driven, above all, by a concern about profits, but it was actually run by men and women who loved books. It sounds quaint today. Nevertheless, by now all the media industries are alike, driven by commercial concerns. And this has been intensified by the fact that the huge few that wield all the power are heavily indebted. They have to make a lot of money. Their shareholders are always at the door. They are very anxious enterprises. They are forced to go wherever they think the money is right now. They are forced to try to grab the biggest demographic bloc they can. They aren’t inclined to take any real risks at all.
And this has tended to make the quality of most media product highly dubious. Whether we talk about the TV news, which is in this country more idiotic and lurid than ever before; or whether we talk about the content of most magazines, which is increasingly soft porn; or whether we’re talking about newspapers, which are more and more like television; or movies or music; we’re talking about a decline in quality that most of the people who work in these industries have recognized.
When you’ve got a few gigantic transnational corporations, each one loaded down with debt, competing madly for as much shelf space and brain space as they can take, they are going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down. They’re not going to be too nice about what they choose to do. They’ll go directly for the please center. They’re going to try to get you watching and buying right away, and what this means is that they are going to do as much trash as they can, because that will grab people.
The word “trash” is old-fashioned, because this is a state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated venture that we’re talking about. They’re using all the most brilliant means of measurement and surveillance to figure out what we’re all about. They focus group everything in a million ways. So we have a highly sophisticated enterprise that’s engaged in a kind of regressive project. They’re trying to sell as much junk as they can by appealing to the worst in all of us, but they do it some extremely civilized means.
Advertising today has to do with the fact that we’re all far more jaded than we used to be–more cynical about certain kinds of utopian claims. It also has to do with an increasing desperation on the part of the advertisers to break through the “clutter,” as they put it. So they tend to do things that are more outrageous than anything they would have tried 30 years ago. There are other factors at work here, but what it all comes down to is that this all-pervasive commercial propaganda, which sells not only countless products but a whole view of life, has itself become much nastier since, I’d say, the mid-1970s. The utopian element has gone out of advertising, and now it tends to be a celebration of the worst kinds of values.
Let’s remember that advertising is, above all, a form of propaganda. It’s changed in a very significant way over the last couple of decades. If you go back to the TV shows of the 1950s that were pitched at kids, you’re struck by the fact that the ads, the commercials in those shows stood out as interruptions. I can certainly recall a certain impatience when those commercials would suddenly appear. You run to the bathroom, you get something to eat, or you just wait until they’re over. This was in the days before people had remotes, so you just sort of had to suffer through them. Sometimes they were amusing, but for the most part they were not the point.
Now that interruptiveness in advertising has disappeared. Advertising has now moved center stage. Consider rock videos, for example. MTV was the first 24-hour, seven-day-a-week commercial channel, because rock videos are ads. Rock videos are highly sophisticated, irresistibly seductive commercials for songs and also for clothes. The fact is that that development has brought us to a world in which the ad is not something you have to suffer through. The ad is not the price you have to pay in order to get to watch the show. The ad is the show. The ad is the point.
(edit – The important lesson here is don’t be all consuming…try creating.)
Full report: Interview with Mark Crispin Miller. Also recommended is Frontline’s The Merchants of Cool, a compelling look at the purveyors behind pop culture. It’s a little dated but no less relevant.
