July 21, 2005
Another bombing—another anti-Muslim feeding frenzy at Canada’s national newspaper, or what passes for one. This time, the bigotry was openly displayed in a sanctimonious and odious July 14 editorial,” which began:
“The victims of last week’s London bombings have not all been identified, or even located, yet some Muslim intellectuals in Canada have already begun jostling for a spot on victimhood’s centre stage. This is not only bad form; it’s plain wrong on the facts, and a shamefully equivocal reply to terrorism.”
Facts?! Since when did any member of the Globe and Mail’s Zionist amen corner care about facts? The merest whiff of violence is excuse enough send them into paroxysms of hatemongering speculation and pro-Zionist apologetics.
As I’ve written previously, the best example of this defect is Marcus Gee: (“Gee, the Globe and Mail need a lesson in honest commentary,” July 22, 2004; and “Why bother with intelligent analysis when there’s brass to polish?” April 28, 2005).
This time, I’m going to let one of my readers take the Globe to task. Here’s what a Victoria resident named Barclay sent me on July 10. I couldn’t have said it better myself:
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“I am a 55-year-old university-educated man who spent most of his undergraduate years studying politics, history and English. Before I could put pen to paper, I had to research host of different sources because I needed to understand a subject from many perspectives. Failure to do so would result in more comments from the marker than the totality of my words. A scholarly effort was not only expected—it was demanded.
In those days, my favorite authors and professors—many of them Jewish—rolled up their sleeves and did the heavy lifting that made them true academics. They were never afraid to state a point of view, and seldom were unable to back up a position.
What holds true for professors and authors also applies to journalists. Those who wish to state an opinion have a professional responsibility to get the facts straight. It concerns me when I read a newspaper columnist who reverses this order or has no supporting facts at all. Margaret Wente is such a columnist.
Her July 9 column “We All Know Who the Real Bad Guys Are” appeared a mere two days after the horrendous London bombings, yet she didn’t pull any punches when she claimed the bad guys were “militant Muslim groups.”
She accused radical Muslims. She blamed male Muslims. She even mentioned female Muslims because they bear more Muslims! She told us who these ”bad guys” were, even though she didn’t know their identities. But an absence of facts is no impediment to a propagandist like Wente.
In a snide comment that shed no light on the bombings, she claimed that London, despite its success as a culturally diverse city, is also known as “Londonistan.” Across Europe, she wrote, “unassimilated Muslims are a growing problem”:
“I think what we are seeing now is the Israelization of Europe, where innocent civilians in cafes and buses will be wiped out now and then in low level attacks carried out by people who have been inflamed by emotive Internet propaganda videos.”
Unfortunately for Europe, the ultimate and horrifying solution that was once proposed for the problem of unassimilated populations in the 1940s was resurrected by Serbians as recently as the early 1990s. Not surprisingly, Wente fails to mention the “unassimilated Muslims” in Israel or the presence of Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza who aren’t about to accept quietly what many of them perceive to be an Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing.
She also doesn’t mention that good guys have resorted to torture, murder and other forms of state terror. What she does report is that Muslims breed like flies. Within that context, State terrorism is nothing more than government manipulation of the Malthusian parameter to ensure that the gene pool for “bad guys” is reduced.
Of course, the flip side to knowing who the “bad guys” are is presuming that Israelis are the “good guys” and because we are also the “good guys,” we have to embrace Israelis as our kin and join them in the war against terror. This feat has been achieved in America due largely to the neoconservatives who harnessed George W. Bush as their useful idiot. An infinitely more unctuous Tony Blair has already claimed the British title.
The Globe in general wants us to get with the pro-Israel program but a newspaper that offers only a narrow Zionist perspective while claiming to present a national perspective not only runs the risk of being labeled a propaganda rag, but is out of touch with the majority of Canadians who don’t subscribe to solutions borne of intense hatred for other human beings. Humility coupled with dogged ambition is still a virtue to us; hubris is not, and that’s where we separate ourselves from our American neighbours.
We don’t have an active policy of invading countries, occupying them, and remaking them in our own image. Neither are we like Israelis who have difficulty convincing others that Palestinians are bigger terrorists than they are. Yet Wente shamelessly exploited the deaths of Londoners and besmirched their memories to put them in the same camp as Israelis. Why?
I did a Google search for “Margaret Wente Globe Zionist” and came upon Greg Felton’s article on mediamonitors.net about the Jewish prism on the news in Canada (“Jewish prism steals light from Arabs,” May 4, 2003). Does Wente’s pro-Israel propaganda fit Felton’s description of the Jewish prism at work?
If the Globe has decided to limit its scope to embrace only the Zionist vision, then the answer is yes.
Editors of the Globe and hacks like Wente have proven to be exceptionally deft at laying out a smorgasbord of “opinions,” “insights” and “editorials” to make sure that their readers’ eyes remain shut to alternatives. I can only hope that the Internet continues to offer a forum for those interested in morality as a means for the discovery of truth.
A prism directs selected wavelengths of light onto a surface to create an artificial image. A lens captures all light and helps us see everything in greater focus. If knowledge can be equated with light, then a prism represents a propagandist, and a lens represents a scholar, which means scholars on the Middle East at the Globe are in short supply.
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