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Subject: Reed on military
Soldiers and Reporters
by Fred Reed
Much email comes my way, from military folk both current and retired, assuring me that the press consists of leftist commy anti-American liberal tree-hugging cowardly backstabbers who probably like the French and would date Jane Fonda. It is an old song. Having spent decades covering the armed forces, I have seen much of the Pentagon and the press. Things are a tad more complex. A few thoughts:
The military, particularly the officer corps, wants not reporting but cheerleading. The very idea of an uncontrolled press is repugnant. Thus officers try to keep reporters away from enlisted men, who are less political and tend to say things that, while true, are not policy. Thus the edgy, wary hostility in the presence of reporters. The truth of what a reporter writes doesn’t matter to them, only whether it is "positive."
The reasons for this sensitivity are in part practical, given that wars cannot long be fought without the support of the public. There are deeper reasons. First, there is the military’s stark with-us-or-against-us outlook. Second, the intense loyalty to the group that characterizes military men. Third, an authoritarian structure to which reporters seem an uncontrolled rabble. "Uncontrolled" is the key word.
The military believes that the press should be part of the team. Its job should be not to report but to support. "Are they Americans, or aren’t they?" To see what the command thinks the press should be, read a base newspaper. It will be a cross between a PR handout and a Weekly Reader.
Reporters do not see their job as cheerleading, this being the work of PR people, whom they despise. Correspondents by nature are not team players but salaried freelances who compete with, instead of cooperating with, their colleagues. Glory hounds, they want to break the big story themselves. Instead of being loyal to any group, they are suspicious of all groups. They do not respect authority. Frequently incompetent, they are pushy, demanding, and irritating. The military is afraid of them. You hate what you fear.
In short, they are everything the military detests. If they did their jobs perfectly, which neither they nor soldiers do, the military would still loathe them.
Further, soldiers with exceptions are insular, reporters greatly less so. Consider. A kid who goes to West Point lives for four years, in formative late adolescence, with relentless military indoctrination. This is not in all respects bad. It tends to produce a personally honest, public-spirited, responsible man who makes an admirable citizen. These same men can run a carrier battle group, as difficult and impressive a thing as I have ever seen done, and they can do it only because they obey, make sacrifices, and respect the group.
The young cadet then goes to Fort Hood, say, for three years in which he is almost exclusively in the company of other soldiers. Next, three years in an armored division in Germany (the rotations may have changed) during which he is again constantly with soldiers and, since GIs don’t learn languages, unable to communicate with Germans other than bartenders. The Army is his entire existence. By the time he is thirty he is deeply imbued with a bird-politics leftwing vs. rightwing view of things. He is by no means stupid -- the academies get bright students -- but he is simple-minded. He believes profoundly that one is either on the team or one is with the enemy.
Reporters aren’t on the team. They report what they see, or think they see. Many do not know what they are talking about, but the military detests even more those who do. In time of war, truthfulness makes them traitors. Soldiers often use the word, and they mean it. You are with us, or you are with the enemy.
The two groups live in sharply differing mental worlds. While reporters are more insular than they should be, they are much less so than the military. They see a broader slice of the world and rub shoulders with more kinds of people. The overseas correspondents see more wars than do soldiers. The result is a certain cosmopolitanism which, whether good or bad, is much at odds with the clarity of the military’s outlook.
For example, many in Washington who actually know how the press works (the military actually doesn’t) believe that the press supports the war in Iraq, has until recently given the White House a free ride, and has been adroitly controlled by the government. I agree. If newspapers had been against the war, they would have published countless photos of gut-shot soldiers who will never get a date, paraplegics doomed to a life on a slab, and more Abu Ghraib photos (which they have.) Soldiers don’t know this. In any event, anything but unqualified support is treason.
The military usually regards journalists as cowards. ("Coward" and "traitor" are their gravest pejoratives.) This is questionable. When the 2000th US soldier died in Iraq, I checked the site of Reporters Without Borders and found that 72 reporters had been killed there (with two more missing), or 3.6 percent of the military total. I don’t know how many troops have served in Iraq. Just now it is about 160,000. To be conservative, let’s call it 130,000 on average, making 347,100 for two and two-thirds years of war. By the equation 2,000/347,000 = 72/x, one finds that there would have to have been 12,500 reporters in Iraq to have equal rates of death between reporters and soldiers. Otherwise, the press is taking casualties at a higher rate than the military. The calculation is rough, but makes the point.
Further, reporters can leave any time they choose. The government forces soldiers to fight under penalty of long jail sentences and, in many times and places, death. If you dispute this, tell the troops that they can fly home tomorrow without punishment and see how many remain. They would not leave from cowardice, but from lack of a stake in the outcome. (Would you leave your children fatherless because you wanted democracy in Iraq?)
More than most professions, the military lives in a world defined by idealism. Being a dentist does not carry an ideology with it. Being a soldier does. The dedicated soldier thinks in terms of honor, valor, loyalty, sacrifice, and heroism, of righting wrong and defeating evil, of proving himself in combat, of glory and exaltation and defending the fatherland. The reporter sees the dead lying in the street, the flies crawling in shattered craniums, the bombed-out cities for year after year without change. He hears this described as progress. To him it is pure bullsh*t.
A beautiful example of war photography. Or so it seems. Am I wrong in thinking he has the lens cover on his sight?
Maybe, maybe not. But it is how he thinks.
Journalists are not idealists. Cynical, weary of being lied to, having seen the fraud and self-interest that underlie, as they come to see it, almost everything, they regard the soldiery as a riverboat gambler might regard the Boy Scouts. The soldiery regard the press as a Boy Scout might regard a riverboat gambler. Different mental worlds.
Ambiguity disturbs soldiers. Few of us can kill and die for ifs and maybes and on-the-one-hand. Thus every war is described in apocalyptic terms, whether Vietnam, Granada, Korea, or Iraq: We must defeat them there or we’ll have to fight them in California. Usually this is nonsense. Journalists may suggest as much. And so, again, they become traitors.
The moral ambiguity of war is especially painful. While military men as citizens are at least as moral as the rest of the population, as warriors they are not, and can’t be. Because of this conflict they therefore have to believe things about themselves that are not true. Consequently you may hear a soldier saying with perfectly sincerity that the US military goes to great lengths to avoid killing civilians. Furious accusation of treason arise when reporters point out that they are in fact killing civilians.
For example, while a case can be made that the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were militarily desirable, they cannot well be described as attempts to preserve civilians. The bombings of cities in WWII were intended to kill civilians, hundreds of thousands of them, to break morale. In war utility invariably trumps decency.
Reporters, being traitorous, will write of these things. After initial cheerleading while the war goes well, they will note that it isn’t going well any longer. Soldiers, who are being killed and mangled, come to hate them, seldom distinguishing between being against a war and being against the troops. After the hell of combat, who wants to hear that maybe it wasn’t really a good idea after all?
On and on it goes.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed83.html
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Subject: 'security fence,' says Dumper
Letters to the Editor
New York Metro
November 17, 2005
To the Editor:
Joshua Frank uses Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Israel to launch a diatribe against Israel's security fence that is wrong on all counts ("Hillary in the Holy Land: Still more of the same," Nov. 17).
Contrary to Frank's outrageous characterization of the fence as an "apartheid wall," the 480-mile security barrier, comprised of 97 percent of chain link fence and only 3 percent concrete wall, is a defensive measure enacted by Israel to prevent Palestinian terrorists from reaching their civilian targets inside Israel. There would be no security fence if there were no Palestinian terrorism.
Furthermore, Israel recognizes the need to balance security with freedom of movement for the Palestinians. Indeed, recent alterations to the route of the fence help it to affect a minimal number of people. Frank laments the economic hardships of the Palestinians, but fails to recognize that the Palestinian economy would be far stronger if terrorists did not use entry points to Israel as access to murder Israelis.
Israel has stated that the security fence is a temporary and reversible measure that has been created in reaction to the reality of ongoing Palestinian terrorism. Israeli leaders have said that should Palestinian terrorism end, there will be no need for this protective barrier and it can be dismantled.
Sincerely,
Anti-Defamation League
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Subject: spreading hate: jew job one
Anti-Semitism on Campus Still a Concern, ADL Tells U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
New York, NY, November 18, 2005 ... In a written submission to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights briefing on campus anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described a number of disturbing recent incidents of anti-Semitism, vandalism, and distribution of hate literature at colleges and universities across the country.
While the ADL noted that institutional anti-Semitism, discrimination, and quotas against Jewish students and faculty are "largely a thing of the past," the League outlined a series of incidents in which stridently anti-Israel activism on campus had crossed the line into anti-Semitic intimidation and harassment.
"The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has a proud legacy of excellent work in raising the nation's consciousness about national problems," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "We believe the USCCR can play a productive role in drawing attention to the impact of anti-Semitism and the need to confront that problem and other forms of bigotry on campus today."
The League's statement distinguished between objective, legitimate criticism of the State of Israel and unfair and improper demonization of Israel, or vilification of Israeli leaders - sometimes through comparisons with Nazi leaders. The statement also described a variety of ADL programmatic responses to bias, prejudice, and anti-Semitism on campus and urged the Commission to support improved government hate crime data collection efforts at colleges and universities.
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Subject: ADL dipsticks success of its attack on Christian culture
Poll: Americans Believe Religion Is 'Under Attack' -- Majority Says Religion is 'Losing Influence' In American Life
ADL Findings Highlight Stark Divide on Church-State Separation
New York, NY, November 21, 2005 … Sixty-four percent of the American people believe that religion is "under attack," according to a new poll released today by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The poll found that 53 percent of Americans likewise believe that religion as a whole is "losing its influence in American life."
American Attitudes Toward Religion In the Public Square, a national poll of 800 American adults conducted October 25-30, 2005 by the Marttila Communications Group, also found large swaths of the American public expressing support for a more direct role for religion in the public square, with organized prayer in public school (47 percent), creationism taught alongside evolution (56 percent), and religious symbols such as the Ten Commandments displayed in public buildings (64 percent).
"The findings suggest that American public opinion is starkly divided when it comes to the role of religion in the public square, and that our nation's proud tradition of church-state separation is threatened as never before," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "Unfortunately, too many people believe that religion is under attack in America, when in fact according to all measurements, religion is stronger in the United States than in any other Western country."
The survey comes at a time when ADL has begun questioning the role of some on the religious right in seeking to impose their beliefs in the public square while attempting to throw out the constitutional balance that protects our nation's religious freedom.
Among the main findings of the ADL survey, American Attitudes Toward Religion In the Public Square:
-Sixty-four percent (64%) of those surveyed agree with the statement that "religion is under attack" in America; 32 percent disagree. Among those identifying themselves as fundamentalist/evangelical/charismatic Christians, 80 percent agree; 19 percent disagree. (view graph)
-Asked if religion is "increasing or losing influence" in American life, 35 percent say that it is "increasing," while 53 percent believe it is "losing." Among evangelical/fundamental/charismatic Christians, 33 percent say it is "increasing," while 60 percent say "losing." (graph)
-Sixty-four percent (64%) agree with the statement that "it is important that religious symbols like the Ten Commandments be displayed in public buildings such as court houses," while 32 percent disagree. Among fundamentalist/evangelical/charismatic Christians, 89 percent agree; 9 percent disagree. (graph)
-Fifty-six percent (56%) favor, and 39 percent oppose, the teaching of the biblical story of creation alongside evolution in public schools as "equally valid explanations for the origins of human life." Among fundamentalist/evangelical/charismatic Christians, 70 percent favor teaching creationism, with 28 percent opposed. (graph)
-Asked "which is a more likely explanation for the origins of human life on earth, Darwin or the Bible?," 57 percent respond "The Bible," while 31 percent respond "Darwin." Among fundamentalist/evangelical/charismatic Christians, 87 percent say "the Bible;" 7 percent say "Darwin." (graph)
-On prayer in public schools, 47 percent of Americans believe that "students should be free to express their religious beliefs throughout the school day, including group prayer," while 44 percent agree with the statement that "public schools should only allow a moment of silence for individual prayer." Among fundamentalist/evangelical/charismatic Christians, 69 percent believe that group prayer is appropriate, while 25 percent support individual prayer only. (graph)
-Nearly half the American people (45 percent) agree that "right wing religious leaders are seeking to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else." (graph)
"The findings of this poll highlight the challenge that we face in this country in trying to maintain the pluralistic, inclusive, tolerant society that has been good for religion, for minorities, and in particular for the Jewish community," said Mr. Foxman. "Despite the fact that religion continues to thrive in this country, which has famously served as a haven for the religiously oppressed throughout its history, too many people believe that religion is under attack, and that there should be a fundamental collapse of our traditional church-state barrier.
"It is unfortunate that those who would like to Christianize America seek to use the concerns reflected in this survey toward goals which would turn America into a very different place than the one that has been so open to all religious perspectives," added Mr. Foxman.
The survey was conducted by the Marttila Communications Group, a Boston-based public opinion research firm that has conducted numerous national surveys for ADL measuring American attitudes on a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues. The margin of error is +/- 3.4 percent.
http://adl.org/PresRele/RelChStSep_90/4830_90.htm
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Subject: ADL afraid of Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson Has "An Anti-Semitic Streak" -- Tape Shows He Hasn't Learned From Past Mistakes
New York, NY, November 23, 2005 ... Reacting to revelations that Michael Jackson referred to Jews as "leeches" in a voicemail to a former business manager, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said the pop music icon "has an anti-Semitic streak" and hasn't learned from his past mistakes, including the use of anti-Semitic epithets in a 1995 song he wrote.
In tapes aired yesterday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Mr. Jackson was heard saying of Jews, "They suck ... They're like leeches. ... I'm so tired of it ... It is a conspiracy. The Jews do it on purpose."
Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:
Michael Jackson has an anti-Semitic streak, and hasn't learned from his past mistakes. It seems every time he has a problem in his life, he blames it on Jews. It is sad that Jackson is infected with classically stereotypical ideas of Jews as all-powerful, money-grubbing and manipulative.
We had hoped that Jackson would have learned from his mistakes. While he apologized for, and later removed the anti-Jewish lyrics in "They Don't Care About Us," it is clear now that he never was able to completely remove the bigotry from his own heart.
It is important now for Mr. Jackson to stand up and acknowledge that his words are hurtful and hateful. He needs to show his fans that he rejects bigotry and is truly serious about stamping out, in his words, "the ugliness of racism, anti-Semitism and stereotyping." This can only begin with an apology to Jews everywhere, especially those fans who have been deeply hurt and offended by his words.
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