Category: Media

Discourse suppression is hazardous to your health

… whether it occurs in the field of economics, or in analysis of Arab-Israeli issues.
All US citizens (along with billions of other people around the world) are currently suffering greatly because the group of “market fundamentalists” who had taken over both the decisionmaking in, and nearly all the commentary about, US economic policy had succeeded to such a great degree, until very recently, in their campaign to muzzle economists who raised questions about their free-market model.
This post— on, interestingly, a blog run by the Wall Street Journal sketches out some of those earlier discourse-suppression attempts. (HT: Krugman.)
It includes this quote from University of Chicago economist (but also, periodic critic of market fundamentalism) Luigi Zingales:

    “This is a common feature of people when they come across dissent – they want to put you in a box and label you and dismiss you.”

In this field, the “toxic” accusation was that a certain economist– Zingales, or his colleague Raghuram Rajan, or Nouriel Roubini, or whoever– was “anti-market.”
In the field of Middle East studies, a parallel role is played by the accusation that someone is “anti-Semitic” or “anti-Israel.”
In both fields, well-funded and powerful interest groups have worked for years to suppress free discussion that is based on an open-ended, fair-minded examination of the facts at hand. Now, in the wake of the September-October financial collapse, there is some attempt to rehabilitate the analysis of those stalwart economists who over the years have worked to try to challenge the assumptions of the market fundamentalists. (Though I note that the WSJ blogger reports that Larry Summers was a notable belittler of the critics at one key 2005 Fed conference… Summers is, of course, one of the key members of Obama’s incoming economics team. Not good news.)
And then, there’s the Arab-Israeli field– one where discourse suppression campaigns and the systematic attempt to exclude, marginalize, or belittle anyone who challenges the “Israel is always right” orthodoxy continue unabated in the US. See, for example, all the cases documented by Muzzlewatch, which still represent only the tip of a much, much deeper iceberg of the discourse suppression practices by the pro-Israel hasbaristas.
This is not only completely unjust, and a serious violation of any rules of fair discourse. It is also extremely hazardous to the longterm interests of the US citizenry. It is certainly not in our interest as citizens to have our elected government give such strong and uncritical support to the actions of the government of Israel– even when, as now, these actions completely violate all the “laws of war” requirements regarding the need for proportionality and discrimination in the conduct of military operations.
Our country needs to have a full and fair discussion both of what is going on the current Israel-Gaza war, and of our government’s policy regarding it, which has been marked by:

    1. Our government continuing to supply Israel with the extremely lethal weaponry that is being used in this inhumanely pursued conflict; and
    2. Our government acting vigorously in the international scene, right now, to prevent the conclusion of the speedy ceasefire that the peoples of Gaza, Israel– and the US– all so desperately need.

The risks that accrue to us from not having this discussion on a full, fair, and fact-derived basis, and on not making the kinds of changes in our government’s policy that would minimize the hazard to all concerned, are large indeed. (Quite apart from the raw morality of the issues involved.)
If we do not have this discussion, and do not make the requisite policy changes in an urgent way, then we can expect our country’s real power and influence around the world to continue plunging just as surely as the financial markets crashed in the latter parts of 2008.
Wilfull ignorance is the worst kind. Wilfull suppression of free, fact-based discourse is no less bad. And in Arab-Israeli affairs as in a discussion of national economic policies, discourse suppression is extremely hazardous to our country’s health.

Haaretz editorial: Israel ‘expedited’ breakdown of ceasefire

The big meme in the western-dominated media has been that even if Israel’s “retaliatory attack” against Gaza has been slightly (!) disproportionate, still, it was justified because after all it was Hamas that broke the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) and has even, according to several accounts I’ve read today, “has been firing rockets non-stop into Israel over recent days.”
Not so. And intelligent Israelis understand that to be the case.
Israel violated the tahdi’eh numerous times throughout its six-month term, often lethally. Hamas violated it only a few times, and worked strenuously (and often, though not always, successfully) to persuade the other Palestinian groups in Gaza to abide by it, too.
In November, one month before the expiry of the mutually agreed tahdi’eh, Israel sent a sizeable ground force into southern Gaza to destroy suspected tunnels there.
That was the big violation Haaretz was referring to today, when its editorial writers noted that,

    Israel’s violation of the lull in November expedited the deterioration that gave birth to the war of yesterday.

So why do so many writers in the western-dominated media continue with their accusations that Hamas is fully to blame?
In the realm of economic policy, Willem Buiter and others have coined the term “cognitive capture” to describe how financiers managed to persuade regulators and legislators to look at the financial world almost wholly from their viewpoint.
It strikes me it’s also a good term to describe the way pro-Israeli organizations in the US have almost completely succeeded in having the country’s commentators and politicians look at the Middle East almost wholly through their eyes.
Another term for “cognitive capture” would be “brainwashing.”
Both terms, however, seem unable to capture the degree to which those “captured”, or brainwashed, may in both these cases have actually internalized the messages of those seeking to “capture” them. It also fails to capture the degree to which the powerful forces doing the “capturing” succeed in their capture/brainwashing task ab initio by sustaining powerful campaigns to ensure that no-one who even questions their mindset or is capable of bringing an independent, querying mind to their task is even allowed into the positions of influence that they seek to control.
Anyway, it’s very depressing to see– yet again!– the degree to which the US media and pols just fall in lockstep behind the “official” Israeli government explanation and framing of the current, extremely tragic events…. And they do this to a degree far higher than many of the media and pols in Israel do!

Pogrom in Hebron? NYT ignores…

Haaretz’s Ami Issacharoff had some striking reporting of the rampage militant Israeli settlers in Hebron went on through the Palestinian parts of the city yesterday, after the IDF evicted some of their fellow-settlers from a Palestinian-owned building, as per Israeli High Court order.
Issacharoff unabshedly described what happened during the rampage as “a pogrom”. He wrote about the enraged settler civilians attacking with stones and flames a Palestinian family home in which 20 family members– 17 of them women and children– cowered in terror. And as the pogromists attacked, people described as “security guards from Kiryat Arba” stood round the house preventing the Palestinians’ neighbors from coming to their aid.
He wrote:

    The brain requires a minute or two to digest what is taking place. Women and children crying bitterly, their faces giving off an expression of horror, sensing their imminent deaths, begging the journalists to save their lives. Stones land on the roof of the home, the windows and the doors. Flames engulf the southern entrance to the home. The front yard is littered with stones thrown by the masked men. The windows are shattered and the children are frightened. All around, as if they were watching a rock concert, are hundreds of Jewish witnesses, observing the events with great interest, even offering suggestions to the Jewish wayward youth as to the most effective way to harm the family. And the police are not to be seen. Nor is the army.
    Ten minutes prior, while the security forces were preoccupied with dispersing the rioters near the House of Contention, black smoke billowed from the wadi separating Kiryat Arba and Hebron. For some reason, none of the senior officers of the police or the army were particularly disturbed by what was transpiring at the foot of Kiryat Arba…

Issacharoff was one of a group of Israeli journalists who decided to abandon the “neutral observer” role and intervene to try to save the family members from the lynch mob:

    A group of journalists approach the house. A dilemma. What to do? There are no security forces in the vicinity and now the Jewish troublemakers decided to put the journalists in their crosshairs. We call for the security guards from Kiryat Arba to intervene and put a halt to the lynch. But they surround the home to prevent the arrival of “Palestinian aid.”
    The home is destroyed and the fear is palpable on the faces of the children. One of the women, Jihad, is sprawled on the floor, half-unconscious. The son, who is gripping a large stick, prepares for the moment he will be forced to face the rioters. Tahana, one of the daughters, refuses to calm down. “Look at what they did to the house, look.”
    Tess, the photographer, bursts into tears as the events unfold around her. The tears do not stem from fear. It is shame, shame at the sight of these occurrences, the deeds of youths who call themselves Jews. Shame that we share the same religion. At 5:05 P.M., a little over an hour after the incident commenced, a unit belonging to the Yassam special police forces arrives to disperse the crowd of masked men.

These journalists deserve the highest awards possible, for their integrity and courage.
And the New York Times? Its writer Ethan Bronner (or his editors?) made no mention at all of what was happening to Hebron’s indigenous and rightful Palestinian residents during the day yesterday. Their account portrayed what was happening as only an intra-Jewish drama. They had space to give detailed accounts of what the Israeli settler women were wearing, and an incendiary quote from someone from a pro-settler party. But the fact that the lives of 20 members of the Abu Sa’afan family were directly threatened during an anti-Palestinian pogrom, conducted by Jewish extremists while the Israeli security forces stood aside– ?
Nah, no room for that in the New York Times.

A marriage made in heaven: Miller and Fox

Cue the violins… Howard Kurtz reports that Fox News has hired disgraced propagandist Judy Miller to do on-air analysis and write for their website. (HT: Think Progress’s Amanda, who gives some good links on the topic here.)
As Kurtz notes, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller reported stories on the search for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be untrue.”
He quotes Fox Senior Vice-President John Moody as saying merely, “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped.”
That’s nonsense. Here’s what a reporter does: She or he reports on what has already happened Or, if the facts of what has happened are still unclear, she writes about as much as she can verifiably report on, identifying her sources with as much frankness as possible, and perhaps indicating the areas she has been unable to fully verify or understand.
She does not knowingly use unsubstantiated or unsubstantiable allegations, “reporting” them as if they are the truth.
Also, a reporter does not speculate about the future, or about what “may perhaps” be known in the future.
In that sense, Moody’s comment that “We’ve all had stories that didn’t come out exactly as we had hoped” makes no sense at all. Reporters’ stories only “come out” differently than the reporter hopes if something happens to them in the editing process that distorts the meaning that the reporter clearly intended to convey. (It happens.) But that has nothing– nothing!– to do with a reported speculation, which is all that Miller was purveying in her dreadful and actively inflammatory reporting pre-March 2003, “coming out” differently in real life once the speculation has proven to be quite ill-founded.
Moody’s use of words tells us a lot about the relationship Fox News has with the whole concept of careful, evidence-based reporting: Tenuous at best, perhaps downright contemptuous at worst.
Judy Miller should fit right in.

Congrats to Paul Krugman

Huge congratulations on his winning the Nobel Prize for Economics.
It turns out it’s for work he did quite a while ago on trade patterns and economic geography. I haven’t read the citation yet, but I hope they do mention his role as an exemplary public intellectual here in the US.
I haven’t always agreed with him. For example, I thought the support he expressed for the Paulson plan when it was first produced, though very strictly qualified, was still ways too strong. But still, in the MSM he’s been the major voice I’ve been seeing who’s been consistently warning of the dangers of CDO’s and, especially, CDS’s.
Moreover, he also roamed far from the classical ‘beat’ of an economics writer to write excellent and very sharp warnings of the dangers of the Bushists’ rush to war in Iraq. That, at a time when alleged foreign-affairs ‘experts’ on the NYT’s columnists’ roll (yes, that’s you, Tom Friedman) were giving strong support to the go-to-war project.
Now, I suppose, I should go and read what it was, exactly, that he got this Nobel for…

Taleban/Talabani: There’s a difference?

WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne gets paid a hefty salary and gets a lot of public respect for his claimed ability to opine knowledgeably about current affairs. But on Friday, he and the other two participants in Diane Rehm’s much lauded, nationally syndicated radio talk show revealed how little they really understand about the areas of America’s two major current wars.
The incident went like this:

    1. A caller from someplace in the Midwest called in and asked something like, “How come during the Palin-Biden debate last night nobody picked up on the fact that Palin referred approvingly to the idea of talks with both Maliki and the Talebani?” Like Palin, the caller mis-spoke the Iraqi PM’s name as “Maleeki.” Unlike Palin, he put that crucial definite article before the word “Talebani”, showing that he had not understood the distinction between Mr. Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq, and “the” Taleban (no terminal “i”), widely recognized in the US as the “bad guy”, now resurging, pro-Qaeda, former rulers of Afghanistan.
    2. Diane Rehm made no attempt to correct the caller’s misunderstanding but passed the question directly on to E.J. Dionne. E.J. also did not correct the caller’s mistake but said something like, “Goodness, yes, that was a terrible mistake Sarah Palin made.”
    3. Neither of the other, supposedly knowledgeable panelists, Jim Angle of Faux News and Jeanne Cummings of The Politico, intervened at all to suggest that the caller had misunderstood what Palin was talking about.

I mention this terrible gaffe, committed by a total of four supposedly well-informed Washington DC “insiders”, because it underlines the extent to which those well-regarded members of the U.S. commentatoriat don’t actually have any real understanding of the matters they opine about with such self-confidence.
It’s quite understandable that a regular citizen, calling in from who knows where, might have failed to make the distinction between Mr. Jalal Talabani, who has been President of Iraq for 3-4 years and as the long-time head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) has been a regular feature in US newspapers since long before 2003, and the Taleban. But it strikes me as inexcusable that Rehm, Dionne, Angle, and Cummings all failed to notice that that the caller had confused those two significant names with each other.
Btw, I note that Sarah Palin referred to “Talabani” quite correctly.

AP’s flawed ‘Factbox’ about Golan

Who compiles this stuff, anyway? As a supposed aid to people seeking to understand the background to the latest news about the proximity talks between Syria and Israel in Turkey, the Associated Press has produced this ‘factbox’ about the Golan, the terrain at the heart of the territorial dispute between the two countries.
Of the five ‘bulleted’ items there, the first is generally okay.
The second starts off with: “Soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967…” It contains zero reference to the actions the Israeli military were taking in that period, when they were systematically advancing into the “demilitarized zone” that had been declared by the United Nations along the seam-line between the Israeli and Syrian armies in 1949, and the associated attacks the IDF maintained throughout that period against Syrian farmers, the Syrian military, and even UNTSO peacekeepers.
According to the AP version, the Syrians forces in Golan were just gratuitously shelling Israeli positions?
Excuse me?
In the third bulleted item in the ‘factbox’ it states,

    Most of the 100,000 Syrian residents of the Golan Heights fled during the 1967 war and were not allowed to return. A few of the roughly 17,000 left have accepted Israeli citizenship. About 18,000 Israelis live in 32 settlements built since 1967.

Zero mention of the fact that these Israeli settlements are completely illegal under international law.
It’s when we get to the fourth bulleted item that the level of “spin” sinks to the level of simple mendacity:

    Israel-Syria peace talks broke down in 2000. Israel offered to withdraw from all of the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border.

That is quite simply not true. The reason the peace bid that Israeli PM belatedly made in 2000 got absolutely nowhere was precisely because he pulled back on assurances PM Yitzhak Rabin had earlier given that Israel would withdraw to the international border. Barak was not prepared to do that, but Pres. Hafez al-Asad insisted as always that that was the only basis on which he would conclude a peace deal.
Asad did not ask for– far less insist on– a single inch of land that was not Syria’s under international law.
Where does AP get this nonsense, anyway? (Why does the name Barry Schweid come to mind?)
Finally, the fifth bulleted item seems completely Israelo-centric. How about we have some mention of the plight of Syrian families split up by Israel’s continued occupation of Golan and of the dire human-rights situation of the indigenous Golanis?
I wonder how many US newspapers editors, eager to inform their readers, will be running this ‘fact’-box without even being aware of the degree of spin and simple mendacity that have gone into its composition?
Editors and others interested in a more richly textured (and certainly, more fact-based) description of the human dimensions of the Golan issue would do well to go back to the vintage 1998 series I wrote about the question.

Western MSM on Asian disasters, contd.

I see that China Hand has posted an excellent analysis of the western MSM’s highly politicized (and sometimes just plain inaccurate) reporting on the “Western aid workers and Myanmar” story, that is considerably lengthier, and better authenticated in terms of good hyperlinks, than the few notes I penned here yesterday.
China Hand comments:

    the whole idea that Western aid workers are indispensable to disaster relief in the initial rescue period (and their absence is evidence of criminal and callous incompetence by the government of the afflicted region) is wrong and misleading, as well as something of an insult to the local people and organizations who, in any disaster, provide the bulk of first-responder disaster relief…

My own point, exactly.
CH further comments:

    We might have an effective Myanmar policy—one that doesn’t force it even deeper into China’s sphere of influence–if accurate reporting allowed us to understand the weaknesses, strengths, and priorities of the regime in light of the challenge of Cyclone Nargis and design a joint response to the disaster.
    But based on the instinctive and intellectually lazy junta bashing in the Western press encouraged by the posturing of the US, UK, and France, I’m not holding my breath.

I am delighted to see that, in CH’s research, s/he finds that one bright spot is provided by The Christian Science Monitor (yay! the CSM!). CH links to and quotes from this fascinating report by the CSM’s Simon Mortlake
Note to China Hand: always good to name reporters who do good work if you can?
Mortlake writes about the Myanmar-related work of

    The Tzu Chi Foundation, the largest NGO in the Chinese-speaking world and a rising player in global disaster relief, [which] has sent 15 volunteers from neighboring countries to Burma to work with more than 100 local staff to distribute aid, says Her Rey-Sheng, a spokesman for the group and a full-time volunteer.
    Tzu Chi also got permission this week to set up a distribution center at a Buddhist temple in Rangoon and work with monks there. It’s planning a fund-raising drive for reconstruction projects.
    Taiwanese relief organizations face some of the same logistical and political constraints in Burma as their Western counterparts…
    Still, Taiwanese aid workers say their low-key, hands-off approach [note: I think that means, “non-judgmental engagement”] to countries like military-ruled Burma, which has been lambasted by Western countries, pays off in times of crisis. Even Burma’s close political ties to Beijing, a fierce diplomatic rival of Taiwan, didn’t appear to intrude.
    In fact, Tzu Chi has even been able to win the trust of the Chinese government. In 1991, after flooding along the Yangtze River. Chinese authorities were suspicious of offers of help from Taiwan, over which it claims sovereignty, while some Taiwanese attacked the group for aiding “the enemy.”
    Its volunteers eventually got permission to work there. This year, it became the first NGO with a foreign legal representative to be licensed in China.
    Its bedrock belief, prescribed by Master Cheng Yen, the Buddhist nun who founded Tzu Chi in 1966, is that all charitable work should be grounded in gratitude to the needy to ensure selfless giving. “Every volunteer feels the same way. By going to help others, they feel blessed,” says Mr. Her.
    While Tzu Chi has 10 million members in more than 65 countries and annual donations of $300 million, homegrown Asian NGOs don’t yet match the size of Western humanitarian organizations, and the idea of cross-border humanitarian work is relatively new.

Oh my gosh! Do you mean that we’re going to have to start to think that “aid workers” might not all be like Angelina Jolie and the huge crowd of western lookalikes who populate the way that most westerners– including very lazy and self-referential western media people– have thought about “aid workers” until now?
You mean (gasp!) that the “west” doesn’t have a complete monopoly on good intentions and good implementation??
This is hard to believe.
Okay, irony alert in the last three paras, folks…
But nice reporting there, Simon Mortlake. Thanks.
Finally, China Hand takes on the question of the Chinese government’s much more expert handling of the western Big Media with respect to its coverage of the horrible, horrible earthquakes.
His comment there:

    Actually, I’ve got a hot story for Western newsies in China. And you’re right on top of it!
    Here it is: Chinese government cynically diverts precious disaster relief facilities to arrange unnecessary junket for scoop-hungry foreign journalists to death zone in order to obtain favorable coverage!
    Wonder when we’ll read about that in the papers.

Point well made.
And MSM-ers, your response to that??
Update 11 a.m.:
I just saw China Hand’s small earlier post, which is a hilarious update on the complete ineffectiveness of French FM Bernard Kouchner’s threat/promise to deliver aid to Myanmar whether the Burmese leaders wanted him to, or not.
Kouchner, who has long been one of the west’s strongest supporters of aggressive (including armed) western intervention in humanitarian crises, told reporters with great fanfare some ten days ago that the French navy already had a ship, the Mistral, sailing in the Bay of Bengal… and that it would be diverted immediately to deliver aid to Myanmar.
Except it turns out that… oops! … the Mistral had no spare rice or other needed goods aboard at all.
So it had to sail back to Chennai, India, and as of Wednesday was still loading the rice there… And according to this clip from aboard the ship that you can get from France’s English-language t.v. website, it hopes to arrive back in Burma this Sunday.
China Hand’s comment:

    somebody tell Bernard Kouchner.
    Next time you order up a humanitarian invasion…don’t forget the rice.

WaPo pulls a Lee Bollinger on Mahmoud Zahhar

Today’s WaPo contains a hard-hitting op-ed from Hamas’s Mahmoud Zahhar, the foreign minister in the Gaza-based PA caretaker government. Zahhar is leading a six-man Hamas delegation that yesterday crossed from Gaza into Egypt with the objective of meeting Pres. Jimmy Carter there today. Carter is then expected to proceed to Damascus, to meet overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal there, tomorrow.
Of note in Zahhar’s op-ed:

    1. He writes nothing there about the possibility of a limited ceasefire (tahdi’eh) with Israel, over Gaza. This indicates to me that he thinks the probability of reaching such an arrangement have plummeted.
    2. He strongly criticizes the campaign “the US-Israeli alliance” has waged to “negate the results of the January 2006 elections.” A justifiable criticism.
    3. He applauds Carter for saying that Hamas needs to be at the negotiating table “without any preconditions” if any peace effort is to succeed.
    4. But he also lays out a stiff Hamas precondition: that “the starting point for just negotiations” is that Israel should “first” withdraw completely to the pre-1967 borders.
    5. He goes to some length to connect the Palestinians’ present struggle with Jewish history, comparing the present actions of Gaza’s people with the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and speaking of his respect for the “modern proponents of tikkun olam.”
    6. He writes movingly of his two sons, killed in the struggle against Israeli occupation, and describes a long time-frame for the Palestinian struggle: “Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begin, and adversity has taught us patience.”

It’s good that the WaPo published this piece, allowing this senior Hamas leader to speak in his own words on their pages. But the paper’s editors evidently decided to take a leaf out of the “hosting etiquette” book written by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, when he invited Pres. Ahmadinejad to speak there recently. Speaking in their own voice on the editorial page the editors launch a diatribe against Zahhar– and even more so against Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas. In doing that, they twist Zahhar’s words to give them the worst possible meaning.
One example of that: Zahhar wrote, “Last week’s attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West.” As any cursory glance at the news reports would reveal, that attack was carried out by a non-Hamas group. But the WaPo editorial accuses of Zahhar of having “endorsed” the attack, which his carefully chosen wording explicitly did not do– and it even accuses Hamas of having carried it out. It also accuses Hamas of “deliberate targeting of civilians, such as the residents of the Israeli town of Sderot.” That, despite reports from Israelis in the know like Daniel Levy that the security forces judge that Hamas avoids targeting civilians.
Again and again, the editorial twists Zahhar’s words and Hamas’s over-all position. But its authors seem to be doing this mainly in order to fuel the particular object of their ire and derision, Jimmy Carter. What a sad situation.
There is a mean-spirited and extremely biased “gotcha” aspect to the way the WaPo treated Zahhar on its pages– very similar to the way Bollinger treated Ahmadinejad. There were a hundred ways the paper’s editors could have published Zahhar’s essay while dissociating themselves from any suspicions readers might have had that they supported his views– but without resorting to twisting his words to use them to launch their own very vicious attack on Carter, as they did.
Meanwhile, two stories on the paper’s news pages give a fairly well-reported picture of the situation in both the West Bank and Gaza. In this story, Griff White writes about the recent death in the Fateh securoity forces’ custody of the pro-Hamas West Bank preacher Sheikh Majid al-Barghouthi.
White writes:

    eyewitness accounts, photographs, video and an independent Palestinian investigation released this month suggested that he was tortured to death during his February detention.

He also gives considerably more background to the case, starting his article with this:

    When the preacher’s body arrived at the hospital, his back was scarlet where he had been whipped with pipes. His legs were black with bruises. His wrists were sliced open and bloodied…

In a separate story, White wrote about the latest escalation in Gaza:

    Eighteen Palestinians — many of them civilians — and three Israeli soldiers were killed Wednesday during fierce clashes in the Gaza Strip, marking the deadliest day of fighting in more than a month…

One of those killed was Fadel Shana, a 23-year-old cameraman with the Reuters news agency.

Carter quite right– On Olympics, Hamas, and Nepali elections

I just watched this clip of George Stephanopoulos’s interview with Nobel Peace Laureate and former US president Jimmy Carter this morning. (Complete transcript here.) Carter is such a wise, inspirational figure. He was calm and reasoned as he discussed three issues:

    — the “transformational” importance of the elections in Nepal, which hold a real hope of a better future for the country’s 29 million citizens;
    — his argument that countries should not boycott the upcoming Olympics in Beijing– including why the situation around those Olympics is very different from that around the 1980 Games in Moscow, which the US did boycott, when he was president; and
    — his still-probable plan to hold talks with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal (among many others) during his upcoming visit to the Middle East.

One of the qualities of Jimmy Carter that I particularly admire is the stress he has always put on peacemaking and peacebuilding as vital to the attainment of full human rights. That has been evident in the Carter Center’s involvement in dozens of conflict-wracked situations around the world, including the role it has played in monitoring elections in, among many other places, Palestine in 1996 and 2006, and Nepal right now.
Another of his admirable qualities is the calmness with which he states a position that, once articulated, seems clear, straightforward, and (to me) evidently true, but which flies counter to much of the chatter generated by the US mainstream commentatoriat.
On Hamas, he said,

    it’s likely that I will be meeting with the Hamas leaders. We’ll be meeting with the Israelis. We’ll be meeting with Fatah.
    We’ll be meeting with the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudi Arabians, and with the whole gamut of people who might have to play a crucial role in any future peace agreement that involves the Middle East.
    As a matter of fact, I’ve been meeting with Hamas leaders for years. As a matter of fact, 10 years ago, after Arafat was first elected president of the PLO and the Palestinians, we were monitoring that election, and I met with Hamas afterwards.
    And then, in January of 2006, we were the monitors there for the Palestinian election, and Hamas won the election. We met with them after the election was over.
    And so, I think that it’s very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians, maybe to get them to agree to a ceasefire — things of this kind.
    But I might add very quickly, that I’m not going as a mediator or a negotiator. This is a mission that we take as part of an overall Carter Center project, to promote peace in the region.

With respect to the Hamas question, Rami Khouri also has an excellent column in the Beirut Daily Star today. (Hat-tip Judy for that.)
Rami uses an argument there that I have articulated on a number of occasions:

    he key to progress toward true peace may pass through judging and engaging Hamas on the same basis that was used with other militant or terrorist groups, including the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, SWAPO in Namibia, the ANC in South Africa, and, more recently, the “insurgents” in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
    This approach typically comprises four components: talk to the group in question rather than boycott it; make clear their objectionable actions that must stop; identify their legitimate national or political demands that can be met; and, negotiate in a context of equality to achieve a win-win situation that stops the terror, removes underlying reasons for it, satisfies all sides’ minimum demands and rights, and achieves peace and security.
    The key to achieving a peaceful win-win situation is to analyze and deal with Hamas in the total framework of its actions, and not only through the narrow lens of terror acts. This means understanding and addressing the six R’s that Hamas represents: resistance, respect, reciprocity, reconstruction, rights and refugees.

On Nepal, Carter noted that the Carter Center has been involved there for five years now, helping to provide ideas and serve as a sounding board for multiple parties as the country’s extremely debilitating and lengthy civil war wound down.
He told Stephanopoulos the election there,

    will totally transform the structure of a society and the political situation and military situation in Nepal.
    It will be the end, for instance, of 12 years of conflict, both military and political — a war that lasted for 10 years and cost about 13,000 lives — and this will bring peace.
    Secondly, it would transform completely the nature of the government. For 240 years, Nepal has had a Hindu kingdom — the only one on earth. And now, it will have a democratic republic.
    And the third thing I think is significant is that, for the first time, large numbers of marginalized people — more than 50 percent of their total population — will be guaranteed a place in the political process.
    The Madhesis, who live down on the Indian border, Dalits, who are Untouchables, ethnic groups — and particularly women. As a matter of fact, in the constituent assembly that will assemble as a result of these elections, that’ll write a new constitution for Nepal, will have at least 30 percent of the seats in the constituent assembly filled by women…

Finally, regarding the Beijing Olympics, I know I haven’t written about them here on JWN yet. I have to say, as a US citizen, one of my main concerns in the present controversy over Beijing’s human rights record and its hosting of the upcoming Olympics is the amount of seemingly mean-spirited and accusatory finger-pointing that has been going on in this country, against the Chinese government.
Yes, the Chinese government has a problematic human-rights record. (Though it also has many human rights achievements, especially in the field of economic and social rights. But China’s present western accusers give it no credit for those whatsoever. Indeed, you get the impression that many of them have no idea what it’s like to lack basic social and economic rights, in the way that hundreds of millions of Chinese people routinely did during the warlord regimes, civil war, and internal upheavals that preceded the Deng Xiaoping era.)
But guess what? Our very own country here in the US has an extremely disturbing human rights record, too! Guantanamo, anyone? Abu Ghraib? Launching a completely unjustified war of aggression against Iraq then running an extremely damaging occupation there for more than five years? Encouraging Ethiopia to invade Somalia, and Israel to assault Lebanon?
All those actions by our government caused or actually constituted very grave human rights abuses. So maybe if “rights-tainted” countries should be boycotted we should be arguing for our country to be boycotted? Certainly, the US activists who have mounted such a campaign against China should be people who take real responsibility, first and foremost, for the actions of their (our) own government…
I do think that most of the US media has played a bad role in the whole Olympic torch tour fiasco, easily buying into and propagating the meme of “bad China” and “admirable and daring anti-China demonstrators” without examining the issue any more deeply at all. (The same big media in this country, that is, that have almost always completely buried the anti-war demonstrations carried out within this country, while filling their space with all kinds of pro-administration propaganda.)
Talking of the role of the media, do look at the way Stephanopoulos asked Carter his question about the Olympics:

    You led the boycott of the Moscow Olympics to protest what the Soviet Union was doing in Afghanistan.
    Should the U.S. boycott the Olympics this year to protest China’s crackdown on Tibet and its complicity with the genocide in Darfur?

Okay, Steph is taking for granted there that China is “complicit” in the very complex inter-group conflict in Darfur, which he labels simply as “genocide.” There might or might not be a genocide in Darfur. But there is certainly a lot else going on as well, including war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by many parties, including the anti-government as well as pro-government side. But where do we get the idea that China is somehow uniquely “complicit” in the actions of the pro-government side there?
China has 315 peacekeepers in Darfur, as part of the AU/UN force there.
How many does the US have? None.
The US government has many under-the-table deals with the Khartoum government, especially in the realm of sharing intelligence about Al Qaeda.
Again, all the anti-China finger-pointing being undertaken by the more ardent “Save Darfur” people in this country seems misplaced…
Actually, many of the “pro-Tibet” people in the US– and their hangers-on in the media– seem to be trying to be much more hardline in their anti-China stance than most Tibetans themselves… especially His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who has never called for a boycott of the Olympics, or for Tibet’s secession from China, or for many of the other things that the anti-China crowd in this country wants to call for.
Anyway, it’s good to see that Jimmy Carter is a real force for wisdom, sensible engagement, and respect for other people, on both the China and the Hamas issues. I think perhaps where he got his wisdom from– in contrast to the shallow positions expressed by Stephanopoulos– is from his commitment to traveling to numerous countries around the world to see the situation in them for himself, and to listening carefully and respectfully to what he gets told by the people in those countries.
If Stephanopouls and his confreres in the big US media would get out of their US-bound echo-chamber a little more, and if they tried to listen carefully to people from a wide range of different backgrounds and with a wide range of different viewpoints, they might actually end up being a lot wiser and understanding how the world works a lot better? Two things that people in the US big media really need to understand a lot better than they currently do are (1) the absolutely inescapable link between war and atrocities, and (2) the fact that one-sided finger-pointing is never a helpful way to get problems resolved (but it can easily raise tensions and help set the stage for otherwise quite avoidable confrontations, even war.)