Khaled Abu Tuomeh has written an explanation of how the Jerusalem Post was gulled on the supposed Gaza “honor killing”. It is not entirely inconsistent with my guess of yesterday. Apparently, the reporter was gulled by some phone calls from “Fatah” telling him the video, readily available on the Internet with Iraqi provenance, was of a crime committed by Hamasmembers.
Unfortunately, Tuomeh gives us no proof the phone calls were inded from Fatah, though it is possible; his explanation is insufficient and self-serving. He lays blame on the Israeli military for his own failure to authenticate:
Since the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, the IDF has banned Israeli journalists from entering the area. Consequently, the Israeli media (and many foreign journalists) are forced to rely on local reporters and Fatah and Hamas officials as a main source of information.
As the French say, Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. Or is it the other way around in this case? Tuomeh doesn’t seem capable of taking responsibility for what happened and his own role in it. Everything is impersonally written, yet this is clearly a personal event.
Who is Tuomeh and how is he being used and for what end? We also don’t know the veracity of his previous report of lurid Fatah videos confiscated by Hamas – or where that came from.
In the larger scheme of things, this is just another small incident, but it is also another chink in the grand myth of media objectivity. Who is reliable? Probably no one.
Only an hour or so ago I linked from the Pajamas Media scroll to a gruesome story at the Jerusalem Post. My title for the link (very close to the JPost hed) was and is Another “honor” killing: 16-year old girl lynched in Gaza.
As you can see from clicking on the link, however, the story is now gone (4:50PM Pacific), replaced by the words: Article content not available. Evidence of the full story is still there, however, if you look at the left of the page where their title remains and the notation that their have been 40 comments.
What gives? Computer error or withdrawal of the story?
For the record,the study detailed a horrifying honor killing in Gaza, which, evidently, had been recorded on video. Here is the story (by Khaled Abu Toameh) for your edification:
This time it’s the brutal murder of a 16-year-old girl in the Gaza Strip. Her crime: “dishonoring” her family. Of course, there is no way to verify the allegations against her and other females who have fallen victim to “honor killings.”
The gruesome murder occurred a few weeks ago, when the girl – who looks much younger than her age – was dragged into the street and handed to an mob of angry young men.
E
yewitnesses told The Jerusalem Post that many of those who participated in the lynch were Hamas members and relatives of the girl.
A five-minute video obtained by the Post over the weekend reveals the savagery and mercilessness of the killers.
What’s really disturbing is that none of those at the crime scene tried to intervene to save the girl’s life.
More than 20 young men are seen beating, stabbing and kicking the little girl before smashing her head with large stones.
It’s not easy to watch such a video. The scenes of the girl lying on the ground as frenzied men trample her are unimaginable.
At one point, the girl tries to cover her head with her hands to avoid the kicking. She then tries to rise to her feet, only to be stabbed repeatedly by one of the men.
As she collapses, one of the attackers pulls down her skirt so that the rest of his friends will not see her underwear. The girl is required to maintain her “modesty” even as she is being preyed upon.
And just when you think the lynch is about to end, someone emerges from the crowd carrying a large white stone.
He throws the stone at the girl’s back as she lays face down, motionless.
Seconds later, another man throws a large stone at the back of her head. The video ends with the girl laying in a pool of blood.
Mission accomplished. Hours later, a few local reporters sent a terse statement to their news organizations informing them of another “honor killing” in the Gaza Strip. Not a word about the way the girl had been lynched. The story barely made it to the mainstream media.
I asked a Hamas security official if he had been aware of the incident.
“There have been a number of cases in the Gaza Strip in the past few months, but we didn’t hear about this specific killing,” he replied. “In any case, we are against these killings because we don’t want anyone to take the law into his own hands.”
Needless to say, no one has been arrested, despite the public nature of the killing.
According to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, at least 11 women have been killed in the Strip since the beginning of the year in what are traditionally known as “honor killings.”
The most recent took place in late July, when three sisters were fatally stabbed by male relatives in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
Sources in the Strip said many cases were never been reported, with the victims buried secretly.
UPDATE: Reference to the article in the “Talkback” section on the left, which registered the number of comments at 40, has now also been removed.
MORE: I just went over to Gateway Pundit and was updated on this. That this is an old video is more than a little bit worrisome. The Jerusalem Post must make very clear to everyone how this error was made, because it is not a minor one. Only yesterday they published another story by the same author, which was also hugely derogatory about life in Gaza. If you are going to publish matter that is that strong, you have to stand behind its authenticity or everything will be doubted. This is Journalism 101. Just because the Post is admired by many readers of this and similar sites does not free them to leave something like this unexplained.
AND: Just a theory, fwiw, playing my old crime writer game over what happened… The earlier article referred to above was tremendously humiliating to Palestinian authorities, imputing rife homosexual orgies to Fatah and pederasty to Hamas. Perhaps someone laid a trap for its author… Abu Toameh… out of vengeance or to discredit him. Who knows? In any case, he fell for something.
Now that Newt Gingrich has done the (relatively) inevitable and taken himself out of the presidential hunt, perhaps he will emerge as something of a kingmaker in still the open Republican race. (Hillary has the Democratic nomination completely in the bag, I’m assuming.) As the AP writes:
Over the past few months, Gingrich had stoked speculation he might enter the crowded GOP field. He noted that Republicans, especially conservatives, were unhappy with the candidates already in the race.
Yet he also has spoken positively of all the leading contenders, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and Arizona Sen. John McCain.
Call me cynical, but something tells me Newt will not award his backing for nothing. [Sec'y of State? -ed. Or a good talk show in prime times.]
I noticed today via LGF that Sidney Blumenthal is inadvertently taking off after Charles Johnson. I say inadvertently, because I doubt even Sidney is so ideologically straight-jacketed to think that Charles works with Karl Rove. So I’m not certain who Sidney was talking about (he doesn’t name anyone naturally) when, in his impassioned defense of Dan Rather, of all people, on Salon today, Blumenthal writes:
Within minutes of the conclusion of the broadcast, conservative bloggers launched a counterattack. The chief of these critics was a Republican Party activist in Georgia. Almost certainly, these bloggers, who had been part of meetings or conference calls organized by Karl Rove’s political operation, coordinated their actions with Rove’s office.
Charles – perhaps the pivotal blogger in the unmasking of Rather for having duplicated the forged document, supposedly written on a period Selectric, with Microsoft Word and then matching his creation and the copy perfectly with a gif file – appropriately laughs off Blumenthal’s accusation with the back of the hand.
But I would like to add a bit more – because I am probably among the few people on the planet who actually knows both men. I had dinner with Blumenthal back in the Eighties when a mutual friend, thinking we had things in common (we did then), introduced us. Charles, as many reading this are aware, I came to know through blogging and the formation of Pajamas Media.
So here’s my take:
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most classical cases of projection I have ever read. Sidney Blumenthal – the consummate insider, a man who has not changed his world view or Beltway allegiances for decades – cannot conceive independent citizens like Charles Johnson exist. It has to be some kind of orchestrated plot, some nefarious clandestine campaign, because that is the way Sidney knows life to be. But, luckily for the rest of us, it’s not.
Charles Johnson is a lone wolf and far more bohemian and original than Sidney Blumenthal. He is, in fact, one of the more interesting people I have ever met and, despite what some have written about him, one of the least racist (and not just because he spent most of his life playing backup for black jazz musicians.) The idea that Charles works with or even knows Karl Rove is ludicrous.
As for the larger theme of Blumenthal’s piece, the implication that Rather should be exonerated because of the greater truth that Bush was a National Guard slacker even if the documents were fake, it is such a pathetic argument I can’t believe anyone wants to make it. But Sidney does. Talk about reification.
Now there’s a headline that calls for a lawyer joke. But let’s just start with a direct quote from the candidate, who has just announced he is taking public financing for his campaign. [But what about his 28,000 square foot house?-ed. It's been mortgaged in a Monopoly game.]:
“This is not about a money calculation,” Edwards told CNN senior political correspondent Candy Crowley on his way to an event in Durham, North Carolina. “This is about taking a stand, a principled stand, and I believe in public financing.”
I also believe in magic in a young girl’s heart, etc. How do these people say these things? I must say I admire Edwards for being able to pronounce those words with a straight face. Must be those years of courtroom experience. “Ladies and gentleman of the jury…”
And speaking of courtrooms, since it doesn’t seem likely that his campaign is going anywhere anyway, maybe John should book on with Phil Spector for the record producer’s retrial. That’s a job that should pay pretty well. I understand the download numbers for “River Deep, Mountain High” over at iTunes are better than ever. [No, you don't. Now you're lying.-ed. Okay, okay.]
UPDATE: Fausta Wertz has reminded me that this is indeed a marriage made in (hair) heaven.
What is it about CBS that people who work for them become delusional? The network is hitting the Daily Double today with Katie C. bloviating on Iraq and good old Dan turning weepy over his lawsuit and implying he’d like to see George Bush deposed. I assume that’s about the extent of the President’s National Guard Service, although I don’t see how that’s relevant to whether Rather promulgated forged documents on the subject on Sixty Minutes. I can’t imagine why a judge would let such a thing in, but who knows… what’s Lance Ito doing these days?
Meanwhile, Katie is reassuring an audience of the already firmly convinced that the Iraq War was a “mistake.” That’s indeed conventional wisdom in the MSM from a very conventional woman, but perhaps a tad early (fifty years?) for the history books. Also, it has the kind of (could we even say racist?) obliviousness we have come to expect from members of her class – coupled with the clich´s about no-Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq that have been contradicted a thousand times to no avail. I guess she doesn’t read much outside staff papers. One thing I’m certain she doesn’t read is Iraq the Model because it is written by, um, real Iraqis who had to live under Saddam. Was the war a mistake for them?
Tactical nukes on Warner Brothers?… maybe.
First OJ, then Robert Blake, now Phil… oh, to be a fancy defense lawyer in Southern California! Now there’s a gig.
George Bush said something interesting in a recent interview:
“It’s different being a candidate and being the president,” Bush said in an Oval Office interview. “No matter who the president is, no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and seriously consider the effect of a vacuum being created in the Middle East, particularly one trying to be created by al Qaeda, they will then begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”
What Bush is recognizing here is something that is becoming increasingly obvious – the left/right dichotomy in our society is a phony exploited by those who lust for power. This is an obvious problem for democracies in general, but we are at a dramatic crossroads in that regard.
In the future, everything will be situational, just as it has been in the past. Would Al Gore – now making fame and fortune on the global warming-oscar-nobel prize lecture circuit – have gone into Iraq himself if he had won in 2000? Of course, there’s no way of knowing this side of the space/time continuum, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Clinton was not hesitant to use power in Bosnia and who knows how he would have reacted after 9/11? Perhaps more “arrogantly” than Bush has. The likes of Glenn Greenwald, instead of complaining about the fixation on Ahmadinejad, could have been arguing for the Iranian’s extinction. Ideology has become a form of bourgeois objectification in our society – a crutch for non-thinking.
Maybe they crave a mean director (not as many of those in Hollywood as there used to be).
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made one of the most insane and reactionary statements I have heard a national leader say in public ever at Columbia today: ‘In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you that we have it.’
Yet he still was well received in the audience. How in the world could they do that? Let us see now if the supposedly pro-gay left wakes up and sees where the danger really is. I’m not holding my breath. They didn’t wake up in the 1930s – why should they now?
