Do you think we’re all such simpletons? You clearly think I am. I did not say we were to blame. I said that we needed to accept some responsibility for why peope might hate us. Your tendency to blow things out to the most extreme interpretation is not conducive to constructive self-reflection or problem solving.

Do they hate us simpy because we’re not Muslim? Certainly, some use that rhetoric and others are trained from childhood to believe it. But I don’t believe it’s at the core. I do believe that within Islam there is plenty of room for peaceful coexistence. Religion is being used and skewed to serve political purposes.

So, you don’t think we’ve ever done anything to deserve scorn from Middle Easterners? We’ve had a benign or only constructive influence?

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525841951&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

“Israel says BBC not reporting war fairly”

Gil Hoffman, THE JERUSALEM POST
Aug. 10, 2006

“The Foreign Ministry is under pressure from Israeli citizens to resume its boycott of the BBC and to withdraw credentials from its reporters due to “one-sided” reports on the war in Lebanon, Israeli diplomatic officials said Wednesday.

For seven months during a wave of Palestinian violence in 2003, Israeli officials boycotted BBC news programs, declining interviews and excluding BBC reporters from briefings. The boycott was ended after the BBC appointed a panel to oversee its Middle East coverage and to ensure it would be unbiased.

The diplomatic officials said the network had not been reporting the war fairly. Senior diplomatic officials in Jerusalem went as far as saying that “the reports we see give the impression that the BBC is working on behalf of Hizbullah instead of doing fair journalism.”

…….”

Middle Ground in the Middle East?
Audio available at 11:05 a.m.
The war in Lebanon continues. There’s speculation about an expanded conflict involving Syria and Iran. This leads to a question: where’s the middle ground in the Middle East now? Today on Weekday we’ll find out who the moderates are on all sides. And we’ll ask what they’re thinking. What proposals have a chance of bringing the various sides together?
Guests:
Ellis Goldberg is an expert on middle east politics and a political science professor at the University of Washington.
Daniel Levy was a member of the official Israeli negotiating team at the Oslo and Taba talks and the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.
Walid Jumblatt is a Druze leader who sparked the Cedar Revolution in February 2005. He heads Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party.
http://www.kuow.org/programs/weekday.asp

It will be available as a streaming archive, and it podcasts too.
It will also stream ‘live’ again at 12:00 (Midnight) Eastern (Friday, officially, but Thursday night) / 9:00 PM Pacific (Thursday night) here: http://www.kxot.org

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3288887,00.html

New York Times ‘used fraudulent photo’

“Man seen ‘dead’ in Beirut photo essay appears in other photos from same scene up and walking around, blog blasts ‘unbelievable fraud’”
Yaakov Lappin

I am not suprised that you would blame the US for the attack on the WTC and the murder of 3000.

Try this thought experiment, Ask yourself what if we didn’t do anything to provoke that attack? What if the Islamic murderers blame us for not being Muslim?

How would you handle such a fact.

Do you think we should all become Muslims? Are you ready to live under Shariah? Or are you a Muslim already?

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/08/ny-times-hezbollah-photo-dust-up.html

The NY Times Hezbollah Photo Dust Up

On 9/11 I was living in a community without TV. It was days before I saw images, though I was only about 150 miles from NYC. So, my first responses were intellectual. I thought about how nobody in this country was going to question what we might have done to cause people to feel so angry that they could do this to us. I knew that most Americans would consider that act the beginning of something rather than the culmination of something. When I finally saw photos, I was emotionally overwrought. It was horribly painful to see people hanging out the windows and falling from the buildings. I was deeply saddened. But, I think because I didn’t see images for a while, I was able to keep those emotions limited to the suffering of the people that day and not bring that into my realm and claim it as my own experience and put on the cloak of victimhood. (And I did know people in that people. Some that got out. Some that didn’t. I used to live in Battery Park City. I went to college in NYC, worked there for years….

I wonder how differently information would be processed if people received words first, then images. Usually, papers put photos on the front page then a little text that jumps to another page. What if you couldn’t see the photos until you have read about the story from at least 3 different perspective. And, then, what if you saw photos from the 3 different perspectives. Would we be more discerning about our responses?

In our evolution we relied on visual information way before we began to use words. Those images come into our consciousness at a deeper level. For example if you write the names of colors with different colored felt pens and write each color in a different color than the word describes say, you write the word BLUE in RED ink, the brain is likely to think you wrote the word RED. Try it on your friends. Advertising uses visual manipulation all the time. The hidden (or not so hidden) sexual content in the ice cubes in liquer ads is one of the most well known. I think the more we understand the better we can transcend but it doesn’t help that Madison Avenue (I don’t think I’m being overly cynical to say this includes TV news) spends billions figuring out the best ways to manipulate us.

Man, that’s a tough one! I’m inclined to say that it would lend itself to a better world of freer thought, if only because the less centralized the sources, the more unlimited the sought-for range of responses. But such a state of things need not necessarily lead to better reactions. Our nature may simply not be capable of tilting closer to thought than to emotion. I still have hope, though, that increasing the number of sources will in itself be a good thing; even if such a course does not change human nature, it will at least broaden the potential for critical thought in those people best suited to it.

I wonder, in response to Joshua: would that ideal situation –in which manipulation of our thoughts and emotions is kept to a minimum– be more likely to occur with more or less decontextualization of images? In other words, does access and ease of distribution, (blogs and the internet) lend itself to a better world of freer thought, or are we just compounding the problem we’re trying to solve?

When I saw the images of destruction on 9/11, I felt, yes, of course I felt; there was no way around it. But long before that day was done, I had ceased to feel much one way or the other, and had begun to think. And what I remember thinking in that afternoon was this: this is the perfect excuse for fascism in America, the perfect excuse for the erosion of freedom that power is always seeking. And I thought that most people wouldn’t even realize that; they would be too busy feeling horrified, outraged, angry, vengeful. As far as I could see in the months afterward, I was right; after all, the damnable Patriot Act came into existence even before our war of revenge in Afghanistan had begun.

I wonder: is there even a way to provide images and/or their captions to the public in such a manner that the manipulation of emotion is kept to a minimum, and the stimulation of critical thinking is maximized? I know that is not what power wants (and perhaps not even what the powerless want either), but is it even possible, given the will? Or are we simply programmed to feel before we think? Is our serpent-brain, being more deeply rooted than our higher thinking, simply fated to always be in the driver’s seat? Or can we transcend ourselves?

Now we have the internet. There’s a pornography to it, as well. You really have to do some research to find sources that you trust are informed and respectful.

When I walk through life and meet with people, I never hear the kind of invective I see on TV and read online and in these ridiculous politically evangelical books. In person, people are just not as fanatic as they are when operating remotely.

Through a glass, darkly

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/through-a-glass-darkly/2006/08/07/1154802817243.html#

“A journalist’s reflex defence against accusations of bias is to say it is in the eye of the beholder. To which your response might be: well he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Such a debate could disappear down an ever-diminishing hall of mirrors or, in the case of the media’s coverage of the war in the Middle East, could become the rope in a tug of war between Israel and various Arab states.

Watching the fervent debate on this issue in recent weeks, I wondered what would happen if representatives of both sides were invited to play foreign correspondent for the day and rewrite a news report. Not an opinion piece but a news report…”

“Fuad Siniora, the prime minister of Lebanon, told the foreign ministers of the member-sates of the Arab League that Israel had killed 40 people in a bombing strike on the southern village of Houla. And, to be sure, 40 including many children. He cried. As it turned out, one person was killed.”

The worst thing that could happen for those of us who do care about needless civilian casualties is for officials of various government and non government organizations to lie about the figures.

The real numbers are bad enough but to hype the figures will only lead people to disbelieve every figure mentioned.

(We expected our readership to get that it was a joke).

Can we tell yet, whether the public responds differently, better, worse, faster, more slowly to events around the world with all these images floating around?