Hello Friends,

I read the below article and was impressed with the thought process and the conclusions Daniel Greenfield reached. It's a very interesting read and well worth the time spent reading it.

Shalom,

Peter

A Fourth Approach to the Muslim World

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 08:47 PM PDT

American policy toward the Middle East has been traditionally split between the Stabilizers and the Radicals.

The Stabilizers were old foreign policy hands in the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA, sometimes tied in with the oil industry. They advocated maintaining stability in the Middle East by putting American support behind "our friends", the dictators. The US would supply them with weapons and military backing in case they were ever invaded or overthrown, and in exchange we would have reliable access to oil. From the Eisenhower interventions to the Gulf War, the United States protected Arab Muslim tyrannies in order to maintain stability in the region.

The Radicals were often academics, part time journalists or old line leftists. They insisted that everything wrong in the Middle East was caused by Western colonialism and imperialism, and the healing could only begin when the United States stopped backing the tyrants and began backing Marxist and Islamist terrorists in taking over their respective countries. The Radicals believed that if the United States would only abandon the dictators and throw their support behind the Marxists and the Islamists, a wonderful new age would dawn in the Middle East.

Until the Carter Administration, the Stabilizers held sway over foreign policy. With Carter though, the Radicals had their first taste of power. Following the doctrine of the Radicals, the Carter Administration helped bring Islamists to power in Iran, and began providing aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Its Green Belt strategy was focused on creating an alliance of Islamists to ally with the US against the Soviet Union. The real result was the same one you get when you try to breed poisonous snakes in order to get a bear off your land. You might succeed in getting rid of the bear, but now you'll have a whole other problem on your hands. That's exactly what happened with the US and the Islamists.

Neither the Stabilizers nor the Radicals were utilizing new ideas in their approach to the Middle East. The Stabilizers were echoing the British Empire's attempts to maintain control of the region through puppet sheikdoms and princedoms. The problem was that it hadn't worked too well for the British, who found themselves entangled in internal Arab and Muslim conflicts and coups. Like the British had before them, United States diplomats and oil company executives would cultivate a tyrant or two, only to discover that they were also completely untrustworthy. The House of Saud wound up seizing the same oil companies, and reversing the power relationship by doling out the oil on their terms, and using the money to begin the Islamization of the United States and Europe, while bribing half the foreign policy establishment to do it.

The Radicals meanwhile were fueled by left-wing anti-Americanism, which translated into a foreign policy of "America is Always Wrong" and "Radical Terrorists are Always Right". Their claims that backing Marxist and Islamist terrorists would lead to freedom and candyland proved to be wrong every time, yet did nothing to prevent them from enabling the horrors of the Mullahs in Iran or the PLO in Israel. True to the same ideological heritage that had turned Russia red with blood, yet insisted that things were going swimmingly-- they were never capable of acknowledging a mistake.

With the Carter Administration, the Radicals increasingly began winning the argument, and the Stabilizers moved to accommodate them. Portions of the Radical agenda were incorporated into that of the Stabilizers. This was easily enough done, since the Stabilizers had never cared too much about who was in power, so long as there was no chaos or unrest. That was why the Eisenhower Administration had backed Nasser over its former allies in England and France. It was why Bush Sr could casually dismiss massacres by the Kuwaitis in the aftermath of the invasion. These were just means of imposing stability.

But the Radicals made very little headway after the Mullahs took over Iran. They could do little to shift US foreign policy away from the old line Arab regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia-- who had strong backing from the Stabilizers. Occasional nods toward democracy would come from the White House or Capitol Hill, and were immediately ignored. But they did find one weak spot. Israel.

The Stabilizers had inherited the old British antipathy toward Israel. They viewed as a country that should never have existed, but had now become a necessary evil. The Stabilizers had commitments to the House of Saud, and to the Kuwaiti Royals, but they had none toward Israel. They had been forced to support Israel as leverage against Soviet backed Arab regimes in Egypt and Syria. But the Camp David Accords had drawn Egypt onto the American side of the board, and the end of the Cold War made many of the old red and white maps seem irrelevant. Which meant that in their eyes, and that of their Muslim overlords, Israel was becoming a nuisance.

To the Radicals, Israel was something much worse. It was Western. It was a colony. It was an alien entity in what should have been a pure Arab-Muslim region. And if their obsession with Israel seemed downright Nazi-like at times, it was because they shared an obsession with making a part of the world Judenrein, not for practical reasons, but for ideological ones. If the Stabilizers had imbibed the Saudi contempt for Jews, the Radicals drank of a deeper and uglier well. If the Nazis had viewed Jews as genetically tainted, the Communists and the Left viewed Jews as politically tainted, contaminated by religion and seperatism. The Nazis had wanted to solve a genetic problem by wiping out the carriers of those genes. The Left wanted to solve a political problem by wiping out Jewish identity.

Israel was the intersection of the left's hatred for the reactionary Western Civilization and the even more reactionary notion of a Jewish identity. Much like Archie Bunker asked Sammy Davis Jr, why if he was already black, did he also want to become Jewish-- the idea of a Jewish state modeled on modern Western states triggered two obsessive streams of hatred from the Left. On the one hand there was H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw screeching that Jews had better give up being Jews, or go rot in Palestine, and on the other hand there was every leftist critic of Western imperialism crying out against US foreign policy in the Middle East. The results were and are almost unfathomably ugly-- as people's deepest prejudices merging with self-righteous political fanaticism tend to be.

The Stabilizers were more than willing to give Israel to the Radicals, so long as the House of Saud and the Mubarak clan and every tinpot tyrant was allowed to do whatever they wanted. And so there was finally a point of agreement between the Stabilizers and the Radicals. But into this pastoral scene, came a third party with another proposal. The Neo-Conservatives.

The Neo-Conservatives represented a break with both the Stabilizers and the Radicals. They were opposed to the status quo in the existing Muslim regimes, like the Radicals. But they were also opposed to the pet terrorists that the Radicals wanted to replace them with. What they wanted to do was to dredge the swamp, reform and democratize the region. The Neo-Conservatives were naive about the realities of the Middle East and the resources such plans required-- but for the first time a group with significant influence on foreign policy had managed to articulate something resembling a moral policy for the Middle East.

The Stabilizers and the Radicals both reacted about the way you would expect when after 9/11, Neo-Conservative ideas about America's relationship to the Middle East gained a great deal of influence. The Stabilizers reflected the panic of their Saudi masters at the prospect of bringing democracy to the region. The Radicals rejected the idea that the Muslim world needed to become civilized, instead they just wanted the Islamists to take over. The one thing both the Stabilizers and the Radicals agreed on was that the Neo-Conservatives were the devil. Which of course they were. After all unlike them the Neo-Conservatives had a proposal that didn't involve America groveling to one bunch of thugs or another.

Of course no foreign policy that was even loosely pro-American could survive for very long. The Bush Administration was undermined from the inside. The reconstruction of Iraq was painstakingly sabotaged within the military, the State Department and the intelligence community, until it dissolved into a proxy war between Baathists and Sadrists, with Al Queda bomb throwers adding spice to the sauce. The old hands like Rumsfeld, Bolton and Cheney were sent packing. Condoleeza Rice took control of foreign policy and turned it back into exactly what it had been under George Bush Sr. Appeasement. Any worries by Arab tyrants were put to rest. Roasting Israel became the top priority. The Stabilizers were back in charge. But not for long.

Obama's ascension marked the return of the Radicals to power. Outreach to the Muslim world was now the top priority. Covert contacts with Hamas and the Taliban were quietly opened. Israel was now truly enemy number one. But so was America. Iran's post-election riots were met with the same shrug that the left had used on pro-Democracy protesters in the USSR. The Arab dictators began growing nervous, as the Obama Administration took a hands off approach to Iran. And Obama's outreach had failed to win any new allies, but only alienated existing allies. Which was inevitable as Radicals are never very good at alliances, especially those that required them to think along the lines of national interest.

Where do we stand today? We've seen the three basic approaches, that of the Stabilizers, the Radicals and the Neo-Conservatives-- and all are fundamentally flawed. The Stabilizers support tyrants who covertly make war on the United States. The Radicals support terrorists who openly make war on the United States. What is even more absurd is that there is really not that much distance between the tyrants and the terrorists, since the tyrants fund the terrorists to increase their own power and popularity, and the terrorists aspire to become tyrants in the name of Islam. And both sides are laughing at the Stabilizers and the Radicals for selling out their country.

The Neo-Conservatives however dramatically underestimated the amount of effort and energy needed to reform entire cultures. Their excessive optimism led to introducing democracy in countries where the only real opposition parties that had managed to survive, were Islamists. The Bush Administration in particular treated democracy as a totem that could do anything, because it had adopted a simplistic model in which the Muslim world was not bad, only its leaders were. And once the people had a chance to vote for peace and prosperity, better leaders would emerge. Where these leaders would come from, and did people in the Muslim world really want peace and prosperity, in the American sense, were questions that went unasked. The Radicals and the Stabilizers both understood this quite well, and knew that with a few pushes in the right places, their whole project would come crashing down.

Those are the three. Which means what we now need is a fourth approach that avoids the flaws of these three. What is the primary flaw of all three? They all sought to determine who would rule in the Muslim world. The Stabilizers thought that the best way was to keep the Muslim world as it is. The Radicals and the Neo-Conservatives wanted to remake it. And all three of these approaches tangled them in the political chaos and instability of the Muslim world. But there is a fourth way.

The Fourth Way is Accountability and it is simple enough. Stop arguing over who will rule in which Muslim country. That is a decision that only the inhabitants of that country can make. And they won't make it through elections, so much as through dealmaking among their oligarchy, tribal leaders and occasional outbursts of armed force. It would take a massive project of decades to have any hope of changing that. But we don't need to. What we need to do is make very clear the consequences of attacking us to whoever is in charge.

Rather than trying to shape their behavior by shaping their political leadership, we can use a much more blunt instrument to unselectively shape all their leaders. A blunt instrument does not mean reconstruction. It doesn't mean Marines ferrying electrical generators. It doesn't mean nation building. It means that we will inflict massive devastation on any country that aids terrorists who attack us. If they insist on using medieval beliefs to murder us, we will bomb government buildings, roads, factories and power plants to reduce them back to a medieval state. We will not impose sanctions on them, we will simply take control of their natural resources and remove the native population from the area, as compensation for the expenses of the war.

Accountability means no more aid to tyrants or terrorists, and no grand democracy projects either. It means that we stop trying to pick a side, and just make it clear what happens when our side gets hurt. We gain energy independence and never look back. And when we've done that, the Muslim world will no longer be able to play America against Russia, against Asia and Europe. Instead it will suddenly find itself stuck with a predatory Russia looking for an energy monopoly, a booming China expanding into their part of the world, and no Pax Americana to protect them from either one.

America has provided the stability that kept many Muslim countries from imploding. It has protected others directly and indirectly from being conquered more times than anyone realizes. All the treachery and terrorism that has been carried out, has been done under an American umbrella. Now is the time to furl up the umbrella, and let the rain fall where it may.

It will be a cold day indeed, when Russia and China realize that they can do what they like in the Muslim world, without the US to stop them. And a colder day still, when European countries realize that there is nothing standing the way of deporting their insurgent Muslim populations, because the US will not lift a finger to protect them, as it did in Yugoslavia. That is accountability. And in both its active and passive forms it will exact a high price from the enemy, and none from us. To employ it, we must be prepared to use massive force casually without considering any collateral damage. We must achieve energy independence at any cost. And we must be prepared to realize that everything else we have tried has failed. Only by disengaging from the Muslim world, can we ever be free of it.

Hello Friends,

It's interesting to read all the facts about the radical left media's conspiring together in order to either kill certain stories that are against their beliefs whether political or otherwise. In the same manner their concerted effort to coordinate "reporting" that support and advocate their beliefs.

It's quite disgusting actually and due to leaks the "Journolist" went offline and was closed at the end of June. Not that this will put an end to the left wing media's conspiring in killing stories and in the same manner creating the "racist" environment in order to support the B Hussein regime but at least this disgusting forum was "killed".

The below article gives all the details.

Shalom,

Peter

Documents Show Media Plotting to Kill Stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright By Jonathan Strong July 20, 2010

Listserve that allowed some 400 liberal journalists, academics, and political activists to brainstorm and collaborate among themselves During the 2008 presidential campaign, Journolist members secretly colluded to discredit and ignore stories that had the potential to harm Barack Obama's bid for the White House. Ceased operations in June 2010 Founded in February 2007 by the Washington Post's liberal blogger/columnist Ezra Klein, Journolist was an online listserve consisting of some 400 self-described liberals – mostly journalists, but also some professors and political activists. Journolist functioned essentially as a secret society of email communications, where members could compare sources, share information, discuss their thoughts on current events, and coordinate the way they reported on certain stories – all off the record. Conservatives were barred from joining the group. Journolist was shut down by Ezra Klein in late June of 2010, a few days after someone had leaked a number of offensive comments that one of its members, David Weigel (a political reporter for the Washington Post), had written on the listserve regarding conservatives. The most damaging leaks, published in The Daily Caller, were laced with obscenities and charged that conservatives were predominantly racists who sought, above all else, to protect their own “white privilege” – even as they used the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” In two of his Journolist posts, Weigel expressed his hope that conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and newsman Matt Drudge would both die. Weigel was not alone among Journolist members in posting such incendiary items. For instance, Sarah Spitz, a producer for the show Left, Right & Center which aired on the National Public Radio affiliate KCRW, wrote that if Rush Limbaugh were to suffer a heart attack in her presence, she would do nothing more than “laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” because “he deserves it.” In 2009, when agitated American citizens nationwide established the Tea Party movement to advocate for limited government and fiscal responsibility from their elected representatives, Journolist member Ryan Donmoyer of Bloomberg News saw “parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts” in Nazi Germany. Richard Yeselson, a writer for various liberal magazines, attributed the people's discontent to the fact that “the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama.” Yeselson dismissively characterized the demonstrators as a collection of “gun nuts,” “anti tax nuts,” “religious nuts,” “homophobes,” “anti-feminists,” “anti-abortion lunatics,” “racist/confederate crackpots,” “anti-immigration whackos,” and “pathological government haters.” Perhaps the most significant revelation about Journolist came to light in July 2010, when The Daily Caller reported that when the racist, anti-American rantings of Barack Obama's longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright had become an issue during the heart of the 2008 presidential primaries, Journolist members had actively conspired to discredit and bury the story. This occurred, for instance, after an April 2008 ABC News debate in which: (a) moderator Charlie Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him nearly a year to formally dissocate himself from Wright's remarks, and (b) co-moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Obama, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?” Journolist members who watched the debate were outraged. Richard Kim of The Nation accused Stephanopoulos of “being a disgusting little rat snake.” The Guardian's Michael Tomasky wrote: “Listen folks – in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have.... We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.” Numerous other Journolist members – including employees of Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, Salon, and the New Republic – agreed that they should attempt to derail public dialogue about their favored candidate vis a vis his relationship with Wright. Soon afterward, a number of Journolist members began collaborating on an open letter defending their favored candidate. Contributors included Baltimore Sun columnist Thomas Schaller, Mother Jones reporter Jonathan Stein (who suggested conferring with “our friends at Media Matters”); Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist; Holly Yeager, now of the Columbia Journalism Review; Salon columnist Joe Conason; Slate contributor David Greenberg; David Roberts of the website Grist; and Columbia School of Journalism professor Todd Gitlin. In its final form, the letter characterized the debate over Obama's affiliation with Wright as “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.” The statement was signed by Journolist members and released on April 18, 2010, garnering considerable attention from the media, including The New York Times. Within a week, Rev. Wright was back in the news after he: (a) accused Obama of having repudiated his (Wright's) comments for “political reasons,” and (b) asserted that the U.S. government had created the AIDS virus as a tool for the commission of genocide against African Americans. Once again, Journolist members rushed to Obama's defense: Chris Hayes of The Nation exhorted his colleagues to ignore the Wright controversy, depicting it as a transparent attempt by “the right” to “maintain control of the country.” “[T]here is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” wrote Hayes. Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent, noted that while “[p]art of me doesn’t like this [Wright] sh*t either,” he was even more distressed by the prospect of “being governed by [Republican] racists and warmongers and criminals” in the event that Obama should lose the election. Ackerman exhorted his fellow Journolist members to “raise the cost on the right of going after the left.” To do this, he said, his colleagues should first “find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window,” then "[t]ake a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear." "Obviously I mean this rhetorically," added Ackerman, before elaborating on his recommended strategy: “If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.” Andrew Breitbart, founder of the website BigGovernment.com, stated that Journolist's behind-the-scenes maneuverings amounted to “collusion” designed to “shape narratives” by taking stories “that should be covered on a mass scale” and stopping them “in their tracks.” Added Breitbart: “What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is JournoList, or are guilty of sitting back and watching.”

Hello Friends,

Here's another very interesting article about the left wing media that's in it's death throes.

Shalom,

Peter

A Dying Media Writes its Own Obituary

Most people think of the news media differently than the participants in it think of themselves. While most people think that the job of newspapers, news radio stations and television newscasts is to report on events, those on the other end of the wire, the printing press and the cable, think that their job is not to report, but to advocate.

The high cost of producing a widely read newspaper, a television station or a radio station, has traditionally limited ownership and injected the owner's biases into the outlet. But the rise of a professional media class in America has made the owner's views almost redundant, in the same way that unions have ensured that every business they work for will be used to serve the interests of the Democratic party. While some reporters may still report, overwhelmingly the members of the professional media class do not report, they advocate.

That is why the rise of the internet has only accelerated media bias, as advocacy journalists are less worried about owners and working for a single outlet, and instead focus on maintaining political solidarity with their professional colleagues. A journalist no longer thinks in terms of working for the same newspaper for 20 or 30 years. He knows that by then there probably won't even be any newspapers. A month from now he'll be in a different outlet. Two months from that, he might be printed in three others, one of them a media blog. Three months from now he may be doing video blogs for Time Magazine. The unstable nature of the market means that the journalist is less concerned with the owners, and much more with his professional standing with the colleagues who will hire him or recommend him for jobs. And today professional standing means political reliability, just as it did in the Soviet Union.

Jornolist is only one of the more public revelations about that private political solidarity, which these days determines the content of the news we are allowed to read. That boys and girls media club serves as an unofficial union in an unstable marketplace that is bounded not by accomplishment or educational credentials, but by pulling together for a common political cause. Whether it was plotting to bring down Bush or raise up Obama, to push nationalization of health care or internationalization of national security-- that unofficial fraternity and sorority of advocacy journalists has turned media bias into their reason for being. They have turned into the definition of what a journalist should be.

The difference between a reporter and an advocate, is that the former reports on events, while the latter uses events as props in his message. Where a reporter tries to learn what happened, the advocate tries to understand how he can use that event in his narrative. The advocate has less in common with the reporter, than he does with an ad executive. Like the ad executive looking at a box of chocolate, the advocate looks at an event and decides how he can use it to sell his message.

That is why news reports and articles have become commercials for liberal products. One news report might try to sell viewers on the idea that the War on Terror is a bad idea, another will encourage them to view bank bailouts positively, and a third will try to make them feel bad for opposing amnesty. And then the news commercials will pause, to allow that ad executive to run a commercial selling viewers a new brand of dog food of chocolate, before returning back to more news commercials. Or to music and dramatic television programming that is likely to be selling some of the same political messages as well.

The politicization of all forms of media is the result of an understanding that places political advocacy above any notion of objective truth or individual rights. It is fanaticism and propaganda in a suit and tie, sometimes even with an American flag placed around the border. Its not so secret belief is that the American people are stupid, that their culture is stupid and that their opinions can only be improved through direct programming from newspapers, books, radio, television, websites and any other source that can deliver political messages to them, whether they are disguised as news or entertainment.

Americans today are living surrounded by as much propaganda as any North Korean. The difference is that the propaganda is subtler because it is less standardized by any regulatory body or fear of prison sentences. But that too is beginning to change. The Obama Administration has defined its idea of the media's role as being the purveyor of its talking points, nothing more. Obama's avoidance of press conferences, and unwillingness to grant access to the media, makes it clear that he wants to keep them on a short leash. Like most totalitarian organizations, the Obama Administration is not interested in being asked questions, only in making sure that their propaganda is distributed in a timely and consistent fashion.

The Obama Administration is a major reason why the media has become dumber lately. Where attacking Bush gave the media a challenge, the Obama Administration leaves them with nothing to do except praise the Beloved Leader and condemn his critics as ignorant racists who hate America. Being an assassin requires more brains than being a herald, and much as the media struggles against it, their only function anymore is to blow the trumpet and repeat what they've been told to say, off the record, by their contacts in the White House.

While the media tries to paint the Tea Party protesters as extensions of the Republican party, it is actually they who have become extensions of the Democratic party. By advocating a polar political agenda, the media has come to be identified with liberalism, and with the country's primary liberal party. Distrusted by much of the country, yet taken for granted by the ruling political elite in Washington D.C., the media is reaching the end of the road. As the media organizations that employ them are becoming financially unsustainable, the ranks of reporters that came out of college firmly believing that their mission was to politically indoctrinate Americans are realizing that they are nothing more than bloggers working for dinosaur media outlets.

The media has poisoned its own well. Its survivors are increasingly political bloggers who satisfy the left's taste for blood, e.g. Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, who survive by pushing radical messages in the most abrasive way possible. But all this really does is turn Time Magazine and the Washington Post into Firedoglake, the Huffington Post and DailyKos. And radicalizing media outlets also marginalizes them. The media has successfully alienated conservatives and independents. Now it is alienating even mainstream Democrats who are sick of childish rantings and conspiracy theories taking the place of serious journalism.

The blogsphere has not only defeated the media, it has remade it in its own image. Conventional reporting is vanishing, and what remains of the media exists only to push talking points, repackage memes, launch attacks at the opposition, and furiously cover the asses of their own pet politicians. Unlike printing presses, radio and television stations; websites are relatively cheap. And that put the media into the uncomfortable position of trying to compete with free blogs. Paywalls have not worked, and so newspapers are folding and media outlets are trimming their staffs to try and stay competitive. And as the Time Magazine website shows us, the end result leaves you with something that has the Time brand on it, but reads like the Huffington Post.

Advocacy journalism has traveled a long from the posturing of a Walter Cronkite pretending to be your favorite uncle, to Keith Olbermann mimicking him with spittle flecked rants about the "Worst Person in the World". Dan Rather's takedown marked the end of the news broadcast. MSNBC and FOX are the logical result of cable news networks surviving by finding a political demographic and catering to them. But what works for FOX and MSNBC won't work nearly as well for media outlets that depended on a general cross-section of readers and viewers, rather than on preaching to the choir.

And that is the irony of advocacy journalism, whose politics helped kill their own jobs. Media arrogance and entitlement polarized media coverage at a time when media outlets had to make a compelling case why their readers should support them. And so they did. They made a compelling case to liberal readers, and told everyone else to take a hike. The result is all around us. The jobs of a small media elite will be preserved, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs, from the circulation department to production assistants, from producers to designers, from delivery truck drivers to ordinary hard working reporters who legitimately covered non-glamorous events. Their jobs have had to die, so that a few thousand angry liberals will be able to keep on ranting on the websites that will be all that remain of once great newspapers and publications.

Now there's talk of a media bailout, which would recognize the media's new status as a government propaganda department. It isn't likely to happen though, except in a small and very selective way, because the Obama Administration's hostility to the media makes it rather clear that they view it as dangerous and redundant. Dangerous because even a heavily biased media can cover stories they don't want, and redundant because a government media would just do what the government already does, without actually being any more trusted than the government. A few political bloggers providing their opinions, subsidized by Soros funded organizations, would suit the Obama White House much better.

Dictatorships always consolidate the press, because they want to control the entire story from start to finish. Not just what is said, but when it is said, and how it is said. Control is the only mandate of tyranny. And political tyrannies are the worst, because the dogma of ideas creates constant mini-debates which are settled through repression and purges. The push to the left radicalizes and destroys what is left of the media. And what remains can be easily scooped up by the same people who paid for the current White House.

By embracing advocacy journalism, the media wrote its own obituary. It stopped being biased as an aspect of its reporting, instead bias became its identity. There ceased to be a media apart from the biased narratives, the attacks aimed at everyone who disagreed with their politics and the shameless slobbering over their favorite politicians. The media made political indoctrination in support of government control over every aspect of people's lives into its goal, and discovered why there is no free press in totalitarian countries. Because the people won't buy them and the government doesn't need them.

The media has reached the end of the road. It still makes noises about public service and informing the public, but everyone knows by now that these are buzzwords that mean op-eds and talking being run as news stories, commentaries being run as broadcasts. No one is buying it anymore, and no one cares. The culture of political conformity has destroyed the media. Its war on the Bush Administration and anointment of Obama were the last gasps of political propagandizing from a collapsing brontosaurus that once defined how Americans got their information. What began as great edifices of journalism that served information coast to coast and around the world, now come to their end as shoddy political blogs ranting about who dares to disagree with them. The media's obit is written, and there's no one even around to read it anymore.

The Fourth Approach sounds like the winner to me. I believe many would move to Mecca if we took it.

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Hello Friends,

I read the below article and was impressed with the thought process and the conclusions Daniel Greenfield reached. It's a very interesting read and well worth the time spent reading it.

Shalom,

Peter

A Fourth Approach to the Muslim World

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 08:47 PM PDT

American policy toward the Middle East has been traditionally split between the Stabilizers and the Radicals.

The Stabilizers were old foreign policy hands in the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA, sometimes tied in with the oil industry. They advocated maintaining stability in the Middle East by putting American support behind "our friends", the dictators. The US would supply them with weapons and military backing in case they were ever invaded or overthrown, and in exchange we would have reliable access to oil. From the Eisenhower interventions to the Gulf War, the United States protected Arab Muslim tyrannies in order to maintain stability in the region.

The Radicals were often academics, part time journalists or old line leftists. They insisted that everything wrong in the Middle East was caused by Western colonialism and imperialism, and the healing could only begin when the United States stopped backing the tyrants and began backing Marxist and Islamist terrorists in taking over their respective countries. The Radicals believed that if the United States would only abandon the dictators and throw their support behind the Marxists and the Islamists, a wonderful new age would dawn in the Middle East.

Until the Carter Administration, the Stabilizers held sway over foreign policy. With Carter though, the Radicals had their first taste of power. Following the doctrine of the Radicals, the Carter Administration helped bring Islamists to power in Iran, and began providing aid to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Its Green Belt strategy was focused on creating an alliance of Islamists to ally with the US against the Soviet Union. The real result was the same one you get when you try to breed poisonous snakes in order to get a bear off your land. You might succeed in getting rid of the bear, but now you'll have a whole other problem on your hands. That's exactly what happened with the US and the Islamists.

Neither the Stabilizers nor the Radicals were utilizing new ideas in their approach to the Middle East. The Stabilizers were echoing the British Empire's attempts to maintain control of the region through puppet sheikdoms and princedoms. The problem was that it hadn't worked too well for the British, who found themselves entangled in internal Arab and Muslim conflicts and coups. Like the British had before them, United States diplomats and oil company executives would cultivate a tyrant or two, only to discover that they were also completely untrustworthy. The House of Saud wound up seizing the same oil companies, and reversing the power relationship by doling out the oil on their terms, and using the money to begin the Islamization of the United States and Europe, while bribing half the foreign policy establishment to do it.

The Radicals meanwhile were fueled by left-wing anti-Americanism, which translated into a foreign policy of "America is Always Wrong" and "Radical Terrorists are Always Right". Their claims that backing Marxist and Islamist terrorists would lead to freedom and candyland proved to be wrong every time, yet did nothing to prevent them from enabling the horrors of the Mullahs in Iran or the PLO in Israel. True to the same ideological heritage that had turned Russia red with blood, yet insisted that things were going swimmingly-- they were never capable of acknowledging a mistake.

With the Carter Administration, the Radicals increasingly began winning the argument, and the Stabilizers moved to accommodate them. Portions of the Radical agenda were incorporated into that of the Stabilizers. This was easily enough done, since the Stabilizers had never cared too much about who was in power, so long as there was no chaos or unrest. That was why the Eisenhower Administration had backed Nasser over its former allies in England and France. It was why Bush Sr could casually dismiss massacres by the Kuwaitis in the aftermath of the invasion. These were just means of imposing stability.

But the Radicals made very little headway after the Mullahs took over Iran. They could do little to shift US foreign policy away from the old line Arab regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia-- who had strong backing from the Stabilizers. Occasional nods toward democracy would come from the White House or Capitol Hill, and were immediately ignored. But they did find one weak spot. Israel.

The Stabilizers had inherited the old British antipathy toward Israel. They viewed as a country that should never have existed, but had now become a necessary evil. The Stabilizers had commitments to the House of Saud, and to the Kuwaiti Royals, but they had none toward Israel. They had been forced to support Israel as leverage against Soviet backed Arab regimes in Egypt and Syria. But the Camp David Accords had drawn Egypt onto the American side of the board, and the end of the Cold War made many of the old red and white maps seem irrelevant. Which meant that in their eyes, and that of their Muslim overlords, Israel was becoming a nuisance.

To the Radicals, Israel was something much worse. It was Western. It was a colony. It was an alien entity in what should have been a pure Arab-Muslim region. And if their obsession with Israel seemed downright Nazi-like at times, it was because they shared an obsession with making a part of the world Judenrein, not for practical reasons, but for ideological ones. If the Stabilizers had imbibed the Saudi contempt for Jews, the Radicals drank of a deeper and uglier well. If the Nazis had viewed Jews as genetically tainted, the Communists and the Left viewed Jews as politically tainted, contaminated by religion and seperatism. The Nazis had wanted to solve a genetic problem by wiping out the carriers of those genes. The Left wanted to solve a political problem by wiping out Jewish identity.

Israel was the intersection of the left's hatred for the reactionary Western Civilization and the even more reactionary notion of a Jewish identity. Much like Archie Bunker asked Sammy Davis Jr, why if he was already black, did he also want to become Jewish-- the idea of a Jewish state modeled on modern Western states triggered two obsessive streams of hatred from the Left. On the one hand there was H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw screeching that Jews had better give up being Jews, or go rot in Palestine, and on the other hand there was every leftist critic of Western imperialism crying out against US foreign policy in the Middle East. The results were and are almost unfathomably ugly-- as people's deepest prejudices merging with self-righteous political fanaticism tend to be.

The Stabilizers were more than willing to give Israel to the Radicals, so long as the House of Saud and the Mubarak clan and every tinpot tyrant was allowed to do whatever they wanted. And so there was finally a point of agreement between the Stabilizers and the Radicals. But into this pastoral scene, came a third party with another proposal. The Neo-Conservatives.

The Neo-Conservatives represented a break with both the Stabilizers and the Radicals. They were opposed to the status quo in the existing Muslim regimes, like the Radicals. But they were also opposed to the pet terrorists that the Radicals wanted to replace them with. What they wanted to do was to dredge the swamp, reform and democratize the region. The Neo-Conservatives were naive about the realities of the Middle East and the resources such plans required-- but for the first time a group with significant influence on foreign policy had managed to articulate something resembling a moral policy for the Middle East.

The Stabilizers and the Radicals both reacted about the way you would expect when after 9/11, Neo-Conservative ideas about America's relationship to the Middle East gained a great deal of influence. The Stabilizers reflected the panic of their Saudi masters at the prospect of bringing democracy to the region. The Radicals rejected the idea that the Muslim world needed to become civilized, instead they just wanted the Islamists to take over. The one thing both the Stabilizers and the Radicals agreed on was that the Neo-Conservatives were the devil. Which of course they were. After all unlike them the Neo-Conservatives had a proposal that didn't involve America groveling to one bunch of thugs or another.

Of course no foreign policy that was even loosely pro-American could survive for very long. The Bush Administration was undermined from the inside. The reconstruction of Iraq was painstakingly sabotaged within the military, the State Department and the intelligence community, until it dissolved into a proxy war between Baathists and Sadrists, with Al Queda bomb throwers adding spice to the sauce. The old hands like Rumsfeld, Bolton and Cheney were sent packing. Condoleeza Rice took control of foreign policy and turned it back into exactly what it had been under George Bush Sr. Appeasement. Any worries by Arab tyrants were put to rest. Roasting Israel became the top priority. The Stabilizers were back in charge. But not for long.

Obama's ascension marked the return of the Radicals to power. Outreach to the Muslim world was now the top priority. Covert contacts with Hamas and the Taliban were quietly opened. Israel was now truly enemy number one. But so was America. Iran's post-election riots were met with the same shrug that the left had used on pro-Democracy protesters in the USSR. The Arab dictators began growing nervous, as the Obama Administration took a hands off approach to Iran. And Obama's outreach had failed to win any new allies, but only alienated existing allies. Which was inevitable as Radicals are never very good at alliances, especially those that required them to think along the lines of national interest.

Where do we stand today? We've seen the three basic approaches, that of the Stabilizers, the Radicals and the Neo-Conservatives-- and all are fundamentally flawed. The Stabilizers support tyrants who covertly make war on the United States. The Radicals support terrorists who openly make war on the United States. What is even more absurd is that there is really not that much distance between the tyrants and the terrorists, since the tyrants fund the terrorists to increase their own power and popularity, and the terrorists aspire to become tyrants in the name of Islam. And both sides are laughing at the Stabilizers and the Radicals for selling out their country.

The Neo-Conservatives however dramatically underestimated the amount of effort and energy needed to reform entire cultures. Their excessive optimism led to introducing democracy in countries where the only real opposition parties that had managed to survive, were Islamists. The Bush Administration in particular treated democracy as a totem that could do anything, because it had adopted a simplistic model in which the Muslim world was not bad, only its leaders were. And once the people had a chance to vote for peace and prosperity, better leaders would emerge. Where these leaders would come from, and did people in the Muslim world really want peace and prosperity, in the American sense, were questions that went unasked. The Radicals and the Stabilizers both understood this quite well, and knew that with a few pushes in the right places, their whole project would come crashing down.

Those are the three. Which means what we now need is a fourth approach that avoids the flaws of these three. What is the primary flaw of all three? They all sought to determine who would rule in the Muslim world. The Stabilizers thought that the best way was to keep the Muslim world as it is. The Radicals and the Neo-Conservatives wanted to remake it. And all three of these approaches tangled them in the political chaos and instability of the Muslim world. But there is a fourth way.

The Fourth Way is Accountability and it is simple enough. Stop arguing over who will rule in which Muslim country. That is a decision that only the inhabitants of that country can make. And they won't make it through elections, so much as through dealmaking among their oligarchy, tribal leaders and occasional outbursts of armed force. It would take a massive project of decades to have any hope of changing that. But we don't need to. What we need to do is make very clear the consequences of attacking us to whoever is in charge.

Rather than trying to shape their behavior by shaping their political leadership, we can use a much more blunt instrument to unselectively shape all their leaders. A blunt instrument does not mean reconstruction. It doesn't mean Marines ferrying electrical generators. It doesn't mean nation building. It means that we will inflict massive devastation on any country that aids terrorists who attack us. If they insist on using medieval beliefs to murder us, we will bomb government buildings, roads, factories and power plants to reduce them back to a medieval state. We will not impose sanctions on them, we will simply take control of their natural resources and remove the native population from the area, as compensation for the expenses of the war.

Accountability means no more aid to tyrants or terrorists, and no grand democracy projects either. It means that we stop trying to pick a side, and just make it clear what happens when our side gets hurt. We gain energy independence and never look back. And when we've done that, the Muslim world will no longer be able to play America against Russia, against Asia and Europe. Instead it will suddenly find itself stuck with a predatory Russia looking for an energy monopoly, a booming China expanding into their part of the world, and no Pax Americana to protect them from either one.

America has provided the stability that kept many Muslim countries from imploding. It has protected others directly and indirectly from being conquered more times than anyone realizes. All the treachery and terrorism that has been carried out, has been done under an American umbrella. Now is the time to furl up the umbrella, and let the rain fall where it may.

It will be a cold day indeed, when Russia and China realize that they can do what they like in the Muslim world, without the US to stop them. And a colder day still, when European countries realize that there is nothing standing the way of deporting their insurgent Muslim populations, because the US will not lift a finger to protect them, as it did in Yugoslavia. That is accountability. And in both its active and passive forms it will exact a high price from the enemy, and none from us. To employ it, we must be prepared to use massive force casually without considering any collateral damage. We must achieve energy independence at any cost. And we must be prepared to realize that everything else we have tried has failed. Only by disengaging from the Muslim world, can we ever be free of it.