Tuesday, August 5, 2008

When Journalists Peddle Fraud

Taking part in a conspiracy is one thing and peddling a fraud that was already plagiarized is another thing. Catch several journalists echo each other as they repeat the same falsehood over and over again, bring the thing to their attention and watch them lament they are being accused of conspiracy. When this happens, look them in the eye and say: Don’t flatter yourselves; conspiracy implies you have brains to think and to coordinate with but you don’t have that much of a brain.

What these guys have is an animal instinct which is sometimes referred to as pack mentality. And if you want to know what this is wait a little while because something terrible happened in Canada which will undoubtedly be taken up by a copycat. It happened that a sicko on a bus stabbed a fellow passenger, cut-off his head and tried to eat him. A copycat should now surface and try to duplicate the horror. But this is something that the so-called journalists do all the time except that in addition to being sick they do what they do with an intent that borders on the criminal.

If you want to see a manifestation of this intent take a look at the following statement:

[Farag grew up in the religiously conservative Egyptian city of Alexandria…she recently told the monthly magazine Egypt Today.]

This statement came in the Washington Post on July 27, 2008 in an article written by Ellen Knickmeyer under the title Hayat Farag, Egypt, Wrestler. The journalist says the quote was given to the magazine Egypt Today. Well, this magazine happens to come online as well as in print form. When you check the July edition you find this passage:

[Farag grew up in a conservative neighborhood in Alexandria…]

A neighborhood in Alexandria is not all of Alexandria, Ellen! The fraud committed by the Washington Post so-called journalist is glaring in that she picked on the wrong city to commit her cardinal sin and to show the color of her glorious ignorance. Alexandria has been the most cosmopolitan city on the planet ever since it was founded by Alexander the Great nearly 2,500 years ago. This is a span of time that is ten times longer than America has lived as a nation thus far. And because Alexandria is cosmopolitan, it tolerates having all kinds of neighborhoods, including one that is conservative.

The idea Knickmeyer is copycating in her article is that Egypt is a conservative country; worse, a religiously conservative country; worse, a religiously Muslim conservative country. The so-called journalist altered the words of Hayat Farag to help spread the lie that the Christians in Egypt need the protection of America. And this comes at a time when the emotionally unstable in the US Congress are being conditioned and duly mobilized to do to Egypt what they are doing to other countries where religious and ethnic wars were started and the flames of hatred are fanned.

The article published in the magazine Egypt Today is a long one and the quote that was forged by Knickmeyer is only a small part of it. But what is remarkable about the article is that it falls in line with other articles published in the same magazine and in the sister magazine Business Today, all of which dispel the image of the Egyptian woman as she has been painted by the mischief makers in the American media. Look up those two publications online and see the accomplishments that women are scoring in Egypt day in and day out.

And since what happens in America is copycated in Canada, I had the occasion to write about the copycat phenomenon except that the champions of free speech in the notorious Jewish Establishment blocked the publication of the book in which the passage was to appear. And so, here is the passage, reprinted in the following 6 paragraphs. The topic I was discussing then was the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004.

[What happened was that Israel sent relief supplies to Indonesia on an El Al plane, Israel’s national airline and they flashed around the world the image of the plane standing on Indonesian soil. Had the Jewish leaders stopped here, people would have viewed the episode as a display of pride in their humanity and moved on.]

[But that was only the beginning. What followed sickened even the most ardent supporters of the Jewish causes. An example of this happened on January 5, 2005 when Steve Paikin said on his show that "some" have described the Arab aid to the tsunami victims as pathetic. He did not say who that some was or where and when they said it. But Richard Gwyn spoke of the Arab journalists who protested against their government’s inaction without saying if they were the ones who described the Arab aid as pathetic.]

[Neither Paikin nor Gwyn said if they knew what any of the Arab countries had pledged or done up to that time, leaving the audience with the impression that the Arabs did nothing. Now, what happens inside the Jewish Lobby and among their supporters is that despite the yelling and the tearing of the hair they do in public to complain about the lack of freedom of expression in the Arab World, these guys follow the internal debates that take place inside the Arab countries. They lift the criticism that is done by the opposition down there and repeat it up here without saying from where they got such criticism.]

[The criticism down there is made by columnists and commentators who work for the opposition parties, write for the opposition newspapers or have an axe of their own to grind, and they are no better at being objective than their counterparts up here. The difference is that the people down there are so vibrant they make Question Period in Parliament look like monks preparing for the silent prayer of the evening. In fact, you don’t have to speak Arabic to get a taste of this. You can watch a discussion on the Al Jezirah satellite channel, see the body language and hear the sounds. But if you want to know what is being said, get yourself a more honest translator than those who work for the Jewish Lobby.]

[What happens after someone like Paikin or Gwyn are told what the Arab opposition has said is that they choose an outrageous opinion or a play on words expressed by the opposition down there and they present it here as fact.]

[So you think this ought to have settled the argument with Gwyn and Paikin, right? Think again. A few days after that pathetic show of ignorance was beamed over the antennas of TVO, Gwyn had forgotten all about the earlier discussion he had with Paikin and tried to make himself sound interesting one more time at the expense of the Arabs. And he did it for no reason except that he thought he could get away with it. He came out of the blue while discussing something else and accused the Arabs of being pathetic about their relief effort for the tsunami victims. Well, you see, dear reader, the word pathetic was the word that Paikin had used on the previous occasion and Paikin immediately understood the implication of what had happened. He thought to himself that if someone like yours truly was watching, he would catch this journalistic fraud and perhaps write about it someday which is exactly what yours truly is now doing.]

At least Ellen Knickmeyer mentioned the article in Egypt Today when most everyone else never mention the source they steal from or the people whose statements they forge. And if you want to see examples of this outrage, look for an article that Knickmeyer wrote about the Christians in Egypt sometime ago and compare it with an article written on the same subject in the New York Times on Saturday August 2, 2008. You will not escape the conclusion that the NY Times article is a fake in that most of it was plagiarized from Knickmeyer’s article.

And that is not the only piece of quackery to appear in the NY Times lately. When the Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine died, a piece written by A.O. Scott appeared on July 29, 2008 in that paper discussing the director’s life and his views concerning contemporary Egyptian society. Always a rebel, Chahine’s beef has been the tendency that ancient civilizations have to resist change, something the filmmaker called a rejection of modernity. This was duly reported in Scott’s article but then the notorious Tom Friedman got into the act the next day, plagiarized that part of the article and made a spectacle of himself and his editors.

Under the title: Drilling in Afghanistan, Friedman wrote a rambling article that was totally out of focus. Unable to make himself sound interesting, the so-called journalist came out of the blue and lashed out at the Arabs and, using Chahine’s words without giving him or Scott due credit, he accused all the Arabs of rejecting modernity.

And of all the ironies you can think of there is one that stands out as notable. It is that all of these events have unfolded during one and the same week. If there is one person who is a symbol of the cosmopolitan nature of Alexandria, it is Youssef Chahine. He was a Roman Catholic born to Egyptian parents of different ethnic backgrounds and was the Alexandrian who never shied from displaying in his work the love that he had for his hometown. And this is not being religiously conservative anymore than I am a religiously conservative as a Cairo-born Roman Catholic, whether Ellen Knickmeyer likes it or not, whether the Washington Post likes it or not, whether the emotionally rattled characters in the US Congress and their Jewish trainers like it or not.

Over and over, we the Christians of Egypt told the Americans to keep out of our business and out of our faces. For centuries we have lived in harmony with our Muslim compatriots and we need a bunch of little-civilized nouveau-cultured morons to force their brand of help on us like we need a hole in the head. I know from experience that the freedom of religion they want for Christians in Egypt is of the same brand as the freedom of speech they have wanted for me for the last 40 years. It is a freedom that is as filthy as filth itself.

A useful advice I can give the folks in the US Congress is that they must refrain from meddling in the affairs of other people at least until they have figured out the difference between religious harmony and that other hole in their anatomy, not the hole they want to put in someone else’s head. Keep obeying the commands of your Jewish trainers, folks, and America will end up in the hole of the damned to which it has been walking slowly but surely.