Having last year declared herself to be Hegelian - this discussion of her remarks by Horacio González set a new benchmark for arselicking - the President is quoted here as saying
Latin America is today going through a tough cultural battle that involves recognizing our own categories of thought.
I can hardly wait for González, Feinmann or one of the government’s other pet intellectuals to bang out a quick 500 words to explain what what she was on about.
When you start identifying with the doings of totalitarian religious fanatics you inevitably end up writing shite like this when some members of the same religion try to separate themselves from the fascists. Coming soon on CiF; a scholarly opinion from Milne regarding what one has to believe in order to be a real Muslim.
Writing about the Israeli press in the London Review of Books Yonatan Mendel says,
It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.
Only the military discourse allowed? He has obviously never read Haaretz and can’t write a decent j’accuse without resorting to untenable generalisations.
Setting aside the clumsiness and exaggeration of the argumentation; what does the article amount to? A claim that Israeli journalists tend to favour their own side both in the discursive structure of their stories and in the credibility they assign to different actors in the conflict.
Isn’t that a surprise? Aren’t you just shocked to the core to discover this? I know I am. Just like you, I had imagined that Israeli journalists were maintaining a scrupulous equidistance between the claims made by their own side and those made by their enemies, that they were indifferent to the outcome of the conflict in which their nation is involved and were able to effortlessly abstract themselves from the political and social context which produced them and in which they live. After all, that’s what journalists everywhere do, isn’t it?
Writing about Paraguay in the London Review of Books, the egregious Richard Gott mentions,
Francisco Solano López, the president who in the 1860s led the country’s unsuccessful defence against an invasion by the forces of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, in the War of the Triple Alliance…
This is perfectly true, as far as it goes but omits to mention the rather important fact that it was Solano López’s decision to declare war on and invade Paraguay’s vastly larger and more powerful neighbours, Argentina and Brazil, that gave them the legitimate excuse they were looking to destroy his regime.
John Lynch, writing here (p.45), gives a more balanced view of events.
In the event, the ruler of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López, did not have the skill to exploit these divisions within Argentina, or between Argentina and Brazil, and he recklessly wasted his assets. When, in January 1965, Solano López requested permission from Argentina to cross Missiones to reach Brazil, he was rebuffed and in March he declared war on Argentina and invaded Corrientes. This enabled Mitre to carry through the Brazilian alliance without political disaster at home. He then declared war on Paraguay, joining Brazil and the government of Flores in Uruguay.
Santiago O’Donnell finds it difficult to write an article about international affairs without getting basic facts wrong and leaving out critical information. In his piece in today’s Pagina/12 he says that wall separating Gaza from Egypt,
… had been built in 2006 to seal the Egyptian frontier after Hamas, led by Ismael Haniyeh, had won the right to form a government of the Palestinian Authority after winning free and fair elections.
This is false. Israel had withdrawn from Gaza by September 2005 having built the wall before it left. Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in January 2006.
He goes on to say that,
Olmert decided that the best response would be to impose an international boycott [on the new Hamas government] with the support of his allies the United States, the European Union, Egypt and Jordan.
So the government of Israel decided what attitude the United States, the European Union, Egypt and Jordan were going to take to the Hamas government. I guess the Israeli Foreign Ministry just sends a daily e-mail with instructions to their colleagues in Washington, Brussels, Cairo and Amman. Or maybe that isn’t necessary, maybe the Israelis have their own people embedded in all those governments and it’s they who are in charge of setting policy in the Middle East.
He then goes on to say that Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers on the border with Lebanon. In fact the number of soldiers kidnapped was two (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) not three.
And now we come to the really fun part. He writes,
The boycott led to tension between Hamas and Al Fatah and put Palestine on the edge of civil war until in June last year when there was a carve-up (repartija) of territory with Hamas taking control of Gaza and Fatah keeping the West Bank.
I’ll leave aside the question of whether the Palestinian factions might have had their own reasons for hating each other and not simply have been responding to external pressures. What actually occurred in June 2007 was rather more than a rise in tension; Hamas and Fatah slugged it out for control of Gaza in bloody combat that cost the lives of 161 Palestinians. Full details of what happened are available here. The upshot of the fighting was that President Abbas accused Hamas of having launched a coup d’état, withdrew recognition of Haniyeh’s government and set up his own administration in Ramallah. So, far from having been on the edge of civil war the Palestinians actually had the first round of it with Hamas coming out as the clear winner.
How does this guy manage to make a living as a journalist when he can’t even get the most basic facts right? How?
