I do not recommend sampling the deep racism to be found at a pus-buckets like The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler or Little Green Footballs regarding Haditha, Ishaqui and Abu Ghraib. But even if you avoid web sites with Fourth Reich pretensions, some conservative bloggers give you a firsthand understanding of how Americans
can commit atrocities.
I usually avoid visiting right-wing sites at all. But, with my husband away for weeks - he is my usual briefer on such garbage - I checked out 50 sites just to see what they were saying. This weekend's widespread rightwing complaint seems to be that the media suck because they have spent more time talking about what some U.S. Marines did than what some Canadians were caught allegedly preparing to do.
My husband has told me that it is bad form to directly link to right-wing web sites at Daily Kos, so I will just give you a few urls and excerpts.
Belmont Club (
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com):
Question: what's the most important news story of the past week? Haditha, Haditha, Haditha, Haditha, Canada, Britain. Ooops. Haditha, Haditha. Haditha. That's not to say the possible misconduct of US military personnel is not news, but the characteristic of correctly functioning sensory organs is that objects appear in their due proportion. If mice seemed the size of elephants and elephants the size of mice a visit to the doctor would seem in order. The press is the public's sensory organ.
Pajamas Media has a roundup of stories on the recent terrorism arrests in Canada involving suspects, many of them teens, who had never been to Afghanistan or Iraq, were as Canadian as Molson Beer or American as Apple Pie and had in their possession three times the explosive used in the Oklahoma City bombing. But large as the Canadian story is it is probably only part of something even larger. Atlas Shrugs quotes Cuanas, who supplies the connecting idea. ...
From a purely academic point of view future historians will find this period an interesting example of how manipulated perceptions struggled obstinately with suppressed reality for the center stage of the policy debate. Some of the questions that will be asked fifty years from now are: what was Scooter Libby really charged with? Is that all? How come millions of people could die in Darfur without anyone noticing? Why were people obsessed with the possible criminal behavior of a handful of Marines in Iraq and uninterested in why their wonderful universities and high schools could produce kids who would be interested in blowing up buildings, spreading poison gas, or maybe shooting down airliners with surface to air missiles.
The Riehl World (
http://www.riehlworldview.com):
Here's a classic example of media bias. As you likely know, yesterday a story with implications for fighting terrorism around the globe broke out of Canada. Meanwhile, a potentially tragic incident involving the US military in Haditha may have taken place in November and is now under invesitgation. Which is the larger story with the potential for greater impact on the world?
Assuming Google News is a relatively objective indexer of what news is being covered by the MSM - take a look.
Stories on line
Terrorist Ring busted all 858 related »
Haditha all 1,493 related »
And the terror bust is now below the fold. I guess it isn't that important after all.
Then there is Roger L. Simon's whine (
http://www.rogerlsimon.com)
I can't say I'm surprised it took eight paragraphs before the New York Times deigned to tell us what might be behind (have motivated) the arrest of 17 people in Ontario over the last couple of days. In fact it takes them six paragraphs before they even name any names. And of course they hasten first to make sure we know most of these men (not yet identified as Islamists) are "young people," shades of the French linguistic obsession with les jeunes, lest we might think them representative of a hostile ideology. This political bowdlerization is accomplished in paragraph four. Think for a moment how the Times would have constructed an article (has constructed many articles) about the malfeasance of US servicemen. They sure wouldn't bury the lede. They would scream "American failure" at the top of their semi-refined lungs in paragraph one. Oh, well,... why do I even bother? (Even CNN has in their lede that the terrorists were motivated by Al Qaeda ideology.)
Throughout these and a dozen other shitty screeds, the rightists moan that the mainstream media have already convicted the Haditha Marines, American culture and George W. Bush, all before the investigation is complete. Simultaneously, they themselves convict not only the 17 arrested in Toronto but the Muslim world, in general. In their view, anybody who reads the Koran is an incipient terrorist. And anyone who suggests that a massacre like Haditha's is anything other than an aberration is an anti-American terrorist-sympathizer.