Now that's funny!
Posted on 01/06/2003 11:39:23 AM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Monday, January 6, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
No, Tallahassee Democrat Executive Editor John Winn Miller didn't really apologize to our old Nazi and Japanese enemies from World War II — not yet, anyway — but he might as well have. Miller forced veteran political reporter and columnist Bill Cotterell to apologize, and suspended Cotterell for one week without pay, for making a couple of statements in private e-mails that were sympathetic to the Israelis, and critical of Arab attempts, since 1948, to annihilate the Jews of Israel. Had Cotterell, who served in the U.S Marine Corps for four years, has written for the newspaper since 1985, and has been working press since 1967, refused to apologize, he would have been fired.
Cotterell reportedly wrote, "Except for Jordan and Egypt, no Arab nation has a peace treaty with Israel. They've had 54 years to get over it. They choose not to," and "OK, they can squat around the camel-dung fire and grumble about it, or they can put their bottoms in the air five times a day and pray for deliverance; that's their business .... And I don't give a damn if Israel kills a few in collateral damage while defending itself. So be it."
Note that Bill Cotterell did not go out looking for an argument — he got suckered into one by a cowardly, pan-Arabist instigator. The instigator — referred to deceptively as "the recipient," as if he just sat at home and either accidentally received Cotterell's e-mail, or Cotterell sent out e-mails to pan-Arabists, hoping to get a rise out of them (which sounds like something I would do) — has a history of taking swings at the newspaper (and surely others), and then calling on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to beat up on it for him. The knucklehead had recently complained about a political cartoon that appeared on the Democrat's web site by Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Doug Marlette. According to the Associated Press' Brendan Farrington, "Council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said the e-mail's recipient had previously complained about a political cartoon that briefly appeared on the newspaper's Web site, asking 'What would Mohammed drive?' and depicting a Ryder truck carrying a missile. The cartoon was not published in the paper."
Reading between the cautious Farrington's lines, Marlette's cartoon was apparently censored the moment Hooper started screaming. Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad are apparently now in charge of America's press.
In Doug Marlette's case, Tallahassee Democrat Executive Editor John Winn Miller put up token resistance to Hooper, to at least give the impression of journalistic independence. "... I defend Doug's right to ridicule anyone. While the vast majority of Muslims are a peaceful people and preach a peaceful religion, there are some who have subverted the message of the Prophet Muhammad for their own violent purposes.... Lampooning fanatics who believe they have a religious basis for murder is fair game."
Doug Marlette's work was censored only six months after the Tallahassee Democrat had celebrated hiring the famous, veteran political cartoonist.
Regarding Bill Cotterell, CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper said, with perfectly forked tongue, "Any journalist has a right to his or her political and religious views, but when those views are expressed in such bigoted terms, it raises questions about a media outlet's journalistic balance and objectivity."
In Bill Cotterell's case, however, John Winn Miller did not bother covering his obscene surrender with a fig leaf of pro-freedom rhetoric.
In last Friday's edition, Miller publicly apologized: "They absolutely do not represent the views and sensitivities of this newspaper. Worse, they run counter to many of the values we hold dearest, among them tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness."
Translated from the newspeak, that would be "tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness for America's enemies."
Miller also forced Cotterell to make a show trial-type confession: "I was wrong and I am sorry. My remarks were grossly inappropriate and do not reflect my views toward Muslim people."
And how is it that the pan-Arabist coward who started this has managed to keep his name a secret?
I get e-mails from morons all the time, some of whom I put in their place. In my case, the knuckleheads are usually racist blacks who assume that my name is a pseudonym. But mainstream journalists already live in fear of saying the "wrong" thing. The Cotterell case will have a chilling effect in further intimidating them from writing what they think, or responding to readers' letters.
But what if Cotterell had said what he did without first being suckered into it? The first statement was true, and the other was morally correct. For 54 years, the Arab world has sought to murder all of the Jews of Israel. And Israel has the right to defend itself, a defense which cannot help but involve "collateral damage." But while the Israelis kill civilians by accident, the Arabs kill Jewish civilians on purpose. And the same Arabs seeking to destroy Israel seek to destroy America, with the help of non-Arab Moslems around the world.
On 911, Islam attacked America. When George Bush started saying, at a Washington, D.C. interfaith service a few days later, that "Islam is peace," he didn't fool anyone. Moslems didn't believe it, and among "infidels," the phrase immediately became a punch line. But Bush had to say such nonsense, because he comes from the Don Corleone school of international relations: "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer." There was no advantage to Bush saying what everyone knew to be true; but in using deception, he could get help from some Islamic nations, in order to beat others. Bush well understands that international relations are always conducted in the state of nature of the war of all against all (or at least, some against others), in which honesty and transparency towards one's enemies are fatal mistakes.
But one cannot tolerate such deception from one's own citizens in wartime. It is not Christian and Jewish Americans who need to apologize to Moslems, but the other way around. At the very least, Moslems need to prove their patriotism, the same way German and Japanese Americans were obliged to do so sixty years ago.
Many Moslems have complained since 911, that they are offended that people would question their patriotism. There's a reason for such doubts; the complainers' patriotism is questionable. And that includes you, Ibrahim Hooper.
Hooper pronounced himself pleased with the kowtowing. "It will send a positive message to the Muslim community in Florida that this kind of bigotry will not be tolerated and I appreciate the swift action of the Tallahassee Democrat in resolving this issue. We don't want to be vindictive in this. We just want to make sure bigoted views don't color the news related to Muslim and American-Arab issues."
If the newspapers had acted this way 60 years ago, America might well today be divided between German-speaking and Japanese-speaking halves.
Ibrahim Hooper is demanding that American journalists show allegiance to America's enemies. Maybe I'm a simple fellow, but that sounds to me like a Philadelphia lawyer's sort of fancy pants treason. And John Winn Miller, an American, went along with it.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
Now that's funny!
Reread the first sentence.
Bottom line - when you communicate with anyone via your work email, anything you say is public and official. So if you want to communicate with bozos like this one, make sure you use your "bitemyass@mail.com" address. Then its private, and you are covered by the 1st amendment.
Yes, you are. But I'm going to give you a special, secret tip -- read an article, before commenting on it!
Your hunch is correct. I hit some of the links, and read some other articles on the story; it was his professional e-mail account.
Bottom line - when you communicate with anyone via your work email, anything you say is public and official. So if you want to communicate with bozos like this one, make sure you use your "bitemyass@mail.com" address. Then its private, and you are covered by the 1st amendment.
Actually, in this case I don't think it would have mattered if he had used his personal e-mail account. The provocateur immediately forwarded the journalist's e-mail to CAIR, which immediately organized an e-mail campaign against the newspaper. Besides, journalists only enjoy First Amendment protections against the federal government; they have no such protections against their own employers.
The dumbest thing is, this appeasement didn't even help the paper's bottom line. Newspapers constantly cave in to, and misreport stories, in order to please minority groups who don't even read them. Meanwhile, they go out of their way to insult and misrepresent the white, native Americans who are usually about 90 percent of their readers, but whose numbers are continually dropping. (The whites stop reading, because they are offended by the anti-white propaganda and deliberate misreporting; the blacks and Hispanics stop buying, because they're increasingly illiterate.) And so, the newspapers get the worst of both worlds: journalistic unscrupulousness and falling profits.
Are those the native Americans with albinism? (Tribe with bad eyesight.)
:-)
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