Gwynne(th) Dyer
Posted on 08/25/2003 9:33:18 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Sitting in Cairo in a flat borrowed from a friend. Turn on the TV and catch the news on BBC World: six stories in 15 minutes. Iraqi guerillas blow up a couple of pipelines. European hostages released by Muslim guerillas in Mali. Nigerian peacekeeping troops in Liberia. Rioting between Muslim sects in Pakistan. Iceland resumes whaling. Islamist terrorists arrested in Indonesia. End of world news.
Four out of six: that's how many of the stories were about Muslims who do violent things. That would make sense if two-thirds of the world's people were Muslims, and most of them were violent. Because only one-fifth of the world's people are Muslims, and many of them don't even spank their children, it calls for an explanation. Especially because the international news is like this most of the time.
BBC World is not particularly bad. In fact, from Minnesota to Moscow to Manila it is the preferred source of TV news for people with an interest in the world, a knowledge of English and access to cable. It is serious about delivering "balanced" news to a multi-national audience, and yet it is doing an absolutely terrible job. Why?
Consider the four "Muslim" stories among the BBC World six I listed at the top of this article. The Iraq story is legitimate. When the world's greatest power is sinking into a political and military quagmire, it is going to get coverage. But why Muslim hostage-takers in Mali rather than politically motivated kidnappers in Colombia? Why sectarian clashes between Muslims in Pakistan rather than inter-caste violence among Hindus in India?
The story of suspected terrorists arrested for the Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta is of legitimate interest, but there's a lot less follow-up when suspected Basque terrorists are arrested in Spain, or when a resurgent Sendero Luminoso blows something up in Peru. The BBC is not anti-Muslim, but it is responding to a definition of international news that makes "violent Muslims" more newsworthy than violent people in other places.
It is largely a Western definition, following an agenda set mainly by the dominant U.S. media. It is rooted in Western perspectives on the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, and has been vastly strengthened by the Islamist terrorist attack on the United States two years ago. It is also a steaming heap of horse-feathers.
I am not preaching pious nonsense about Islam being a "religion of peace." The only peaceful religions are dead religions. And I am not denying that the Muslim world has a big historical chip on its shoulder. Having run one of the most powerful and respected civilizations on the planet for the first 1,000 years after they burst out of Arabia and conquered large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, Muslims have spent the past three centuries being overrun, colonized and humiliated by the West. But the image of Muslims that the rest of the world gets through international news coverage is deeply misleading.
For the past month I have been wandering around the Middle East with eight other members of my extended family. For some, it was their first time in the region; others of us have lived here or visited often enough to be able to lead everybody astray. And we gave less thought to our personal safety -- and much less to petty theft -- than we would have done on a comparable trip across America, or even through Europe.
I won't go on about how kind and friendly most of the people we met were, because most people are like that everywhere. I would point out that every single person I discussed current events with was against the U.S. invasion in Iraq, but that I nevertheless encountered no personal hostility although I am easily mistaken for an American. (Would an Arab doing a similar trip around the United States have the same experience?)
If Iraq gets completely out of hand, the patience and tolerance that still prevail at street level in the Muslim Middle East will be severely eroded, and even Asian Muslim countries may end up taking sides against the United States and Britain. But for the moment Samuel Huntington's nightmare vision of a coming "clash of civilizations" is still a long way off, and the most striking thing is the sheer ordinariness of daily life in the Muslim world. Don't be misled by television.
It’s perfectly all right for the United States to slap the rest of the world in the face once in a while, if the rest of the world is wrong or just to defend its own vital national interests. But it should be done for national interests, not private ones, and it should be done in ways that cause the least possible offence. That is not what's happening now.
Consider only the past month. In the second week of July, the Bush administration told Congress that its ballistic missile defence project would "bump up against" the constraints of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty "within months".
Never mind that it's a stupid idea; just look at how it's being done. The ABM Treaty allows either party to withdraw unilaterally on six months' notice, but no such notice has been given. The US is just going to breach the treaty illegally.
In the third week of July, US negotiators at a UN conference aimed at curbing the global trade in small arms effectively killed the initiative.
The country that produces over half of the world's small arms blocked any restrictions on private gun ownership, and vetoed an African-backed proposal to ban arms sales to "non-state actors" (ie, the guerilla groups who are ravaging so many African countries). "The US should be ashamed," said South African envoy Jean Du Preez.
Late in July it was the turn of the 1972 treaty outlawing germ warfare. For six years, 56 countries have been negotiating a supplementary treaty that would create verification rules and international inspectors to enforce what was previously just a pious pledge not to produce biological weapons.
Fifty-five of those countries had agreed on a 200-page draft protocol and suddenly, on July 25, the US declared that it could not agree because US pharmaceutical plants, which dominate the world market, would then be open to inspection too, thus jeopardising commercial secrecy.
It's as if every interest group gets to make policy.
And so it goes. Last week Thomas Novotny, the lead US negotiator for the past decade on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, suddenly resigned his post. Colleagues say that it was over frustration at the sudden US switch from a policy that sought to restrict cigarette advertising and marketing to one that basically echoes the tobacco industry's positions.
It's as if there was nobody in charge, so that every bureaucratic or industrial interest group with access to the Bush administration gets to make policy for its own bit of the picture. If George W. Bush were really running the show, there would at least be a coherent strategic vision, and maybe tactics to match. But you just have to look at the frequent anguish on his face as he struggles to find his way to the end of the sentence to suspect that he may not be up to the challenge.
IQ tests are notoriously unreliable, and we all know that "IQ" does not correspond very closely to executive ability. But the Lovenstein Institute's conclusions about George W. Bush are nevertheless illuminating.
The Lovenstein Institute, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long published an IQ for each new president, based on his academic performance, writings "achieved without aid of staff", linguistic clarity, and so on.
It's rough and ready stuff, but it awarded Bill Clinton an astonishing IQ of 182 (the average in the US today is around 104), which largely conforms to one's previous impression that the man was useless but brilliant.
Jimmy Carter got 175, John F. Kennedy got 174, and Richard Nixon got 155: very clever men all, though with few accomplishments to show for it. By contrast, the mid-range men like Franklin D. Roosevelt (147), Harry Truman (132), Lyndon Johnson (126), Dwight D. Eisenhower (122), Gerald Ford (121) and Ronald Reagan (105) all had a major impact on affairs (except Ford, of course).
At the other end are the Bushes. Even the father only scored 98, but he did seem in charge of his White House. He was, after all, a man with long service in bureaucratic wars and much foreign experience as well. But George W. Bush has no such background, and the Lovenstein Institute estimates his IQ at 91.
An IQ of 91 does not mean you are stupid. It means that you are more intelligent than at least a quarter of the American population. But it probably does not equip you to run large and complex enterprises or deal with the clever and ruthless operators who inhabit the upper reaches of Washington politics, bureaucracy and lobbydom.
It is a harsh and an early verdict, but maybe things are spinning out of control just because they are smarter than he is.
(Gwynn Dyer in The Canberra (AU) Times, August 7, 2001)
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=your%20say&story_id=74239
The envelope please. And the World's Laziest Columnist is … Gwynne Dyer!
We know what you're thinking: Who the heck is she? Actually, Gwynne's a guy, and according to his bio on this page, he is "one of Canada's media renaissance men, an outstanding journalist, broadcaster, producer, author and filmmaker who now makes his home in London." He claims his syndicated column appears in 150 newspapers, but we found the column that won him this coveted award in only three: Australia's Canberra Times, New Zealand's Southland Times and New Jersey's Newark Star-Ledger.
So how is Dyer lazy? Let us count the ways. First, the premise of his column is the most tiresome cliché around: that President Bush is not too bright. When the Star-Ledger ran the column last Tuesday, it gave it the oh-so-subtle headline "Too Dull-Witted to Lead."
Second, Dyer offers the following "evidence" of Bush's supposed intellectual shortcomings:
IQ tests are notoriously unreliable, and we all know that "IQ" does not correspond very closely to executive ability. But the Lovenstein Institute's conclusions about George W. Bush are nevertheless illuminating.The Lovenstein Institute, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has long published an IQ for each new president, based on his academic performance, writings "achieved without aid of staff," linguistic clarity, and so on.
It's rough and ready stuff, but it awarded Bill Clinton an astonishing IQ of 182 (the average in the U.S. today is around 104), which largely conforms to one's previous impression that the man was useless but brilliant. …
At the other end are the Bushes. Even the father only scored 98, but he did seem in charge of his White House. He was, after all, a man with long service in bureaucratic wars and much foreign experience as well. But George W. Bush has no such background, and the Lovenstein Institute estimates his IQ at 91. … It is a harsh and an early verdict, but maybe things are spinning out of control just because they are smarter than he is.
There's just one problem, and we'll let the Star-Ledger explain it. On Saturday the Jersey paper ran the following correction (which we couldn't find on its Web site):
A column by Gwynne Dyer on Tuesday's op-ed page contained incorrect information. The column cited a study by the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pa., that concluded President Bush had the lowest IQ of any recent president. There is no Lovenstein Institute in Scranton, Pa., and no such study was conducted.
U.S. News & World Report (fifth item) pegs the "Lovenstein study" as an "Internet hoax," and the excellent Snopes.com urban-legend site has a thorough debunking.
So Dyer is citing a canard to confirm a cliché. But we have not finished plumbing the depths of his intellectual indolence. It turns out even in being duped he was merely being derivative. All of the "information" about the "study" that Dyer included in his "column" had appeared in London's left-wing Guardian nearly three weeks earlier, and Dyer doesn't even "credit" the Guardian for its "reporting"!
We actually saw the Guardian piece back in July and thought about excerpting it for our How Others See U.S. feature. But the story seemed far-fetched to us, so we checked it out by running a Yahoo! search, which turned up no evidence of the institute's existence. Accordingly, we dropped the idea of using the Guardian column.
Now, we don't mean to pat ourselves on the back for our diligence. Conducting that search took us no more than 10 seconds. Our point is that Gwynne Dyer was too lazy to do even that minimal amount of work. Canada's renaissance man indeed.
-snip-
(James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, August 13, 2001)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95000961
I can , however, envision most Arab people as peaceful, although it seems in every Arab nation, women are treated like slaves, but that seems to have not caught the attention of this writer...
what I would like from our Arab and Muslim neighbors is only this....
if you proclaim to be the "religion of peace" then will you please stop supporting terroism and condemn all terrorists attacks openly and loudly.....something that was pecularly missing after 9/11.....
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This place functioned for several years without barf alerts until a bunch of newbies came in and thought they were humorous.
What a laugh!
Now, I'm agnostic, but come on- are you telling me that Christ exhorted his followers to kill and actually led them in this endeavour by example? There is no way you can compare the two as if they are the same. The Koran is the collected words of Mohammed. You can find numeruos examples in the Koran of Mohammed giving the Muslims license to kill the idolators and others. Where do you find something similar in the New Testament's quotations of Jesus?
What about Stalin, Pol Pot, Chairman Mao et al? They weren't religious at all yet they killed millions. If you had said "ideology kills people and is still going on" you would have been closer to the truth but still not quite accurate. The truth is people kill each other and always have. They've done it since before religion existed. People have also always used ideology as an impetus and justification to kill others. But it is people that do the killing. Take away religion, they'll use something else- perhaps with even more gusto and with less restraint.
Did anybody else catch this one? That's sort of like the "Only good Injun is a dead Injun" ditty. Is the author saying we'd be better off by killing off all religion?
Gwynne(th) Dyer
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