Did you see the latest ad from iTunes, promoting Coldplay’s new album?!
How does Apple do it? Their ads are always so fresh, so ahead of the pack, so audio-visually on the cutting edge of art and pop.
The New York Times periodically rotates bureau chiefs and reporters across cities and regions. When tracking the Jerusalem bureau, it is interesting (and sad perhaps) to notice a trend where many of them arrive with a positive outlook and are moved elsewhere after they start adopting an increasingly dour (if not pathologically cynical) perspective with regards to peace prospects. Steven Erlanger used to write extremely insightful and diverse stories, then slowly gave in to total bleakness, and now I notice he is writing out of France, as he has eased Isabelle Kershner into the position. She seems to be much more balanced on the topic. Will she also be overcome by despair before too long? I recall years ago noticing how Clyde Haberman went through this arch of perspectives, from positive to balanced to pessimistic. Peter Bennett seems to have avoided the curse, but it is quite hard, perhaps impossible – and arguably it is a sign of dark wisdom.
Wouldn’t it be great if ordinary citizens all joined together and said, "I have had enough – and I am going to do something about it!" and then pushed their Heads of State to once and for all deliver a two-state-agreement?!
They could draw inspiration from this:
"I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!"
- From NETWORK, the movie (let’s just hope that the civic action wouldn’t be hijacked by corporate networks, though it could turn into something like this):
This is better than a warning on a cigarette box.
The film-maker Jehane Noujaim dreamt a day when people across the world would see the same films, images and messages on the same day, at the
I just got this very cool invitation from Laurel Rapp, who runs our International Education Program…
You’re Invited: Global Town Hall Meeting
(webcast live to your classroom!)
Ever wonder what young Israelis and Palestinians growing up in conflict zones hope for, dream about, and are working to change?
Ever wonder what both groups are doing to end the conflict between their two peoples?
Ever wonder what our role as citizens of the world should and can be?
If you’ve ever wondered and would like to know more, please join Empower Peace and OneVoice on Monday, May 19, for a Global Town Hall Meeting webcast from East Jerusalem linking Israeli and Palestinian youth leaders with students and young people from around the world.
Charlotte Allen writes in the Wall Street Journal about the creation of ASMEA, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, as an counterweight alternative to the highly-politicized MESA, the Middle East Studies Association.
Towering scholar Bernard Lewis, described by Allen as the "eminence grise" of Islamic studies, is oddly enough the founder of both. He was prompted to create this new body because MESA’s orientalist "political correctness" stifles true analysis, with all MESA activities – panels, papers, symposia – nowadays evaluated through rigid and cartoonish anti-Israel, anti-US filters.
What is disturbing and perhaps inevitable, as Allen observes, is that ASMEA may end up being hijacked by the opposite extreme. Few university academics attended the inaugural meeting, perhaps for fear of being ostracized by "liberal" dogmatists that rule today campuses. Military and defense specialists were prevalent, as were think tank researchers with hawkish "know your enemy" perspectives. ASMEA Vice-chair Fouad Ajami and Professor Lewis have been vilified as "pro-Iraq-invasion" neo-cons. ASMEA research may end up equally uncritical and trite as MESA’s, just from the opposite political spectrum.
A week ago I wrote about a potentially similar development in the area of "pro-Israel" advocacy and lobbying, with JStreet seeking to rise as the flag-bearer of left-wing pro-peace DC US-Israel constituents to counteract their perception of AIPAC as the right-wing, anti-Arab DC US-Israel alliance, potentially leaving less platforms for moderate, centrist voices.
A disturbing pattern emerges making it harder for centrist voices to be heard and represented. Mainstream moderates may make up the overwhelming majority in almost every area of discourse, but they are often overshadowed by the more passionate extremes, and their natural constituencies ready to embrace a black or white side of the spectrum.
Nuanced, balanced thinking has no natural constituency.
The same problem exists with the media. News Corp’s FOX and Wall Street Journal are primarily platforms for conservative thinking – and you rarely if ever will see an op-ed contribution that challenges the inclinations of an orthodox readership. NPR, CNN and The New York Times are primarily platforms for liberal (in the left-wing sense) thinking – and their editorials tend to be painfully unimaginative and caricatured. (Alas, it also tends to be that the more "entertaining" shows and moderators have definite political slants – whether it’s the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Mahr for the left, or Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly for the right; centrist thinking is much more "boring").
Each media platform increasingly caters to audiences primed for "affirmation" rather than "information" – G’d forbid if some new data point challenges our assumptions.
It is not just the institutions that are to blame, but all of us as products of these institutions. I am fascinated to notice how "news" developments are interpreted with such extraordinary bias by people who have formed an opinion.
I remember during the Bush-Gore elections debacle how every development, decision or institution that favored George Bush (US Supreme Court, Florida Administration) was seen as correct by Bush supporters and as an afront to justice by Gore supporters. Conversely, every development that favored Gore (Florida Supreme Court, Palm Beach or Dade County officials) was viewed as perfectly just and logical to Gore supporters and irredeemably flawed by Republicans.
Over the last two months I’ve also asked Clinton and Obama supporters to reflect on the bias of a news source or behavior from one party or the other. Almost never does an Obama supporter admit that the Obama campaign may be fallible, and almost never does a Clinton supporter admit that their candidate may have done something wrong.
Lack of critical thinking and unbiased analysis presents a major challenge to society.
Is it me or did anyone else notice the extreme bias of the media against Barak Obama this Sunday in all news shows? Whether it’s just a media circus game to extend the political party with a longer nomination fight, or whether it was Senator Clinton’s machine that appealed to the media establishment, it is fascinating how biased the media was.
The clearest and most patent example of downright dishonest coverage came this Sunday around 1:40pm EST when Jim Acosta from CNN covered the Indiana contest as follows:
Here is a teaser of two separate parallel campaigns about to be launched to mobilize Palestinian and Israeli citizens to push for a two state agreement in 2008.
The guy in the picture, by the way, is Sefi Kedmi, a OneVoice Youth Leader who used to belong to the right-wing Moledet party and then changed his political outlook and has been one of our most committed youth leaders on the Israeli side. He took the initiative to create an Israeli college campus network of activists and several other grassroots campaigns.
It is striking how often we resort to recasting our fallen leaders into molds of perfected humanity. No matter their flaws, once assassinated, their death transforms them to immortal epic heroes.
In re-casting our fallen, we humans do not just pay tribute to their courage and compensate them for their lost years. We also re-write history to make society seem more enlightened and history more bearable, if not downright inspirational. We re-write the fallen to have us seem more pious.
And so it is that Martin Luther King Jr., whose tragic passing we have just commemorated, has been re-written into a Disney prototype of a civil rights leader. Whereas at 39 years of age this courageous human had failings like all of us, we cast out any weaknesses and remember only his “dream” of co-existence. We purge any problematic comments that some today would consider “unpatriotic.” And we conveniently forget that on the night that he was killed he was being called everything from a sell-out to a “menacing” instigator by leading newspapers and critics. According to modern lore, we fantasize that he embraced and was embraced by all of mainstream America, except by the one coward who shot him.
The phenomena of post-mortem-transformations is not uniquely American. Yitzhak Rabin is now revered by all Israelis as a unifying symbol, the soldier of peace who sacrificed his life for the cause. He should indeed be admired. But history seems to have conveniently swept aside that a large percentage of the Israeli population considered him a reckless traitor and the media was replete with condemnations and calls for his lynching in the weeks leading to his assassination.
Why is lionizing historic figures a problem? Don’t we all need to be inspired? Yes, but in transmogrifying the fallen into impossibly perfect figures to emulate, we make it very difficult to sufficiently appreciate and praise the mere good effort of the still-living leaders, not to mention our own responsibility to do our small part.
Why is re-casting history a problem? Because it turns deficient but illustrative history into unusable fairy-tale legend, and it leads us to draw distorted lessons from the past.
Gandhi, for example, was an exceptional leader, but he was not – as most people imagine him today – a heavenly pacifist. Yes, his tools were non-violent, but his strategies were often not. He was a brilliant strategist who knew he had the high moral ground and forced violence to be inflicted on his people in order to arouse moral rage around the world. He would ask his followers to walk and push their way through British soldier lines, knowing the soldiers would be forced to either give up control or hold the line through brutal force against defenseless white robed activists. He did not draw blood but caused others to draw it. Yes, one can admire Gandhi’s many positive contributions, but nobody is served by blind exultation of his “non-violent” path without critical examination of his means.
Contrast Gandhi’s approach to the still-living Dalai Lama, who has at least so far truly adopted a path of absolute non-violence, calling on Tibetan youth not to engage in violence or cause violence to be unleashed upon them, advising he will resign as spiritual and political leader if his call is not heeded. Gandhi would most likely have reacted differently. We have yet to see if the Dalai Lama’s path will change the status quo in Tibet, but if the path itself is the way, there is plenty to study and reflect in his life.
Only by analyzing the unvarnished nuances of human character can we accurately evaluate our past, our present, and our future.
Only by avoiding the tendency to create mythical messianic figures who must come to the rescue to rid us of human suffering can we own up to our shared responsibility as human beings, however imperfect and flawed we may be, to do a little of the leading ourselves.