Liberal Media Lies? How Can That Be?

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What difference does it make if we manufacture news as long as we keep the unwashed informed.  (See 1 below.)
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Even a cat can do it:  Kitten On The Keys
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Stratfor's Friedman regarding Israel new strategic position.  (See 2 below.)

Meanwhile my friend Avi writes that Iran knows how to play chess (See 2a below.)
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Victimhood triumphs again regarding British white and American black achievements?  (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)  A World of Lies

By Dennis Prager

  | Remember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 — tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die because he was gay?

The American people were led from the outset to believe that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because of his sexual orientation. And that is how virtually every American still views the story.

In the words of Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., "Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement."

A play based on Shepard's killing, "The Laramie Project," became, according to the Wall Street Journal, "one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country." In 2009, Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, the Matthew Shepard law, which expanded the definition of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

It turns out that Matthew Shepard's murder had nothing to do with his being gay.

As early as 2004, the ABC News program "20/20" broadcast (to its credit) a denial by both murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, that the murder had anything to do with Shepard's being gay. It was, they both claimed, a robbery gone bad.

"It was not because me and Aaron had anything against gays," Henderson told ABC.

As a result, ABC News was widely attacked by all those who had a vested interest not in truth, but in maintaining the homophobia story: the liberal media, the gay-rights movement and the lawyers for the victim's mother.

The New York Times reported: "Those leading the charge against the heavily promoted ABC report [included] Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)."

Sean Maloney, the aforementioned congressman who was the lawyer for Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard's mother, called the program "just bad journalism ... there is a mountain of evidence that anti-gay bias was a trigger for the beating that left Matthew dead after they robbed him."

Now a book has been published, written by Stephen Jimenez, himself a gay man, that confirms the accuracy of the 2004 ABC News report. Matthew Shepard was involved in the hyperactive Wyoming meth drug culture; he was murdered over a drug deal; and his primary murderer was a bisexual who had probably slept with Shepard.

The media aspect of this case was summed up in a Wall Street Journal review: "Mr. Jimenez's book is most useful in illuminating the power of the media to shape the popular conception of an event. It shows how a desire for Manichaean morality tales can lead us to oversimplify the human experience."

That's a bit delicate. Actually, it shows how powerful the left-wing media are, how they are dedicated to agendas rather than to truth, and how much of what Americans believe is shaped accordingly.

Remember the 2006 story about nooses that were hung by racist white students in Jena, La., to signify lynchings?

CNN reported: "Jena's racial tensions were aggravated in August 2006, when three white teens hung the nooses the day after a group of black students received permission from school administrators to sit under the tree — a place where white students normally congregated."

That was the national story: There was a tree near the high school under which only white students sat, one day a black student sat under the tree, and the next day nooses were hung from the tree. As late as August 2007, the Washington Post still wrote about "Jim Crow-like hangman's nooses dangling from a shade tree at the local high school."

None of this story was true.

First, the tree was never reserved for white students. As the Associated Press reported in September 2007, "According to teachers and school administrators, students of all races congregated under it at one time or another."

Second, the nooses had nothing to do with lynchings or race. As the Christian Science Monitor reported in October 2007, "An investigation by school officials, police, and an FBI agent revealed the true motivation behind the placing of two nooses in the tree. "[They] were understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team."

Remember the white lacrosse-team members at Duke University charged with the gang rape of a black stripper — and how the New York Times and Duke and everyone in between reported this as an example of privileged white boys' racism?

That, too, was all a lie. The stripper made up the whole story. (Last week, she was convicted of murdering her boyfriend. Have you read about that?)

The list of lies is almost endless.

The New York Times reporter in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Walter Duranty, denied that there was a famine in the Ukraine in 1931-32 — the Communist-induced famine that killed about 5 million Ukrainians. And he won a Pulitzer Prize for it.

The media has recently portrayed the Kennedy assassination as the product of Dallas's "right-wing" "climate of hate" — even though a card-carrying Communist committed the assassination.

The media told us over and over about a heterosexual AIDS "epidemic" in the U.S. There was none. The media fabricated the heterosexual epidemic in order to remove stigma from gay males and in order to garner support for more AIDS research money.

Why all this mendacity?

There are truth-tellers and there are liars on the right and on the left. But for the Left, truth is subordinated to whatever it is the Left most cares about. Gay rights, minority rights, women's rights, government health care, and environmentalism are only the most obvious current examples.

That's why talk radio, conservative websites, Fox News and conservative opinion pages are so important.

Europe doesn't have them. And its population is brainwashed. No wonder Europeans believe that America and Israel are the most dangerous countries in the world. Their media told them so.

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2)Israel's New Strategic Position

By George Friedman

Israel has expressed serious concerns over the preliminary U.S.-Iranian agreement, which in theory will lift sanctions levied against Tehran and end its nuclear program. That was to be expected. Less obvious is why the Israeli government is concerned and how it will change Israel's strategic position.

Israel's current strategic position is excellent. After two years of stress, its peace treaty with Egypt remains in place. Syria is in a state of civil war that remains insoluble. Some sort of terrorist threat might originate there, but no strategic threat is possible. In Lebanon, Hezbollah does not seem inclined to wage another war with Israel, and while the group's missile capacity has grown, Israel appears able to contain the threat they pose without creating a strategic threat to Israeli national interests. The Jordanian regime, which is aligned with Israel, probably will withstand the pressure put on it by its political opponents.

In other words, the situation that has existed since the Camp David Accords were signed remains in place. Israel's frontiers are secure from conventional military attack. In addition, the Palestinians are divided among themselves, and while ineffective, intermittent rocket attacks from Gaza are likely, there is no Intifada underway in the West Bank.

Therefore, Israel faces no existential threats, save one: the possibility that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and a delivery system and use it to destroy Israel before it or the United States can prevent it from doing so. Clearly, a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv would be catastrophic for Israel. Its ability to tolerate that threat, regardless of how improbable it may be, is a pressing concern for Israel.

In this context, Iran's nuclear program supersedes all of Israel's other security priorities. Israeli officials believe their allies, particularly those in the United States, should share this view. As a strategic principle, this is understandable. But it is unclear how Israel intends to apply it. It is also unclear how its application will affect relations with the United States, without which it cannot cope with the Iranian threat.

Israel understands that however satisfactory its current circumstances are, those circumstances are mercurial and to some extent unpredictable. Israel may not rely heavily on the United States under these circumstances, but these circumstances may not be permanent. There are plenty of scenarios in which Israel would not be able to manage security threats without American assistance. Thus, Israel has an overriding interest in maintaining its relationship with the United States and in ensuring Iran never becomes a nuclear state. So any sense that the United States is moving away from its commitment to Israel, or that it is moving in a direction where it might permit an Iranian nuclear weapon, is a crisis. Israel's response to the Iran talks -- profound unhappiness without outright condemnation -- has to be understood in this context, and the assumptions behind it have to be examined.

More than Uranium

Iran does not appear to have a deliverable nuclear weapon at this point. Refining uranium is a necessary but completely insufficient step in developing a weapon. A nuclear weapon is much more than uranium. It is a set of complex technologies, not the least of which are advanced electrical systems and sensors that, given the amount of time the Iranians have needed just to develop not-quite-enough enriched uranium, seems beyond them. Iran simply does not have sufficient fuel to produce a device.

Nor it does not have a demonstrated ability to turn that device into a functioning weapon. A weapon needs to be engineered to extreme tolerances, become rugged enough to function on delivery and be compact enough to be delivered. To be delivered, its must be mounted on a very reliable missile or aircraft. Iran has neither reliable missiles nor aircraft with the necessary range to attack Israel. The idea that the Iranians will use the next six months for a secret rush to complete the weapon simply isn't the way it works.

Before there is a weapon there must be a test. Nations do not even think of deploying nuclear weapons without extensive underground tests -- not to see if they have uranium but to test that the more complex systems work. That is why they can't secretly develop a weapon: They themselves won't know they have a workable weapon without a test. In all likelihood, the first test would fail, as such things do. Attempting their first test in an operational attack would result not only in failure but also in retaliation.

Of course, there are other strategies for delivering a weapon if it were built. One is the use of a ship to deliver it to the Israeli coast. Though this is possible, the Israelis operate an extremely efficient maritime interdiction system, and the United States monitors Iranian ports. The probability is low that a ship would go unnoticed. Having a nuclear weapon captured or detonated elsewhere would infuriate everyone in the eastern Mediterranean, invite an Israeli counterstrike and waste a weapon

Otherwise, Iran theoretically could drive a nuclear weapon into Israel by road. But these weapons are not small. There is such a thing as a suitcase bomb, but that is a misleading name; it is substantially larger than a suitcase, and it is also the most difficult sort of device to build. Because of its size, it is not particularly rugged. You don't just toss it into the trunk, drive 1,500 miles across customs checkpoints and set it off. There are many ways you can be captured -- particularly crossing into Israel -- and many ways to break the bomb, which require heavy maintenance. Lastly, even assuming Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon, its use against Israel would kill as many Muslims -- among them Shia -- as Israelis, an action tantamount to geopolitical suicide for Tehran.

A Tempered Response

One of the reasons Israel has not attempted an airstrike, and one of the reasons the United States has refused to consider it, is that Iran's prospects for developing a nuclear weapon are still remote. Another reason is difficulty. Israel's air force is too far removed and too small to carry out simultaneous strikes on multiple facilities. If the Israelis forward-deployed to other countries, the Iranians would spot them. The Israelis can't be certain which sites are real and which are decoys. The Iranians have had years to harden their facilities, so normal ordnance likely would be inadequate. Even more serious is the fact that battle damage assessment -- judging whether the site has been destroyed -- would be prohibitively difficult.

For these reasons, the attack could not simply be carried out from the air. It would require special operations forces on the ground to try to determine the effects. That could result in casualties and prisoners, if it could be done at all. And at that the Israelis can only be certain that they have destroyed all the sites they knew about, not the ones that their intelligence didn't know about. Some will dismiss this as overestimating Iranian capabilities. This frequently comes from those most afraid that Tehran can build a nuclear weapon and a delivery system. If it could do the latter, it could harden sites and throw off intelligence gathering. The United States would be able to mount a much more robust attack than the Israelis, but it is unclear whether it would be robust enough. And in any case, all the other problems -- the reliability of intelligence, determining whether the site were destroyed -- would still apply.

But ultimately, the real reason Israel has not attacked Iran's nuclear sites is that the Iranians are so far from having a weapon. If they were closer, the Israelis would have attacked regardless of the difficulty. The Americans, on the other hand, saw an opportunity in the fact that there are no weapons yet and that the sanctions were hurting the Iranians. Knowing that they were not in a hurry to complete and knowing that they were hurting economically, the Iranians likewise saw an opportunity to better their position.

From the American point of view, the nuclear program was not the most pressing issue, even though Washington knew it had to be stopped. What the Americans wanted was an understanding with the Iranians, whereby their role in the region would be balanced against those of other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the Arabian emirates and to some extent Israel. As I've argued, the United States is still interested in what happens in the region, but it does not want to continue to use force there. Washington wants to have multiple relations with regional actors, not just Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Israel's response to the U.S.-Iran talks should be understood in this way. The Israelis tempered their response initially because they knew the status of Iran's nuclear program. Even though a weapon is still a grave concern, it is a much longer-term problem than the Israelis admit publicly. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried hard to convince the United States otherwise, the United States isn't biting.) Since an attack has every chance of failing, the Israelis recognize that these negotiations are the most likely way to eliminate the weapons, and that if the negotiations fail, no one will be in a more dangerous position for trying. Six months won't make a difference.

The Israelis could not simply applaud the process because there is, in fact, a strategic threat to Israel embedded in the talks. Israel has a strategic dependency on the United States. Israel has never been comfortable with Washington's relationship with Saudi Arabia, but there was nothing the Israelis could do about it, so they accommodated it. But they understand that the outcome of these talks, if successful, means more than the exchange of a nuclear program for eased sanctions; it means the beginning of a strategic alignment with Iran.

In fact, the United States was aligned with Iran until 1979. As Richard Nixon's China initiative shows, ideology can relent to geopolitical reality. On the simplest level, Iran needs investment, and American companies want to invest. On the more complex level, Iran needs to be certain that Iraq is friendly to its interests and that neither Russia nor Turkey can threaten it in the long run. Only the United States can ensure that. For their part, the Americans want a stronger Iran to contain Saudi support for Sunni insurgents, compel Turkey to shape its policy more narrowly, and remind Russia that the Caucasus, and particularly Azerbaijan, have no threat from the south and can concentrate on the north. The United States is trying to create a multipolar region to facilitate a balance-of-power strategy in place of American power.

Israel in 10 Years

I began by pointing out how secure Israel is currently. Looking down the road 10 years, Israel cannot assume that this strategic configuration will remain in place. Egypt's future is uncertain. The emergence of a hostile Egyptian government is not inconceivable. Syria, like Lebanon, appears to be fragmented. What will come of this is unclear. And whether in 10 years the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will remain Hashemite or become a Palestinian state is worthy of contemplation. None have military power now, but then Egypt went from disaster in 1967 to a very capable force in 1973. They had a Soviet patron. They might have another patron in 10 years.

Right now, Israel does not need the United States, nor American aid, which means much less to them now than it did in 1973. They need it as a symbol of American commitment and will continue to need it. But the real Israeli fear is that the United States is moving away from direct intervention to a more subtle form of manipulation. That represents a threat to Israel if Israel ever needs direct intervention rather than manipulation. But more immediately, it threatens Israel because the more relationships the United States has in the region, the less significant Israel is to Washington's strategy. If the United States maintains this relationship with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, Israel becomes not the anchor of U.S. policy but one of many considerations. This is Israel's real fear in these negotiations.

In the end, Israel is a small and weak power. Its power has been magnified by the weakness of its neighbors. That weakness is not permanent, and the American relationship has changed in many ways since 1948. Another shift seems to be underway. The Israelis used to be able to depend on massive wellsprings of support in the U.S. public and Congress. In recent years, this support has become less passionate, though it has not dried up completely. What Israel has lost is twofold. First, it has lost control of America's regional strategy. Second, it has lost control of America's political process. Netanyahu hates the U.S.-Iran talks not because of nuclear weapons but because of the strategic shift of the United States. But his response must remain measured because Israel has less influence in the United States than it once did. 

2a)  Iran Checkmates the P5+1

by Avi Jorisch

)In the deal between Iran and the six world powers, it appears that a rogue regime marching towards nuclearization has outmaneuvered the West. In disarming the sanctions regime so painstakingly put together over the last few years, the Iranians have given almost nothing meaningful in return. Instead, they are employing the same playbook that brought the mullahcracy to power and the very strategy that allowed North Korea to get the bomb. Above all, Iran now has an international mechanism that will allow it to effectively play for time.

Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the West has tried using covert and public negotiations with Iran, arms deals, direct confrontation, cyber-warfare, containment and indirect action against Iran's terrorist proxies. Most recently, the United States and its Western allies have strenuously employed sanctions to punish the banks, corporations and charities that have actively assisted Iran in its attempts to secure the bomb, and by all accounts, it was the sanctions that finally brought Iran to the negotiation table.

The goal of these sanctions was always to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program, not just to slow it down. Unfortunately, the new agreement fails to achieve that objective and takes the wind out of the sails of one of the few tools to have had measurable policy impact. The deal provides Iran with significant sanctions relief over the next six months. Iran is now expected to earn approximately $7-10 billion in oil sales, precious metal and automobile transactions that otherwise would have been frozen. The Obama administration is calling this a "small sum of money to be released." But the Iranian regime reportedly has only $20 billion in unrestricted access to foreign currency reserves, and the agreement will add another 30-50 percent to its coffers, a hefty sum for a regime facing a hobbled economy and a currency crisis.

A close reading of the agreement demonstrates that in return for these Western concessions, Iran is not obligated to stop uranium enrichment. On the contrary, through a gaping hole in the agreement, Iran may keep the 10,000 centrifuges already spinning and is merely forbidden to build new ones. It is not obligated to shut down its plutonium reactor at Arak, nor is it required to transfer its uranium and plutonium stockpiles out of the country.

Only hours after the deal came to light, the two sides were already at odds on its key provision: whether Iran has the right to enrich uranium. Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is openly rejoicing that the agreement recognizes this "right" and takes a credible threat of military action off the table. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry disputes both interpretations, but notes that "everyone has the right to be skeptical" of Iran's intentions.

Many are dubbing the agreement a "fool's bargain." In fact, in return for Iran's agreement to freeze the growth of its nuclear program, the West should have frozen any new sanctions while continuing to implement existing sanctions. For each step Iran verifiably rolled back, the West should have responded in kind. Ultimately, this type of approach could have ensured that Iran's nuclear program was intended for peaceful purposes only.

The United States is claiming victory because it persuaded the Iranians to agree to oxidize their 20-percent stockpile of enriched uranium down to 5 percent. But by all measures, this type of stockpile can quickly be ramped back up to 20 percent, particularly with the regime's existing centrifuges. According to Zarif, all the measures Iran will take are "reversible, and they can be reversed fast."

The P5 +1's message is clear: the sanctions regime is dying. Iran is free again to sell its oil, trade in precious metals, buy new parts for its ailing airline industry and grow its automotive sector. No doubt many in China, Japan, Germany, South Korea and India are already lining up to continue doing business with the Islamic Republic.

Iran is following North Korea's example. The six-party talks that followed Pyongyang's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003 were ostensibly aimed at finding a peaceful solution to North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Though the discussions by all accounts were substantive and fruitful, in October 2006, Pyongyang announced that it was testing its first nuclear weapon. North Korea had simply played for time to master the full nuclearization cycle and test its bomb.

Iran is no stranger to bazaar negotiations and employing tactics that are less than transparent. For example, during Ayatollah Khomeini's exile in Iraq and France, he worked with opposition groups ideologically opposed to his own – ultimately bringing him to power - making pacts with them using tactics such as khode (tricking an opponent into misjudging a position), tanfia (removing the enemy's sting), and taqiyya (concealing one's true opinions when dealing with the "enemies of Islam".

Bumper stickers around the Muslim world state that innallaha ma sabirin, God is with those who are patient. As creators of the game of chess, Iranians are not only masters of strategy and thinking several steps ahead, but have more than enough patience to go around. As the West struggles with a simple game of checkers, it looks like the Iranians have gotten their checkmate.

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3)

Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.

The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time -- as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.

"The Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough.

These data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the observations in a book titled "Life at the Bottom" by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said that, among the patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven.

What jolts us is not only that this phenomenon is so different from what we are used to seeing in the United States, but also that it fits neither the genetic nor the environmental explanation of black-white educational differences here.

These white students in England come from the same race that produced Shakespeare and the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton, among other world class intellects over the centuries. But today many young whites in England are barely literate, and have trouble with simple arithmetic. Nor are these white students the victims of racial discrimination, much less the descendants of slaves.

With the two main explanations for low performances on school tests obviously not applicable in England, there must be some other explanation. And once there is some other explanation in this case, we have to wonder if that other explanation -- whatever it is -- might also apply in the United States, to one degree or another.

In other words, maybe our own explanations need reexamination.

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.

In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise -- and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.

Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing.

We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.

Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working class schools on New York's lower east side.

You can find the data on pages 40-41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of "Teachers College Record," a journal published by Columbia University -- that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.

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