BuzzMachine

Spade meet spade
: Am I blind? Perhaps I just have a narrow world view but I can’t find one blogger who is siding with the Palestinians against the Israelis. (Can you?)

So how come Bush is finding it so hard to call a terrorist a terrorist?

I feel a need to restate the obvious, following George Orwell’s “famous dicta” as paraphrased by Norman Podhoretz (see below): “There comes a point when the primary duty of an honest man is to restate the obvious.”

The painfully obvious:

Terrorists are the enemy. Terrorists are our enemy. Period.

Newspeak
: In the Jerusalem Post, Norman Podhoretz takes George Bush to task for waffling not just on the politics of the war in the Middle East but also on the language of it. Never, says Podhoretz…

…did he permit himself to be bamboozled by the idea so dear to so many denizens of those communities that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Taking the opposite position, he declared repeatedly that terrorism was itself evil, under any and all circumstances. From which it followed that there could be no such thing as a good terrorist.

Right. It has become known as the Bush doctrine: a terrorist is a terrorist; anyone who harbors a terrorist is a terrorist. Unless, apparently, his name is Yasser.

Podhoretz says it with greater subtlety. He complains about Bush falling prey to the phrase “circle of violence” to describe what’s happening over there in hell now.

A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words “cycle of violence” allow of no distinction between terrorist attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians in a military action. And in the context of the “Arab-Israeli conflict” (itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called “the Arab war against Israel”), to speak of a “cycle of violence” is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational parties….

Bush’s occasional surrender to the “cycle of violence” cliche has, in short, marked the limit of his power to resist political speech that defends the indefensible, and befogged the incandescent clarity about terrorism he began to achieve after September 11.

Podhoretz says Bush is leaving it to Donald Rumsfeld to be honest and blunt, as he was just the other day

Sounding like Bush when he had been at his best, Rumsfeld declared: “Murderers are not martyrs. Targeting civilians is immoral, whatever the excuse. Terrorists have declared war on civilization, and states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing.”

Amen. Amen. Amen.

Bush’s word waffling worried Podhoretz greatly:

As a Jew, I tremble for the harm that may come to Israel through President Bush’s loss of clarity — and with it his ability to restate the obvious. But as an American who believes with all his heart and soul in the necessity of my country’s war against terrorism, and in the justice of our cause, I also worry about the moral and intellectual and strategic damage done to that cause by the refusal to face the plain truth that the despots who tyrannize over most of the Muslim world hate the United States, “the Great Satan,” even more than they hate Israel, “the Little Satan.”

The pen can be mightier than the sword. It can also be weaker.

Is Yasser Arafat a terrorist?
: That is the simple question of the day.

I just watched an anchor on FoxNews go ballistic on the point.

The pressure is on from the right to get George Bush to hold to his own Bush doctrine and declare that those who harbor (or sponsor or breed) terrorists are terrorists.

The diplomatic, strategic, and tactical complications are obvious.

But the line is clear: We were attacked by terrorists. Terrorists are our enemy now, too.

Is Yasser Arafat a terrorist?

Absolut pundit
: He‘s back.

Hey, Mr. Pope, you twit
: So the Pope scolds Israeli for “humiliating” the Palestinians. Oh, for Christ’s sake.

How about condemning the Palestinians for selling their own children as murderers who are killing innocent Israelis, Mr. Pope?

Says the Times of London (with my italics):

The Vatican also denounced suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism by Palestinian extremists against Israeli civilians, reflecting the Pope

Do not turn off the lights
: If you’ve ever imagined what a soul looks like, it looks like the two towers of lights over Manhattan.

At dusk, the lights at the World Trade Center come on and you can barely see them, they are so light against a light sky, barely there, almost a secret.

Then, as the night grows deeper, the light grows stronger, clearer, more beautiful, more moving.

I took the pilgrimage to see the lights tonight because they will soon be turned off.

I drove down through Jersey City’s seedy side — well, seedier side — to Liberty State Park and people were gathering by the water to see the lights.

It was so much better than going to Ground Zero. There was no tacky tourist honky tonk here, no souvenirs of terror, no tourists gaping at the hole, fewer tourists taking pictures. One group did try to take a picture of themselves with Manhattan in the background, the flash on their camera lighting the light. But this scene was filled with life: people with proper reverance but without a hush walking to the water; lots of sound from kids running around and helicopters and planes and boats; the sight of office and apartment buildings across the water all filled with life and lights.

I was more moved by the towers of light than by anything I have seen or read or heard about September 11.

And that is why I appeal to Mayor Bloomberg to leave the lights lit.

They are all we have now from the towers and the day. They are a tremendous symbol of hope and assurance. They are beautiful. I can’t bear the thought that they will be turned off and that the hole in our city will go dark again.

Please don’t turn out our lights.

Old v. new
: I hold dual citizenship in old media and new (my InstaResume here). Today, once again, there is much buzz about these two media spheres — the media Flintstones against the media Jetsons — thanks to a blog-baiting column by a flaming jackass in beantown and retorts by Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, Matt Welch and by the end of today, surely many more.

But everybody’s been getting this slightly wrong. This is not about making a choice: old media or new media. They aren’t competitors. They are different.

New media is fundamentally new for one essential reason: The Web is owned by its audience. That cannot be said of any other medium; publishers, editors, producers, moguls own the printing presses and transmitters and they have always made their living deciding what we should know; they stand proudly on the other side of the barrier to entry.

On the Web, anyone can be a protopublisher. The people post in forums (we get thousands of posts a day from the audience on my company’s sites); they create web pages; they broadcast; now they write weblogs.

Collectively, this gives the Web its voice. That is the voice of the people.

Some old-media people aren’t sure what to do with that; some (like the beantown bozo) try to dismiss it; some are even scared by it. But the wise mediaman will just listen to that voice. The Web gives us an entirely new relationship to the audience, an entirely new way to hear what the people are thinking, what interests and concerns and excites them. There is no better way — no, no other way — to do that.

When that gullible gasbag in Boston — and the odd other old media types like him — denegrate weblogs and the Web, they are dismissing their very own audience. They are showing a complete lack of respect, even disdain, for their audience. They don’t want to hear what the audience to say. They want the audience to listen to them, not vice versa. As Lileks (who, I hope, hires me when he starts his paper) says with characteristic eloquence: “The newspaper is a lecture. The web is a conversation.”

But on our part, we in the new media world also should not dismiss the old. We do not have reporters and photographers out there asking hard questions and ferretting out facts and even risking their lives to inform us; old media operations do. Daniel Pearl was not a blogger; he was a reporter and that is an honorable and vital title. Let us be grateful for the work they do. Without it, we would know nothing; we would just be blathering.

What old media does best is give us the facts. Credibility is their asset.

What new media does best is give us perspective — a new perspective, the too-long-unheard perspective of the people. The people are our asset.

And new media does that best in weblogs because these are products of passionate interest where quality rises to the top. Nobody’s getting rich or famous (yet) blogging; we do it because we love it (I do it because I learn); and the best ones succeed because they’re the better than the worst ones and the audience knows the difference. Weblogs as a whole do an amazing job of editing the world of news, finding the best, warning of the worst, asking questions, poking holes, adding perspective and opinion and the voice of the people.

Both are valuable. Only the blind cannot see that.

The terrorist vacation
: I’m amazed that anyone is talking about exile for Yasser Arafat.

Picture it: Arafat — fat, sassy, and tanned under his pathetic beard of 10 hairs — is sitting on the sand in Casablanca, snarfing down the hummus and couscous as he gets on his mobile phone back home: “Send in another suicide bomber,” he orders. “Make it a young one this time… No, we just bombed a mall. How about a hospital? Have we done a school yet? Screw the peace process.”

He will make his people suffer and delight in making his enemy suffer as he basks.

Bad idea.

Fools
: So Glenn Reynolds finally had to make it clear that he wasn’t bought by AOL (who’d want to be with their stock — too damned much of which I own — causing flushing noises everytime it passes by on the ticker). It was only a clever Register April 1 gift to the gullible.

I wish Reynolds would out the Big Media guy who called him thinking this was real.

Note also a fine April foolishness from F’d company.

From the front
: A new blog from Israel [via Letter from Gotham].

These days here in Jerusalem, a security guard is posted outside just about every place that you might go. In front of Mega-groceries the other night there were two middle-aged guys standing in front with long guns and their fingers on the trigger.

Easter
: I had a bad moment at church this morning, Easter morning. I choked for a moment in the middle of singing the Hallelujah Chorus as I thought of the families of the victims of 9.11 at the same time that I was suffering my every-Easter doubts about resurrection and life everlasting and the very foundations of this day and this faith.

I’ve learned to live with these doubts. I measure the gap between doubt and certainty and call that faith. I’m not sure about this mystery, never have been, never will be (until I die). I choose to accept it, on faith.

But today, it hurt again to think about those people who fell and burned and crashed on 9.11 — for my doubts, my failure of faith, meant that I was not sure whether there was any comfort for them and their families in an afterlife, in meaning. I felt as if I failed them.

And as I kept thinking about this and about all the victims in this war — the innocents in the Middle East who have been blown up merely for the sin of living — I realized, as I often do, that if it were not for the resurrection and a belief in the afterlife and a few other fine points of theology, I might as well be Jewish (and this is why I have always wondered why Christianity separated itself so far from Judaism and its traditions; why do we not celebrate Passover together?). 9.11 made me feel closer to them.

Part of me wishes that we could send everyone in the Middle East to their rooms together until they can get along together — and leave us in peace. But, of course, the rest of me, the sane part, realizes that they can no longer be left to their own devices and that the time has come to take action and take sides. I choose to get past history — for it’s hard to decide how far back one has to go to decide who started this fight: to 1948 or to the pharoahs? I choose to judge the players on their actions today. I choose to ally myself with other victims of terrorism against terrorism.

The Passover murders are Easter murders as well. That is a lesson for today.

: David Warren arrives at the same place — namely, Jerusalem — from a different route.

My mind cannot wander to Jerusalem this year, without feeling a deep solidarity with my Jewish brothers and sisters, in Israel, under daily assault from suicide bombers, and in the shadow cast by a horrible war — the backward shadow of a war that is approaching. I pray for the Muslims, too, with all who stand at Heaven’s Gate, who must walk through “the valley of the shadow of death.”

But for the Jews I pray in solidarity, for they are once again under attack, not because there is a war, but because they are Jews.

After the Holocaust we vowed, Never again. Have we already forgotten?

It is time for all Christendom to remember, Never again. That we will not stand by, as Jewish people — as pregnant mothers, children, teenagers, old women and old men — are selected for extermination. That we are not indifferent in this matter, that we are not neutrals as between the victim and the murderer. That as Christians, and in the name of Christ, we stand by our brother and sister Jews.

Amen.

Jonestown: Jerusalem
: Arafat is looking like a cult leader, pure and simple. He reminds me of Jim Jones in the days before Jonestown, all paranoia and wishful martyrdom. Listen to Arafat on Arab TV:

…we ask Allah to grant us martyrdom, to grant us martyrdom. To Jerusalem we march

Hell is getting crowded
: Israel is not the only place being terrorized by suicide bombers of the Islamic stripe. Ten people at a Hindu temple in India were just murdered by a Muslim suicide bomber.

You won’t like what comes next
: Inspired by Victor Davis Hanson‘s line, “There will be no second Holocaust,” Will Warren pens a few right-on lines of his own:

Not concerned with what Allah wants or doesn

Dead letter box
: Penthouse‘s parent company is in danger of folding.

Arafat’s Panic Room
: Question: What happens if Israel does kill Arafat? They say they’re not trying to, but they’re attacking his headquarters, as he cowers in one room. A stray bullet or missile or angry soldier could take him out. What then? War tonight?

: Dear Mrs. Arafat, says Tres Producers.

Sorry we blew your husband up. We were trying to “isolate” him from the rest of his terrorist leadership, and we ended up

Cool is dead
: Many will have pointed to the NY Times declaration today that the Web, like an old girlfriend, is just no fun anymore.

I welcome this.

The Web became too cool, too cute, too soon.

The Web became useless.

Yes, I do worry that has Internet companies go out of the business and real companies reduce their Internet investments, there will be less on the Internet to engage the audience and the audience could shrink.

But the truth is that people are spending less time on the Web today because they’re wasting less time.

They’re not surfing; we see that in every focus group we do. People know what they want; they get it; they get off.

This is not a problem isolated to the Web. Other media can get useless, too. When I was Sunday editor of the NY Daily News, I started a new section with only one mission: Every story in it had to be useful. No thumbsuckers about city hall. No days with bag ladies. No cries of injustice. Useful. For too many newspapers, I said, had started to become useless.

TV regularly becomes useless and then reforms itself when it discovers that that’s a way to lose money. Ditto movies and books.

The Web was cool when it was new and then cool wasn’t such a bad thing. I started a bunch of sites that were Cool Sites of the Day and I was proud of that… then.

But now the Web is about getting information, about buying things, about communicating (and weblogs do help with two of three of those things).

So I welcome the Web’s new dullness. Let’s hear it for dull!

Ha!
: A FoxNews anchor asks Binyamin Netanyahu whether he believes Arafat’s offer of a complete ceasefire. Netanyahu seems genuinely surprised at the question and replies: “Are you joking?”

He says Israel must do to Arafat what America did to the Taliban.

This is going to get even uglier.

: To the death…
: You’ve been waiting for the TV trend in reality shows and extreme game shows to go too far, haven’t you? Been wondering when we’d see the first serious injury or death, right? The start:

A contestant on the US version of Dog Eat Dog ended up in hospital after taking part in one of the show’s stunts.

The 26-year-old man had held his breath underwater for two minutes.

He was taken to hospital by paramedics as a precaution after an emergency call was made to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

US TV network NBC identified the man only as a Los Angeles personal trainer.