Israel-ISIS Analogy? CNN’s Zakaria Puts Foot in Mouth Again

...What’s the secret of Zakaria’s charmed life on CNN? Viewers see what CNN management still won't; in addition to plagiarism and insufficiently cited sources, misplaced appeals to authority and tortuous analogies do not make Zakaria a foreign policy expert. Rather, they undermine his pretense to being one

Myron Kaplan..
CAMERA Snapshots..
10 February '15..

Fareed Zakaria’s take on Feb. 9, 2015 cited the Irgun, a covert Jewish group in British Mandatory Palestine, as an inspiration for ISIS’ (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) terrorism barbarianism. Irgun was one of three Jewish underground military organizations in 1945-1948 that fought to bring about the end of the U.N. Mandate and the establishment of a Jewish state. Zakaria has demonstrated a compulsion to see Israel darkly, regardless of facts (examples here, here, here), and this is one more piece in the pattern.

Here, Zakaria implicitly equates ISIS to Irgun — Islamic fundamentalists who commit mass murder of children, trade captured minority women as "wives" and "execute" prisoners by beheading and immolation to Jewish nationalists who attempted to avoid non-combatant casualties.

ISIS slaughters and enslaves as many as it can of those opposing its ideology bent on establishing a world wide caliphate under sharia (Islamic law). But the Irgun, a small group numbering less than 2000, aimed primarily at destroying property. It did not target noncombatants, let alone insist at gunpoint that non-Jews convert to Judaism, on its way to compelling Britain to remove its troops from what was to become Israel.

Zakaria’s Fiction - No Accountability?

Zakaria plays an authority about foreign policy on television but the closer you look at his views, the shakier his claim to expertise looks. Opinion columnists who need to doctor the facts in order to make their points aren’t merely wrong, they are charlatans of the sort that makes plagiarism look benign.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
08 April '13..

Last summer television personality and columnist Fareed Zakaria was suspended by both TIME magazine and CNN for committing plagiarism in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post. Yet the ubiquitous voice of conventional wisdom about foreign policy was soon back in his familiar haunts undaunted by his humiliation and allowed to pretend as if nothing had happened. But the problem with Zakaria wasn’t his lack of acknowledgement of the work of others so much as it is his penchant for ignoring inconvenient facts when advocating the policies that he urges the country to adopt as if they were self-evident.

A particularly egregious example of this trait was made clear last month when Zakaria was writing about President Obama’s trip to Israel. Zakaria wrote a column that endorsed the president’s speech to Israeli youth to pressure their government to make peace with the Palestinians. While, as we pointed out at the time, this appeal was directed to the wrong side of the dispute, Zakaria was entitled to his opinion about Israelis ought to do. What he was not entitled to was his own facts about the situation.


Zakaria wrote the following in support of his belief that the Israelis should go the extra mile and start making concessions:

After all, Israel has ruled millions of Palestinians without offering them citizenship or a state for 40 years.

As anyone who has paid even cursory attention to the conflict in the last generation, this is patently false.

CAMERA - Should Fareed Zakaria Have Challenged Erdogan's False Accusation ?

SS
CAMERA/Snapshots
03 October '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/10/should_fareed_zakaria_have_all.html

As CAMERA reported, CNN's Fareed Zakaria issued a correction of the incendiary statement made on his show by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan accusing Israel of killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Zakaria says the problem was a faulty translation of Erdogan's statement. While it is commendable that Zakaria issued the correction, by defining the problem as a faulty translation, he sidesteps his own responsibility as interviewer and host to directly challenge what at the time appeared to be a defamatory accusation.

Erdogan's statement, as it was translated and broadcasted, accuses Israel of perpetrating massive and indiscriminate killing. Zakaria offered no challenge to Erdogan. If he had, Erdogan could have clarified or corrected what he said or Zakaria could have exposed his statement as libelous.

There are three possible explanations as to why Zakaria did not challenge Erdogan at the time. None of these explanations presents Zakaria in a favorable light.

1) He did not want to confront the Turkish Prime Minister while interviewing him. If that is true, then Zakaria's reputation as an incisive interviewer who challenges his guests is diminished.

2) He did not know that Israel has not killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. If that is true, then his reputation as a maven of international politics has been dealt a blow.

3) He wasn't paying attention or didn't consider it important enough to challenge Erdogan. If that is true, then his competence and integrity as a journalist are open to question.

Rather than simply blame it on mistranslation, Zakaria should have been more forthcoming and admitted an error of judgement.

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Fareed Zakaria Paints Hezbollah as More ‘Tolerant’ Than GZM Protesters

Ron Radosh
pajamasmedia.com
26 August '10

Fareed Zakaria spoke last Sunday on CNN — on his weekly program Fareed Zakaria GPS — with his usual haughty display of what he considers to be the great wisdom he regularly presents to his audience. The would-be secretary of State told his viewers this:

And now for the “Last Look.” With all the talk about places of worship and where they do and don’t belong, I wanted you to see this. This is the Magen Abraham synagogue. It’s not in Miami. It’s not in Tel Aviv. It’s in Beirut. That’s right, Beirut, Lebanon.

The synagogue is just now emerging from a painstaking restoration project. When the repairs began over a year ago, the temple was literally a shell of its former self. So why did this nation, often teetering on the brink of religious hostilities and hostilities with Israel, restore a Jewish house of worship? To show that Lebanon is an open and tolerant country.

And indeed, the project is said to have found support in many parts of the community, not just from the few remaining Jews there, but also Christians and Muslims and Hezbollah. Yes, Hezbollah — the one that the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Hezbollah’s view on the renovation goes like this. “We respect divine religions, including the Jewish religion. The problem is with Israel’s occupation of Arab lands … not with the Jews.” Food for thought. Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week. Stay tuned for “Reliable Sources.”

If you insist on seeing his delivery, you can watch it here.

This reminds me of nothing less than the famous phony documentary the Nazis made about Theresienstadt as they were creating this showplace concentration camp to try to fool the world, to show everyone how good they were to those Jews they were actually sending to the death camps.

(Read full article)

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Force Your Friends to Give In, Pay Off Your Enemies:

Two Newsweek Articles and the Obama Administration’s Foreign Policy Philosophy

Barry Rubin

The Rubin Report

21 September 09

I want to start by talking about two specific articles and then draw some conclusions about the current philosophy of U.S. foreign policy so please keep reading. Ready? Here we go:

So let me get this straight. Newsweek publishes an article advocating “tough love” on Israel, insisting that this U.S. ally must be pressured into making huge concessions in order to “save itself” and then publishes another article advocating bribes to the anti-American, radical Islamist, terrorist-sponsoring Taliban so that it will stop attacking America.

Is something wrong here, with each of these two themes individually and the sharp contradiction between them?

Well, yes there is.

Fareed Zakaria is one of many acclaimed “foreign policy experts” who, after years of reading their writings I can’t possibly understand why they should be acclaimed foreign policy experts. True, it is too easy to oversimplify in ridiculing his article, "The Way Out of Afghanistan: We need to buy off our enemies,"published on September 12.

The British long used the bribery of tribal chiefs to govern that area—and a number of others as well—and U.S. payoffs to Iraqi tribes have played an important role in undermining the Iraqi insurgents among sections of the Sunni population. So one can argue—although there are also arguments against it—that bribing tribes can be a valid tactic.

But in context this argument shows just how dangerously out of touch such positions are. Could the United States have paid off the Cuban or Vietnamese Communists to keep the Communists out of power? We are talking here about the Taliban and its supporters, ideologically motivated Islamists who genuinely believe in their ideology. No, you cannot buy off the Iranian regime or the Syrian regime or Hamas or Hizballah or the Iraqi insurgents with money.

Only a few hours ago an Arab friend asked why Americans simply seemed incapable of understanding the nature of their enemies. I replied that Americans—certainly not those in intellectual and political power--just don’t take ideas and ideology seriously, find it impossible to conceive that people would fight, die, and kill for their beliefs; would be motivated by things other than material gain; would act against their “rational self-interest.”

And if anyone doesn’t understand that these people are dedicated, serious, willing in many cases to sacrifice their lives, believing that the deity has commanded them to behave as they do he is going to lead the West into disaster. By the way, since they think they’re winning so why sell out?

When Zakaria writes, “The Taliban is proving a tougher foe than anticipated,” isn’t that precisely because of the factors mentioned above? If it was so easy to buy off the Islamists in Afghanistan why didn’t the Soviets succeed in doing so?

He continues by saying the problem has been that, “efforts to reach out to the Taliban so far have been limited and halfhearted.” Well, what makes it different from saying that the problem with al-Qaida is that the United States hasn’t tried hard enough to reach out to them? Oh, perhaps it’s because Usama bin Ladin has all the money he needs already? Is that the only distinction?

Zakaria concludes, “A few years from now, we can be sure that Afghanistan will still be poor, corrupt, and dysfunctional. But if we make the right deals, it will be ruled by leaders who keep the country inhospitable to Al Qaeda and terrorist groups like it. That's my definition of success.”

Yet if one is giving to people who already are committed to Taliban and al-Qaida, why shouldn’t they just take the money and use it to seize power? Also, in common with current doctrine that claims to be liberal but is in contradiction to the liberalism of every previous decade, Zakaria is indifferent to the degree of repression and oppression that involves. For example, while it is probably true that the fate of women in Afghanistan won’t improve over the next few years no matter what the United States does, pursuing a policy that actually sells them into slavery seems a pretty sleazy thing to do.

I seem to remember generations of liberals excoriating conservatives as people who backed ruthless, oppressive dictators because it was good for investments or helped to fight Communism.

Perhaps this is an idea of broader merit. The United States could try to pay off all the Islamists to stop taking anti-American action, perhaps even watch them seize power (say, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt) in exchange for a promise not to bother the United States; possibly feed Israel to them (which matches up with the “tough love” Newsweek article), give Central Europe to Russia as a sphere of influence, and so on.

Yet at bottom I don’t think the Obama administration is following some left-wing policy to sell out U.S. interests, or Israel, or Central Europe. Something else is going on. It is instead a policy of saying:

Don’t bother us. We don’t want any confrontations. We don’t want any crises. We don’t want to have to fight anyone. Pressure your friends to make concessions because they should give in rather than battle for their rights. Pay off your enemies so they don’t come after you.

And this is the philosophy of all too much of the contemporary media, academia, and elites in the West. It could work politically. By staving off conflicts, governments can hope to please their publics who don’t want conflict and war and hearing about people hating them. Then, too, they can claim success at having avoided crises.

This applies to U.S.-Israel relations as much as it does to U.S.-Taliban relations. The administration loudly proclaimed that it would bend Israel to its will, force it to give a big concession while getting nothing in return. Yet once Israel resisted, the administration backed down.

That’s one reason why U.S.-Israel relations are going to be okay. The administration doesn’t want a confrontation with Israel any more than it wants one with Iran. And the fact that there is a lot of domestic popular and congressional support for Israel reinforces that fact.

The Obama Administration is not responsible for these Newsweek articles. But the general worldview from which it emerges underlies their approach to international affairs.

Will the world let the administration get away with this approach? We will see. It is unlikely that the administration will be bothered by protests from friends who feel insufficiently protected or even betrayed. But it may not be able to disregard the aggressions of anti-American radical forces which see this passivity and fear of conflict as a splendid opportunity.

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