JINSA advocates censorship, military strikes on "partisan" media outlets

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"JINSA is the hard-line, Likudnik Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. They boast a pretty powerful line-up of present and former advisors including Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. If you’re looking for groups to blame for helping to get us into the endless war and now occupation of Iraq, JINSA is certainly a great place to start.

The new edition of their house organ includes this remarkable gem, Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars, from retired US army officer Ralph Peters who says openly what we all suspect to be true every time an Al Jazeera office accidentally gets blown up in a war with the US, or the Israeli Defense Forces accidentally shoot a reporter. Revealing both constitutional contempt and the creepy linkages between right-wing Jews and fundamentalist Christian Zionists, Peters actually calls the media godless "neo-pagans" and advocates not only censorship but military strikes. The media, he insists, are a "hostile third party" in war, and must be treated as such.

Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza.

What????? It gets worse…

Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. (Ed. emphasis) Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

more

[atreides1]

1. Isn't it great?

Men like Peters swore to defend the US Constitution, and yet had no intention of actually doing it.

What worries me is that there are others in uniform and in government service who probably think the same way he does!

It's people like these that we have the most to fear, not the Osama Bin Laden's of the world.

Men like Peters, Cheney, Bolton, and the rest are best described by this statement attributed to Cicero:

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor—he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation—he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city—he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.......Cicero, 42 B.C.E."

[bemildred]

2. Sort of like a "Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice"? nt

[EvilStepfather]

3. I wrote about this the other day elsewhere

And I hope it gets more attention.

This guy is a nutjob. What he says about Muslims, and Islam, is just insane.

[Douglas Carpenter]

4. JINSA gave once of their highest awards to Sen. Evan Bayh (Democrat of Indiana)

A man who came very close to being selected as the 2008 Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate. It may very well have been a last minute Internet campaign that derailed the Bayh nomination.

http://www.jinsa.org/node/721

"This is a hallmark of Evan Bayh. A former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and a past recipient Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Award for Distinguished Service from the neoconservative security think tank JINSA, "

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/03/evan_bayh_tough_but_smart.php

================

But then again, Evan Bayh is such a wacko foreign policy extremist that his biggest problem with the war in Iraq seemed to be that he was afraid it might prevent a war with Iran:

http://washingtonindependent.com/159/stop-obamabayh-08

" The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI) is pleased to welcome Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) as an Honorary Co-Chairman. Bayh becomes the third U.S. Senator to join the committee after Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced their participation on January 28.

The Committee is a neo-con group that was formed to propagandize the country into war. It boasted such illustrious neocon members as Bill Kristol, former CIA director James Woolsey, and even McCain senior foreign policy adviser and Chalabi-bamboozler Randy Scheunemann, whom Josh has been blogging about."

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/bayh_as_veep_he_cochaired_wing.php

[shira]

5. Marvin Kalb: "The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict "

The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-012


Marvin Kalb is no "hardline Likudnik".

[Donald Ian Rankin]

6. Wow. You seem to be implicitly endorsing the article quoted in the OP

Please tell me you aren't?

[shira]

7. I'm right with Marvin Kalb on this one....did you read any of his paper?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

9. Kalb doesn't answer the question.

I skimread Kalb's article, which didn't tell me anything particularly interesting - in a day and age when the Israeli loony right (at least on the I/P issue - depressingly, many Israelis with left-wing views on other issues are hard-right on this one) controls more than 3/4 of the Knesset, arguably more - depending on how much of the Labour party you count as not being right wing on the I/P issue - not being a "hardcore Likudnik" doesn't really mean anything.

Kalb's article specifically doesn't answer the question I ask you - you appear to be implicitly endorsing the article in the OP, which advocates censorship and military strikes on news outlets. You're certainly tying yourself in knots to avoid condemning it.

[shira]

10. Marvin Kalb is a classic liberal.......what did you get out of his article? can you summarize...

...briefly please?

And no, I don't advocate media blackouts or censorship....just integrity, objectivity, honesty, and accuracy that's all. Instead of being in the business of advocacy - and creating news - I want the media to simply do its job and objectively report the news. I wish the MSM had more of a liberal tilt to it.

Israel tried blackouts/censorship in Gaza. It didn't work, as Palestinian stringers reported exactly what Hamas wanted and the Western media ate it up. With western reporters allowed in Gaza, the likelihood of that would have been lessened - considering lessons were hopefully learned from Hezbollah 2006 (read the Kalb report).

[LeftishBrit]

8. Sounds pretty horrifying...

'Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.'

I HOPE that this was taken out of context, and that the writer was in fact warning of the dangers of a suppression of a free press, rather than supporting such suppression! Otherwise, it is fairly disgusting. I hope JINSA is not influential; on the whole, Jewish Americans tend to be at the more liberal end of the spectrum. I had not heard of this organization before, and admit that I managed to read the acronym as 'JINS' - the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, and was wondering how on earth something like this would appear there!

[Alamuti Lotus]

11. I suppose this goes both ways

Should JINSA applaud when it finds itself a target of war? Such unthink-tanks are also an active combatant in these matters, providing the propaganda umbrellas and state ideologies responsible for the slaughter of thousands in recent memory.

[Violet_Crumble]

12. Not for whackjobs like them, it wouldn't. I bet they don't consider themselves partisan n/t

[Alamuti Lotus]

13. Well, yes.. such rulings only apply to "those others" and it is unthinkable to apply in reverse