Mideast Media Sampler 11/06/2011

From DG:

1) Mackey's bias

Robert Mackey is the lead blogger at the New York Times' The  Lede blog. After briefly leaving the Times for the Guardian, he's now back at the Times. All of the bloggers at the Lede are pretty open leftists. What Mackey brings to the job is an extreme anti-Israel bias. All of Mackey's tricks are on display in Video of Israeli Navy Intercepting Boats Bound for Gaza.


In order to impute greater authority to himself, he refers to Isabel Kershner as "my colleague." But she's a reporter, who deals with primary sources, he mostly deals with secondary sources. Mackey's standard operating procedure is to question every single Israeli claim and present anti-Israel claims uncritically. He even observes that the flotilla participants pointed out that other UN panels disagreed with the conclusions of the Palmer report that the blockade of Gaza was legal.  The news item he linked to reported on one of those panels. It was a panel of UN "rapporteurs," including the unhinged Richard Falk. With Mackey, if a source is anti-Israel, it is automatically credible and subject to no further scrutiny.

Walter Russell Mead makes an apt observation (via memeorandum):

One notes incidentally that the folks who denounce Israel for any failure to abide by UN wishes or resolutions don’t feel any better about those policies when, as in the case of the Gaza blockade, UN bodies find them legal.  For some people, the UN is a beacon of light and a call to the conscience of mankind when it takes an anti-Israel stand and an irrelevant nuisance when it doesn’t.
This is, no doubt, the response of a measured and careful anti-Zionism from which all tinctures of anti-Semitism have been carefully and thoroughly expunged.

Mackey, of course, resents being characterized as anti-Israel and has complained to CAMERA. A few months ago, CAMERA nicely critiqued one of his defenses.

2) Eid Greeting

President Obama offered greetings to the world's Muslims. He is following in President Bush's footsteps. However one paragraph bothered me (via Instapundit):

The Eid and Hajj rituals are a reminder of the shared roots of the world’s Abrahamic faiths and the powerful role that faith plays in motivating communities to serve and stand with those in need.  On behalf of the American people, we extend our best wishes during this Hajj season. 

Perhaps I'm being overly sensitive, but the Eid and Hajj celebrations do not show the shared roots of the Abrahamic faiths. For Muslims believe that it was (despite the explicit mention of Isaac in the Torah) that it was Ishmael who was offered. The celebrations are symbolic of the rejection of Judaism by Islam.

3) The Syria problem

Barry Rubin has previously written about how the Obama administration (and other political figures) have backed the Muslim Brotherhood's participation in opposition to the Assad regime in Syria. Khaled Abu Toameh adds some details in Syria's Choice: Murderous Secular Regime or Islamic Fundamentalists:

According to reports in the Arab media, Islamic fundamentalist groups have been smuggling weapons into Syria from Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.
Most of these weapons have fallen into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists, who are now waging a guerrilla warfare against Assad's security forces, the reports say. 

Syria's fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood organization, which was banned by the Syrian dictator's father, Hafez Assad, decades ago, has come back to life thanks to the uprising that was initially launched by secular forces.

4) What the Arab Spring needs: Educational reform 

There's an odd article in the New York Times, Arab Spring Spawns Interest in Improving Quality of Higher Education:

The institute presented its new report on the region, “Classifying Higher Education Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa: A Pilot Study,” at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar, which completed its third annual conference last week. 

The WISE conference, as it is known, is an international initiative financed by the Qatar Foundation, a government-funded nonprofit organization for education, science and community development. This year, the forum brought together 1,200 academic leaders and policy makers for three days of discussions on educational reform. 

The study, which lasted two years, includes research on 300 higher education institutions in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Issued in conjunction with the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies and with support from the Carnegie Corporation, the report was released at the summit meeting, its authors say, to underscore that countries in the region are trying to raise their educational profiles. “Many higher education systems in the region are still in transition phase — leaving old systems and coming to new systems,” said Adnan El Amine, co-author of the report, and founder of Lebanese Association for Education Studies. “Over all, Arab institutions’ involvement at the international level is relatively low.”

One thing worth asking is that if this foundation is funded by the government of Qatar, how independent is it? This is a question that isn't even addressed.

The report mentions that more universities are funded by private organizations. But the nature of the education will vary according to the goals of those organizations. No background here is provided. And of course if the governments become more Islamist in outlook, that will likely have an effect on the curricula too. The concluding paragraph makes sense:

During the WISE conference, the issue of ensuring quality of education, and its link to employing young people, was at the forefront of discussions. “We cannot afford to produce graduates who don’t fit the needs of the market anymore,” said Sheika Mozah bint Nasser, chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation “We have to have an education system that prepares them for jobs and builds critical thinking in a dynamic environment.”

This is correct, but hardly profound. Of course you want an education system that prepares students for the economy, but you need a well functioning economy first. There seems to be a disconnect between what's happening in the Arab Spring and the focus of this conference.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Middle East and Media Bias and Spring.