[lbo-talk] Re: Watching the Watchdogs

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Oct 10 23:23:13 PDT 2006


On 10/10/06, Michael Givel <mgivel at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Response to Yoshie:
>
> Double checking your sources is an important and good thing.
> This is my post-positivist interpretation on the results below:
> It depends on the questions asked in the surveys as I noted yesterday.
> One factor, in my view, is the murder of journalists in a combat zone
> like Iraq. Some others, as you note, are various forms of possible or
> actual state censorship such as shutting down newspapers, including
> imprisonment or assassination of vocal press critics of state policy
> as a way to dampen criticism and as a human rights violation.
> Corporate censorship is also important, I agree. Bottom line:
> you need to put all of this information together and make a decision.
> Such as is Iran really oppressive in press freedom or is this a US
> plot to unfairly tar the country?

We agree on taking a totality of conditions into account.

Suppose Washington has a sudden change of mind and makes a sensible decision: it will normalize its relation with Iran, so that Americans can make money by investing into its oil industry. Then, even if Iran were 100% more repressive than it is now, few -- including leftists here -- would give a damn about it, as few did till it became part of the "axis of evil" constructed by Bush, except those who had special reasons to follow it (like expatriate Iranian activists, Iranian studies scholars, NGO staffers specializing in Iran, etc.).


> Personally, I have read a lot on their
> approach to the press and I think press freedom falls into
> a long line of other human rights violations against gays, woman,
> and of course the overt anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial practiced
> by the top leadership.

I have already said quite a few things about the questions of women, GLBT individuals, Jews and other ethnic/religious minorities, etc. in Iran, so I won't repeat them here. I also won't repeat my particular criticism of Ahmadinejad's remarks on the Holocaust and general criticism of the Holocaust envy found among some Arabs and Muslims.

That said, while we are on the topic of freedom, I'll raise a couple of points about it and the Holocaust here. Holocaust denial is literally a crime in a number of European states, for which a violator can serve a prison sentence. That is probably not a good idea. It does not appear to help diminish anti-Semitism, and it ends up giving ammunition to those who hold mistaken notions about it in the Middle East, for they can point to Europe's contradiction in its professed political liberalism and defense of free speech, which a number of Europeans are quick to invoke when it comes to defending things like the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. I'm not a free speech absolutist, and imho Europeans have a right to criminalize Holocaust denial if that is their democratic will; I'd simply question the wisdom of doing so.

Moreover, whilst condemning Holocaust deniers, we also at the same time have to create space for serious discussion about political uses of the Holocaust -- of the sort Norman G. Finkelstein has been the most dogged critic -- in mainstream political discourse, in the USA as well as Europe. Holocaust denials are to be criticized, precisely because they make legitimate public debates about political uses of the Holocaust difficult. The Holocaust can't be allowed to continue to serve as an implicit or explicit justification to take more and more lands away from the Palestinians and negate all their rights and liberties.


> Conflicts of interest should also be duly noted in the assessment
> --like government and intelligence funding sources. However,
> proportionality and proof of causal links are also important.

Sure. <http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=17794> <http://www.cpj.org/development/donors.html> <http://www.cpj.org/development/board.html> <http://www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/about_detail.html?ctxid=CH0058&docid=CMS1141811809778>.

Given them, it would be astonishing if they took corporate or private-public partnership censorship and information management as seriously as state censorship and information management or if they were as critical of the US and French (in the case of RSF) governments as they are of the states regarded as enemies by them. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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