frandroid

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Palestinian organization (run by an anglo married to a Palestinian, sometimes controversially) has a good project going on. When meeting with media to discuss slanted media coverage, they were told that media are deluged with reader Zionist feedback asking them for "balanced" coverage totally slanted on the Israeli side. So they decided to try to muster some forces to oppose this, and created the CJPME Media Accountability Project. Basically it's a mailing list where they tell you about blatantly Zionist articles published in the media, and they invite you to write to the editors to complain about the slant. Interestingly, while they send you talking points, they urge you to not copy & paste the points, and come up with your own version, and to be polite (!!). It's an interesting exercise. You should sign up!

So anyway, I sometimes write something in. I just did right now. It's not quite polite but skirting the edge. The piece of trash I'm criticizing barely deserves acknowledgment anyway...

From: frandroid
To: rroberts@postmedia.com, aDonnelly@postmedia.com, fraser.myers@spiked-online.com, viv.regan@spiked-online.com, brendan.oneill@spiked-online.com
Subject: Re This Wasn’t a War Crime

Dear editors,

If Brendan O'Neill doesn't know what the legal definition of a war crime is, I suspect that your editorial board and your opinions editor (I guess that's the EiC, since...) probably know. So it would be nice if you could at least not let such uninformed and self-contradictory takes get out there. As well, it's quite established in international law that two wrongs don't make a right, so because Hezbollah keeps firing missiles into Israel doesn't mean that the pager attack isn't terrorism and a war crime, "because they did something like that too."

Of course as usual in your pages, anti-zionism gets subbed with
anti-semitism, a sophistric device you are well aware of keep promoting. It would be nice if the Post tried to show some sort of intellectual honesty instead of just propaganda.

Amusingly, O'Neill both characterizes Hezbollah as medieval militants, as well as recognizing their technological prowess (re: rockets, comms tech, etc). So which is it? It would be nice to have columns that are logically consistent from one paragraph to the other. The mud-throwing here is pretty elementary.

Finally, "spiked" is usually the term for stories that the editor has
decided were too trash for their own pages. I guess the Post is so hungry for content that even the spiked stories make it to print? Maybe I should try my own hand at it.

Yours in journalistic struggle,
--f

("Spiked" is the name of the section this "column" appeared in and also a podcast this this "writer" hosts.)