Mondoweiss Agitprop
There's a lot of talk swirling around the blogosphere about a short video Max Blumenthal made last week in Jerusalem. Blumenthal purportedly wandered through downtown Jerusalem last week, the evening before Obama's Cairo speech, and recorded the sentiments of folks; the result he found and shows is that Jerusalemites have an obscene hatred of Obama the Nigger.
There's been a lot of discussion about how it's unfair to line up some inebriated teenagers (especially American ones who aren't allowed to buy liquor at home but can do so in Israel) and attribute their idiocy to Vox Populi; people who don't like Israel have countered by saying that what people say when they've drunk too much is indicative of what they think but don't say when they're sober (I agree on this, by the way).
My contribution to the discussion, if a discussion it is, is that Blumenthal's collection of interviewees is – at best – odd. He says he wandered through downtown, yet the video is made at two places only. One, Rivlin street, is the haunt of the American one-year-students crowd, though you can find tipsy European tourists there also, and of course some local Israelis. It's one block long, the whole street. The second place was Jaffa street near Ben Yehuda – indeed, the center of town – about a block away from Rivlin. And the whole time Blumenthal's camera was on, he never saw even one single Israeli? How likely is that?
Say you're interviewing the locals at Time Square about some matter, so as to figure out what Americans think. Inevitably, you'll come across a lot of tourists, it being Time Square, but what are the chances you'll find not a single card-carrying American? And if that happens, and you then post your video to Youtube to castigate America, what does that tell us about you?
I've been eying the folks at Mondoweiss for a while, wondering if they're worth some closer analysis; maybe they are, instead of Glenn Greenwald who is proving uninteresting for my purposes.
There's been a lot of discussion about how it's unfair to line up some inebriated teenagers (especially American ones who aren't allowed to buy liquor at home but can do so in Israel) and attribute their idiocy to Vox Populi; people who don't like Israel have countered by saying that what people say when they've drunk too much is indicative of what they think but don't say when they're sober (I agree on this, by the way).
My contribution to the discussion, if a discussion it is, is that Blumenthal's collection of interviewees is – at best – odd. He says he wandered through downtown, yet the video is made at two places only. One, Rivlin street, is the haunt of the American one-year-students crowd, though you can find tipsy European tourists there also, and of course some local Israelis. It's one block long, the whole street. The second place was Jaffa street near Ben Yehuda – indeed, the center of town – about a block away from Rivlin. And the whole time Blumenthal's camera was on, he never saw even one single Israeli? How likely is that?
Say you're interviewing the locals at Time Square about some matter, so as to figure out what Americans think. Inevitably, you'll come across a lot of tourists, it being Time Square, but what are the chances you'll find not a single card-carrying American? And if that happens, and you then post your video to Youtube to castigate America, what does that tell us about you?
I've been eying the folks at Mondoweiss for a while, wondering if they're worth some closer analysis; maybe they are, instead of Glenn Greenwald who is proving uninteresting for my purposes.
taken from :Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment