Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (240241)	8/29/2007 5:41:52 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 281500

Maybe the PM can't revoke them, but the Jewish majority certainly can. The principle is the same as the Jew living under some non-Jewish Muslim government in Arabia 500 years ago. No Elroy. There is rule of law, a Prime Minister, a Knesset, a (liberal) Supreme Court. There are many checks and balances on the PM's will. This is like saying the white majority in America could just revoke the citizenship of African-Americans. It won't happen. Now maybe you could invent some drastic national security crisis which would make it happen, like the Japanese-Americans in WWII (though even they weren't deported), but it's a wild stretch. You've changed your argument from "it sucks to live as a Jewish dhimmi in a Muslim country" to "it sucks to live under a dictator, regardless of religion". Absolute power in limited hands has the potential for great abuse, anywhere, regardless of religion/ethnicity. Others have made the claim that Jews lived very well under Muslim majority rule in Arabia in their history. You'll claim that Muslims live very well under Jewish majority rule in Israel. Perhaps both claims are accurate, but neither guarantees that the majority power will treat the minority well. All that has to happend for the minority to not be treated well is for the majority to decided to not treat them well. THAT'S IT. Sharia says what it says Elroy, and it's not mysterious about the status of dhimmis. True, clever lawyers can get around anything so maybe they have found a special "guest" status for expat workers to exempt them from jizra or something. They certainly go into convulutions to permit collecting intersting in Islamic banks, except it's never called interest, it's rent or something else. Again, if the Muslims here tell me that we/they live under sharia law, and Nadine says otherwise, who do you think we should believe? Whether YOU want to define it as Sharia is not that important anyway - my experience stands as proof that non-Muslims can live under a Muslim dominated government, and its totally fine, not at all as you portray it. Strange, eh? I'm in no way a supporter of Islam or all things Muslim, but I choose to live in a "Muslim nation" rather than the USA. You are super-partisan Israel supporter, but you choose not to live there. Kinda make you wonder...

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (240241)	8/29/2007 5:56:27 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 281500

Journalists do their best :-) A few words in defence of journalism By Gordon Robison, Special to Gulf News Published: August 28, 2007, 23:05 gulfnews.com I landed my first paying job as a journalist at age 12 after talking a local newspaper editor into hiring me to cover high school basketball. The road from the gyms of rural New England to mosques in Upper Egypt, refugee camps in Darfur and what sometimes seemed like the mass insanity of Baghdad has been a long one. What kept me at it (aside from an occasionally compelling need to come up with rent money) was a belief that this business is something special. At its best, journalism is not so much a profession as a calling. Yet if journalism is a calling it is one that today often elicits scorn and, worse, an assumption of agenda-driven mendacity from the very readers and viewers we are trying to serve. This came to mind twice over the last few days. The first time was on a Gulf-focused internet discussion board of which I am a member. Most of this group's members are academics - a supposedly sober-minded group that values the careful weighing of facts and the even more careful consideration of nuance. Yet, in disagreeing with an article about Lebanese politics in the New York Times several members were quick to heap scorn on the reporter who wrote the story. One member even admiringly cited a highly partisan Lebanese website that accused the Times of having a policy of favouring one Lebanese faction over another. The second time was in a maths class (of all things) at Harvard. As part of a graduate-level lesson on statistical analysis the class looked at both a press release on educational achievement and the data on which it was based. The professor's point was that the press release was technically accurate but fundamentally misleading - written to make the schools in question look better than they actually were. Yet the immediate reaction of several of these thoughtful, accomplished Harvard graduate students was that the exercise showed how "the media lie" (note here that the students were not looking at media coverage of the issue but at the press release put out by the schools department). Incomplete It is painful to see so many people assume journalists to be sharp-witted, agenda-driven plotters whenever they read something they do not like. People seem remarkably reluctant to believe that our work is sometimes incorrect or incomplete for no better reason than that we journalists are human and humans make mistakes. For better or worse this is the way things are. Yet, over three decades of working in newsrooms I have seen a lot of screw-ups (and been responsible for my share of them), but I have never seen anyone "lie" in the sense of consciously reporting a falsehood. With the passage of time I've also come to believe more and more strongly in the value of training. It is what instills the professional ethos that minimises bad reporting. This is not meant as a slur against blogging or citizen journalism, rather it is to say that "traditional media" still have an important role to play in our increasingly digitised world - one that bloggers and ordinary folks with cellphone cameras supplement but do not replace. For all the talk of how the anyone-can-be-a-journalist world of blogging will send traditional newspapers and television networks to their graves, it is surprising how much of the blogger's world exists in reference to the work of traditional media. Similarly one can say "I don't bother with newspapers any more, I get everything I need to know from Google News." Fair enough, but all Google News does is scoop up stuff that is already out there on the internet. Kill off "old media" and there will be surprisingly little left for Google to aggregate. Yes, newspapers and television networks are businesses and they are there to make money. But the media also, at least in theory, serve a higher purpose -not, I grant, always successfully - but isn't an informed public supposed to be a good thing in and of itself? This is not something unique to American or Western culture. Journalists from other regions may do things differently, and often operate under legal or cultural constraints many Americans have trouble even imagining. But conversations with colleagues from around the world long ago convinced me we all have more in common than is often supposed. Are we perfect? Of course not. Open to criticism? We certainly ought to be. But trying to twist the news and get things wrong? Seriously, if you really believed that you would not be reading a newspaper in the first place. Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.