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Banned
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
.....Do you trust the casualty numbers given by the Palestinian authority?
Do you trust the numbers from major news organizations?
What do you attribute the apparent acceptance at face value of these Palestinian faked incidents?
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ustwo, the source of the "pallywood" video, is Harvard professor, Richard Landes, and the domain registration of the website where it originates, is
http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whoi...rg&type=domain
Richard Landes....
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http://www.seconddraft.org/about_us.php
ABOUT US
We are, at launch, only a website with some unusually revealing and important video footage we think many people need to see.
<b>Because those of us working on the opening dossier at this site are primarily American, French and Israeli Jews, that constitutes the initial core inspired to put up this website and to manage the material that comes in about Pallywood.....</b>
.......Richard Landes is a Professor in the History Department at Boston University. He was trained as a medievalist and wrote his first book on a series of forgeries that had fooled historians for centuries, even after a scholar in the 1920s had shown decisively that the texts were fiction. In addition to working on medieval peace movements and the relations between elites and commoners in 11th century France, he focuses on millennial and apocalyptic movements. In addition to courses on medieval history, he offers courses in "Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace", "Europe and the Millennium," and "Honor-Shame Cultures, Middle Ages, Modern World." He is completing a book entitled Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. It was as part of his research on this subject that he came upon the Pallywood tapes.........
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http://www.bu.edu/history/faculty.html#Landes
Richard A. Landes (B.A., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., Princeton University) Medieval history, millennial studies
Professor Richard Landes is the author of Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989-1034 (1995) and co-editor with Thomas Head of The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Responses in France around the Year 1000 (1992). He is currently working on a two-volume study on the role of apocalyptic expectations in Western culture.......
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http://www.bu.edu/mille/people/rlpages/ChiraqIraq.html
Sailing Full Speed in Iceberg-Laden Waters
Paris, March 5-16, 2003
I came to Paris with two things on my agenda. First, as a medievalist, I wanted to see what was going on among my colleagues over the last several years concerning my period of expertise — the turn of the 10th-11th century — and second to find out if there were an opposition to what strikes me as the incredibly destructive diplomacy of Jacques Chirac. For my colleagues, I had a question about the status of a very bad book by Sylvain Gouguenheim about the year 1000 (in which I was cited more than any other author including Georges Duby, in every case negatively), and its impact on the thinking of medievalists working on the period. For any Frenchman — cab driver, students singing drinking songs in the street at 2 AM, people sitting in the metro and the café, colleagues and friends —<h3>I wanted to know why Chirac had pursued an obstructionist policy that humiliated Bush and protected Saddam,</h3> rather than playing nice cop to the USA’s tough cop and telling the Arab league, "Look, our good friend the Americans are pissed, and rightfully so. Saddam has got to go. We don’t want a war, so you see to his removal, and if you do, we can guarantee you that we can hold back the USA. If not, we can’t promise anything."...
....A deeply disquieting self-satisfaction permeates the French position on the war in Iraq. Demonstrators express pride at the fact that their nation stands tall for peace "finally we can feel good about France!" says a young student; the press speaks of the virtually unprecedented rates of approval for "Chirac le pacifique"; intellectuals delight in dismissing Bush’s motives as those of vengeance (for his father, not 9-11), and oil. "Tout le monde le sait, c’est une guerre de petrol."
Of course such positions have paper thin substance, dissolving the moment one mentions the possible motives of Chirac that relate to the punitively favorable oil contracts the French have with Iraq, and with the myriad ways that France (and Germany and Russia and China) have armed Saddam over the past decade. Indeed one of the major reasons that Chirac says nothing about removing, but only "disarming" Saddam may have much to do with his fears that another regime, especially one that results from an American invasion, would reveal the depths of French complicity with both the arming of this maniac and the victimization of his people who starved while the French made deals in which 10% automatically went straight into Saddam’s personal bank account.
Do the French know this? I get two answers when I raise the issue. First, denial linked to insistence that there are no proofs and if America knew this why did they not produce them. Second, brazen acceptance. "Mais tout le monde le sait. [Everyone knows that.]" Sometimes it’s the same person at two different points in the conversation, here making the invidious comparison between vile American motives and noble French ones; there giving me a lecture on the "realism" of the French and the naiveté of Americans. As Jacques Revel, in his devastating book on French anti-Americanism notes, it’s the characteristic irrationality of French narcissism that it can hold two mutually contradictory notions in its head at the same time, as long as it makes them feel good about themselves. And to feel good means demonizing the US. A colleague whom I greatly admire and have always considered the most independent of the medievalists I’ve come to know said to me, in all seriousness: "The USA is unquestionably the most dangerous country in the world, far more than Saddam Hussein, than North Korea, than anyone." "How can you say that?" I asked in astonishment. "Because it’s the most powerful country in the world and it’s been taken over by the fundamentalists." Now my friend was not among those many of his countrymen who snatched up copies of a ludicrous book by a Frenchman claiming that the Pentagon attack of 9-11 did not actually occur (thus placing them alongside the Muslims around the world who believe that the Mossad destroyed the WTC as ridiculous conspiracy mongers), but he partakes of the driving thirst for everything bad he can hear about America.
The spectacle of an entire nation (certainly its intelligentsia) prey to a collective delusions of this nature, especially when the results are so destructive for them in the long run, is a sobering experience. It calls into question the idea that you need totalitarian control of the press in order to control information. Here we have a intelligent and educated culture with a high level of esprit critique with access to a wide range of material both in their own press (although it’s an effort to find it), and foreign press (especially on the WWW), and it systematically deludes itself. Sometimes I felt like I was trying to talk someone down off of a bad acid trip: as long as I could maintain eye contact and reason firmly with them, they could follow; but as soon as the connection was broken they’d return to their delirium. .......
......The French may not be les tou-tous of the Americans. But they are Chirac’s sheep, and in this case, they are being herded to their destruction by wolves who do not even bother to disguise themselves. Why bother when the French, especially the French left, imbued with a supreme sense of their intellectual and moral (!) superiority, do such a good job dismissing, minimalizing, marginalizing, and ignoring anything that might disturb their comfortable and admirable self-image?......
<b>.......The terrible thought that dawns on me is that if the war goes well for America and the books reveal the degree of illegal weapons trade of the four big countries "for peace" — France, Germany, Russia, China — will the French lead the world in conspiracy theories that permit them to blame the USA and Israel for their own incredibly self-destructive behavior which has come back to bite them?</b>
I return to the US to find an article about the problems of French-American relations in the wake of these events. The American journalist walks in the streets of Paris and comes away with a characteristic French conclusion. "It’ll blow over." "It’s merely a diplomatic tiff." "It’s not anti-Americanism, it’s just a dissatisfaction with Bush’s policies." All through the article, I could hear the strains of the favorite French chorus, "il faut dédramatiser." Helas, that is probably just what the renown frog who fails to jump from a pot of water as it goes gradually from cold to boiling tells himself every step on the way to getting cooked.
Richard Landes
Department of History
Boston University
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Quote:
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Aug...USIraq,00.html
Pentagon Generals Warn of Iraq Civil War
Friday, August 04, 2006
By ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON — Two top Pentagon commanders said Thursday that spiraling violence in Baghdad could propel Iraq into outright civil war, using a politically loaded term that the Bush administration has long avoided.
The generals said they believe a full-scale civil war is unlikely. Even so, their comments to Congress cast the war in more somber hues than the administration usually uses, and further dampened lawmakers'hopes that troops would begin returning home in substantial numbers from the widely unpopular war in time for this fall's elections.....
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You touched on the key question in your comments in your thread's OP....where do you get your information....your sources for news? What sources do you trust to shape your opinions? The sources that we trust to influence our individual opinions result in some of us predicting consequences and outcomes of political policies, instead of finding ourselves blindsided as events overcome inaccurate perceptions. The position that the Bush administration now finds itself in, with regard to the "success" of it's mid-east, foreign relations, fiscal, and domestic policies, today, vs. in March, 2003, being a case in point. What did Richard Landes "get right" in his 2003 rant?
Reading Richard Landes's "rant" on Chirac, and his opinions of Chirac's constituency in France, written a week before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the seconddraft.org, "About Us" description of Landes, et al, trigger a reaction in my brain that sez, <b>this is not an unbiased, or an evenhanded, observer/chronicler/analyst of events/history.</b>
It was quicker and easier to research Landes's reputation for accuracy and evenhandedness, than it would be to watch his video. I have to "consider the source". In regard to Landes's blind support of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and his smear of the French and support of Mr. Bush, I have only to ask the question, "what have professor Landes and the folks who think similarly to the way that he does, been correct about, in their support for mr. Bush and his war in Iraq?" The obvious answer is "not much". If Landes's "pallywood" video represents a new departure from Landes's recent dismal track record in "picking sides" in the politics and justifications of war, I'm sure I'll read about it in the Times or in the Post......
Last edited by host; 08-04-2006 at 12:50 AM..
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