Wednesday, March 07, 2007

When Going Too Far is Never Enough

Funny how we come across some people: author and apologist for Syrian dictators Jürgen Cain Külbel seems mad at Medienkritik’s Ray, and oddly enough mad at the US, Israel, and even mad at most of Lebanon too. He’s even nearly expressing genuine emotions in his desperate comparison of the US’ dealings with the eastern Mediterranean as a “puppet play”, and implying that the Siniora government is a puppet of the US. The poodle meme dragged out one more painfully boring time.

How did we find this guy? He’s got his panties in a bunch over the fact that David’s Medienkritik organized a public demonstration in Mainz last year in support of President Bush and the war on transnational terror – something the Syrians have done more for through direct arming and tacitly allowing advanced terrorist training and technique development in the Be’kaa Vally of Lebanon for more than a decade. Using an accusation as a defense of his hatefulness, he accuses Ray of “working for the CIA”. Among idiots, this might actually seem novel. Evidently a handful of people practicing their right to free speech is a problem for this guy. He can’t wrap his brain around where the pluralism that permits him to trash others comes from or how to preserve it. It isn’t a matter of him disagreeing with anyone else’s VIEWS, he seemed apoplectic that they were allowed to be there at all.

What drew my attention to him was his blatant mendacity when it comes to the Lebanese which I'll get to later. But to get an idea of what passes for "advocacy journalism" these days, and what passes for intelligent discourse in the adolescent anti-western camp, you need to look at their actions and habits.

Forget free will, anyone who chooses anything other that his favorite repressive ideologues is “a puppet” – as if he isn’t. Talking straight through his teeth, he all but admitted to certainty that the Syrians killed Rafik Hariri while accusing the US and Israel of the deed, and seems a lot more concerned with constructing houses of cards to be fawned over in places which have no free press than making any informed or useful theses.

By way of German bloggers we learn that he's currently writing a book about Osama bin Laden entitled "Osama bin Laden -World Theater with a Corpse." In an interview he did with "Muslim Markt", he explains that his book will talk about how "USAma bin Laden" was already dead by the time of the 9/11 attacks, implying that he is a fiction created by the US to justify its' actions therafter. I suppose anyone with time-penetrating precience is sure to be capable of that sort of conspiracy! What's sad is that even in German the "corpse thing" is dated and tasteless, and if countless other attempts to make this same silly argument haven't grown stale yet, here he is trying to make it again. Too bad it only works once or twice with the same gullible audience, but by indulging the Syrians to find flattery in having a European writing it while focusing on their pet peeves, that a new field of interest might open up.

Like any bad propagandist, he also seems to have himself convinced of his own nonsense, and can’t seem to recognize that the majority of Lebanese detest the Hizballah, but like anyone with any serious criticism of the Ba'athists in Syria, are too scared by them to speak out. The fact that the far more serious problem that Hizballah, once a puppet, is now a barely controllable possessed puppet of Iran and Syria registers no-where in his work. One can hardly call that due dilligence.

Maybe this guy is grabbing his ankles for money, ideology, readership among fevered single-issue simpletons in the German-speaking geographic pocket, or simply doing it to get access to senior figures in Damascus. What seems particularly un-natural for any kind of writer is that he seems to be making quite an effort on their behalf of a state long obsessed with a neighboring state that has an actual free press.

Take look at his incredibly ignorant choice of images:

Puppets in blackface.

What century is he living in?

Apart from he seeming obsession with anti-capitalism (Syria is still a command economy), and manipulating the timeline and causes of Siniora’s appointment, here’s a sample of his rubbish:
Siniora obviously still believes in the US-American neoconservative idiocy of „nation building“ and to the spreading of western style democracy in the entire elbow from Morocco to Indonesia. And it obviously recognizes from Bush and cohorts would only install „democratic“ revolutions so long as only valid ones were established...

„L’état c’est moi”, is what Siniora thinks, because he’s following on a November 2006 opinion poll that didn’t take place in Lebanon, but mainly among the exiled Lebanese living prosperously in California, Ohio, and elsewhere under the star-spangled banner along with a few Parisians, the Israeli Prime Minister, and the former East German girl-scout leader who are behind him.
He goes on to question the motives of the protesters who wanted Syria-supporting President Emile Lahoud to step down, and also calls the Lebanese Prime Minister a “Guerrilla fighter for US democracy” and the first “Democratic Dictator” in Beirut.

There is absolutely no evidence that Siniora thinks any of this, or theorizes anything whatsoever about democratizing “ze elbow from Morocco to Indonesia.” It is far more likely that he has managed to see the same thing any humanist would: in democracies, ethnic and religious minorities aren’t singled out and slaughtered by unelected thugs. That this would have some appeal to the many religions and political views that very notion of The Lebanon was founded to protect should not shock this little man. But apparently it does.

And yes, Siniora does seem to believe in nation-building, just as Hariri did, he believed in the need to build back into existence from the dark days of Syrian “protection” that seemed to get a lot of people killed, a nation. His own nation. What WAS the Taïf accord if not just that?

As for taking potshots at Merkel, I can’t help but laugh at how much of a political slut this man is. Does he really believe that German foreign policy could have “made” anyone?, much less made a difference to anyone in the near east when they aren’t just disengaged from it, but aren’t even among the parties who have been historically entrenched in it? In Lebanon, German engagement is less than that of Canada's, and is limited almost entirely to selling them costly German goods inflated even more by an overvalued Euro. That lack of magnitude notwithstanding, he’s as blinkered as Michael Moore on 9/12 who stupidly believed that jihadists cared enough about the same issues he did to be shocked that they would attack states that voted for the Democrats.

Combining a fake populism by trying to throw red-meat to a potential audience and a racist's condescention of "who people are," Külbel is an example of the logical outcome of a societally trained incapacity to judge right from wrong. One that falls for the sort of relativism that gives ciphers and idiots way to think themselves intelligent and “fair”. It isn’t. It leads one from a lack of intellectual depth to making an entirely repugnant choice when they do finally think they know what they believe in. It also finds itself leading ultimately to supporting an unelected dictatorship that keeps political prisoners out of sight for decades in a callous bid to preserve its’ inner circle. It apologizes for the actions of tyrants, and does it to the cost of mankind's humanity.

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