person:ben shapiro

The New Zealand shooting put the media’s Islamophobia problem on display yet again
▻https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-saeed-new-zealand-shooting-islamophobia-media-20190315-story.html

Take, for example, language that is used to describe Muslims.

In the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, there were descriptions of the mosque and its worshipers as “peaceful” — by the media as well as by well-intentioned, horrified onlookers around the world.

The use of the term “peaceful” seems, at face value, benign, but it is a term that insinuates that Muslims and mosques, by near default, are violent unless we categorize and prove them to be otherwise. Muslims, themselves, have adopted the language of “Islam means peace” as a means of protection against violence and accusations of dual loyalty. The choice that is given to Muslims is one that defaults violence: We are either violent or we are against violence.

The 11 worshipers killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018 were not called “peaceful worshipers.” The Sutherland Springs Church, which saw 26 of its congregants killed in 2017, wasn’t called a “peaceful church.”
But the acceptability and normalization of Islamophobia goes beyond that: It’s when a black, visibly Muslim woman in Congress has her own party partake in an Islamophobic campaign against her, a campaign that hinged on the assumption that Muslims, by default, are anti-Semitic.

It’s when those who have spent a large part or the entirety of their careers fear-mongering about Muslims are rewarded by prestigious institutions with Ivy League fellowships or columns in the New York Times.

It’s when a former U.S. President gets up in front of tens of thousands of fellow party members and demands a loyalty test from Muslim Americans whose vote he is trying to collect for his candidate wife.

It’s when an editor of one of the most respected journalistic institutions in this country casually tweets about “halting and repatriating Middle Eastern mass migration to Europe to keep it safe.” And then does something similar four years later in a piece about how maybe the fascists have a point about “enforcing the borders.”

There is “good” Islamophobia — it’s not all Fox News, Ben Shapiro and right-wing chatrooms.

There is Islamophobia we accept, as though it is simply a known truth, because we accept the foundational premise of Muslims having a propensity toward violence, toward not being loyal to “our values” — that there is something, a now New York Times columnist once called, “the tantrum of Islam.”

CNN firing Marc Lamont Hill proves Israel is untouchable in U.S. media

You can attack the Palestinians in America uninterrupted, call to expel them and deny their existence. Just don’t dare say a bad word about Israel, the holy of holies.

Gideon Levy
Dec 02, 2018

▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-cnn-firing-marc-lamont-hill-proves-israel-is-untouchable-in-u-s-me

Marc Lamont Hill is an American writer and lecturer in communications at Temple University in Philadelphia, and also an analyst with CNN. In a speech last week at a United Nations conference he called for “international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
In a matter of hours, the skies collapsed into well-orchestrated hysteria. Seth Mandel, editor of the Washington Examiner, accused Hill of having called for Jewish genocide; Ben Shapiro, an analyst on Fox News, called it an anti-Semitic speech; Consul Dani Dayan tweeted that Hill’s remarks were like a “swastika painted in red,” the Anti-Defamation League said they were tantamount to calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. The inevitable outcome was not long in coming and CNN fired the rebel analyst on the very same day.
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How dare he? What was he thinking? Where did he think he’s living, in a democracy with free speech or a country where dialogue about Israel is under the serious censorship of the Jewish establishment and Israeli propaganda? Hill tried to claim that he’s opposed to racism and anti-Semitism and his remarks were intended to support the establishment of a binational, secular and democratic state. But he didn’t stand a chance.
In the heavy-handed reality that has seized control over dialogue in the United States, there’s no room for expressions that may offend the Israeli occupation. On a liberal day it’s permissible to say “two states” as long as you do it in a whisper.
What would have happened if Hill had called for the establishment of a Jewish state between the Jordan and the sea? He would have safely continued holding down his job. Rick Santorum, the former senator, said in 2012 that “no Palestinian” lives in the West Bank. Nobody thought of firing him. Even Hill’s critic, Shapiro, has called in the past for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the territories (he backtracked on it a few years later) and nothing happened to him.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-historic-win-and-the-future-of-the-democratic-p

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b465113554b7b0b88500348/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180723_r32440.jpg

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-eight. She was born in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx and lives there now, in a modest one-bedroom apartment. Parkchester was originally a planned community conceived by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was for decades segregated, predominantly Irish and Italian. Today, it’s largely African-American, Hispanic, and South Asian. Ocasio-Cortez comes from a Puerto Rican family in which the parents’ self-sacrifice has been rewarded by their daughter’s earnest striving, and, now, a historic achievement. Come November, Ocasio-Cortez is almost certain to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. As recently as ten months ago, she was waiting tables at a taco place near Union Square called Flats Fix. On June 26th, she pulled off a political upset in the Democratic primary for the Fourteenth Congressional District, soundly defeating the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, the most powerful politician in Queens County and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.

We sat down at a table near the window. She allowed that she was getting worn down. “You’re speaking to me when I am still emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and logistically processing all of this,” she said. “The whole thing’s got me knocked a little flat.”

With good reason. Not long ago, Ocasio-Cortez was mixing margaritas. Today, she is the embodiment of anti-corporate politics and a surge of female candidates in the midterm elections. “It’s a lot to carry,” she said. As a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she was on the receiving end of Murdoch-media hysteria. The Post greeted her win with the headline “RED ALERT.” Sean Hannity pronounced her “downright scary.” And Ben Shapiro called her a member of the “howling at the moon” segment of the Democratic Party. On the anti-Trump right, Bret Stephens wrote in the Times that “Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist,” and warned that, in a national election, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will be “political hemlock for the Democratic Party.” None of it seemed exactly real. When I asked her where she was going to live in D.C., her eyes widened in surprise, as if it had not occurred to her that she would no longer be spending most of her time in the Bronx. “Not a clue,” she said.

One of her most effective strokes was a two-minute-long video, the creation of Naomi Burton and Nick Hayes, D.S.A. activists from Detroit, who started Means of Production, a media-production company, and set out looking for working-class-oriented campaigns. They learned about Ocasio-Cortez on Facebook and sent her a direct message on Twitter. For less than ten thousand dollars, they produced a soulful social-media-ready film that showed the candidate in her apartment, on a subway platform, in a bodega, talking with a pregnant woman, to kids selling cupcakes. All the while, in voice-over, she speaks directly to the viewer:

Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office. I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family. . . . This race is about people versus money. We’ve got people, they’ve got money. It’s time we acknowledged that not all Democrats are the same. That a Democrat who takes corporate money, profits off foreclosure, doesn’t live here, doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us. What the Bronx and Queens needs is Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee, and criminal-justice reform.

The video went viral. Something was afoot.

On Election Day, in a car on the way to the billiards hall where Ocasio-Cortez was going to watch the returns, some of her advisers were getting encouraging reports from polling places. Shut it down, she said. No more looking at phones, no more guessing: “Let’s see the vote.” That night, cameras captured her expression of shock as she watched the news: a thirteen-point landslide. She had no words. It was a moment of pure joy playing out live on television. Crowley gamely accepted the results and, with a pickup band behind him, took out his guitar and dedicated “Born to Run” to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For a man in six kinds of pain, he sang a creditable version.

If the Murdoch press was predictably outraged, some establishment Democrats were wary, too. Nancy Pelosi dismissed the win as a local phenomenon. And, while her tone was curt and superior, her larger point was clear: in November, Democratic candidates, no matter what shade of blue, had to beat Republicans. Districts had to flip. At dinner, Ocasio-Cortez bristled at the establishment dismissals. She did not doubt that there were many factors in her win—her identity as a young woman, as a Latina, as a daughter of a working-class family—but she had also out-organized a party boss, hammered away at immigration and health-care issues, and brought out new voters. It was infuriating for her to listen to the condescension.

“I’m twenty-eight years old, and I was elected on this super-idealistic platform,” she said. “Folks may want to take that away from me, but I won. When you hear ‘She won just for demographic reasons,’ or low turnout, or that I won because of all the white ‘Bernie bros’ in Astoria—maybe that all helped. But I smoked this race. I didn’t edge anybody out. I dominated. And I am going to own that.” The more complicated question was how she was going to own her identity as a democratic socialist.

When Ocasio-Cortez is interviewed now, particularly by the establishment outlets, she is invariably asked about “the S-word,” socialism; sometimes the question is asked with a shiver of anxiety, as if she were suggesting that schoolchildren begin the day by singing the “Internationale” under a portrait of Enver Hoxha. When I asked her about her political heroes, though, there was no mention of anyone in the Marxist pantheon. She named Robert F. Kennedy. In college, reading his speeches—“that was my jam,” she said. R.F.K., at least in the last chapter of his life, his 1968 Presidential campaign, tried to forge a party coalition of workers, minorities, and the middle class.

D.S.A., which was founded in 1982, is not a party but a dues-paying organization, and it has seen a bump in membership recently, from five thousand in 2016 to more than forty thousand today. The first co-chairs were Harrington and the author Barbara Ehrenreich. David Dinkins, the former mayor of New York, was a member of D.S.A. There’s no question that some members are Marxists in the traditional sense; some want to see the destruction of capitalism and the state ownership of factories, banks, and utilities. Jabari Brisport, a D.S.A. member from Brooklyn who recently ran, unsuccessfully, for City Council, told me that the group is “a big umbrella organization for left and leftish types, from Bernie-crats to hard-core Trotskyists.” Julia Salazar, a D.S.A. member in her mid-twenties who is running for the New York State Senate with the ardent support of Ocasio-Cortez, told Jacobin, a leftist quarterly, that a democratic socialist “recognizes the capitalist system as being inherently oppressive, and is actively working to dismantle it and to empower the working class and the marginalized in our society.”

Ocasio-Cortez and, for the most part, the people around her speak largely in the language of Sanders. Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, and yet in the most extensive speech he ever gave on the theme—at Georgetown University, in November, 2015—he did not mention Debs. Rather, he focussed almost entirely on Franklin Roosevelt and the legacy of the New Deal. He said that he shared the vision that F.D.R. set out in his 1944 State of the Union speech, what Roosevelt called the Second Bill of Rights. Sanders pointed out that universal health care was “not a radical idea” and existed in countries such as Denmark, France, Germany, and Taiwan. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production,” he said, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”

Ocasio-Cortez and her circle focus less on the malefactions of the current Administration than on the endemic corruption of the American system, particularly the role of “dark money” in American politics and the lack of basic welfare provisions for the working classes and the poor. When they hear conservatives describe as a “socialist” Barack Obama—a man who, in their view, had failed to help the real victims of the financial crisis, while bailing out the banks—they tend to laugh ruefully. “I think the right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years,” Saikat Chakrabarti, one of Ocasio-Cortez’s closest associates, said. “It inoculated us. But people focus on the labels when they are not sure what they mean. What people call socialism these days is Eisenhower Republicanism!”

#Alexandria_Ocasio_Cortez #Politique_USA #My_heroin_for_now

Non, on n’a certainement pas encore touché le fond avec ces histoires de fake news. Continuons à creuser : Facebook and Google make lies as pretty as truth - How AMP and Instant Articles camouflage fake news
▻http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/6/13850230/fake-news-sites-google-search-facebook-instant-articles

The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy. On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed, every story comes prepackaged in the same skin, whether it’s a months-long investigation from The Washington Post or completely fabricated clickbait.

While feed formatting isn’t anything new, platforms like Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and Apple News are also further breaking down the relationship between good design and credibility. In a platform world, all publishers end up looking more similar than different. That makes separating the real from the fake even harder.

Stephen Bannon, un idéologue controversé à la Maison Blanche

▻http://www.lemonde.fr/elections-americaines/article/2016/11/16/stephen-bannon-un-ideologue-controverse-a-la-maison-blanche_5031796_829254.h

La nomination de Stephen Bannon comme conseiller stratégique du futur président américain suscite de vives critiques. L’ex-patron du site « Breitbart News » est accusé d’antisémitisme et de racisme.

http://s1.lemde.fr/image/2016/11/16/644x322/5031795_3_59df_stephen-bannon-dans-les-coulisses-du-meeting_dd8c29df5f68d7cd0bea181eed358269.jpg

Le site ultraconservateur Breitbart News a donné l’impression, mardi 15 novembre, d’avoir pour unique mission de défendre Stephen Bannon. La nomination de son ancien dirigeant comme conseiller stratégique du président élu Donald Trump, une fonction aux contours encore incertains, a suscité en effet une vague de critiques compte tenu de l’idéologie identitaire qui lui est prêtée. L’Anti-Defamation League et le Southern Poverty Law Center notamment, spécialisés dans la surveillance des groupuscules d’extrême droite, s’en sont indignés, assurant que, sous sa responsabilité, le site a banalisé les thèses de suprémacistes blancs et une forme d’antisémitisme.

Breitbart News a dénoncé une cabale ourdie par « des élites battues et humiliées » à la suite de l’élection de M. Trump le 8 novembre. Mais la défiance s’étend au Parti républicain. « Ce site, c’est la poubellisation des esprits », déplore sous couvert d’anonymat un consultant conservateur rencontré mardi.

Entré définitivement au service du milliardaire en août, après l’avoir activement soutenu par l’intermédiaire du site créé en 2007 par Andrew Breitbart, mort subitement en 2012, M. Bannon a tout pour détoner à la Maison Blanche. Il n’a aucune expérience du pouvoir et est entré tardivement en politique après une carrière passée dans l’armée, au sein de la marine, chez la banque Goldman Sachs, puis à Hollywood où il a produit des films avant de réaliser des documentaires consacrés successivement à Ronald Reagan, à Sarah Palin, la candidate républicaine à la vice-présidence en 2008, et enfin au mouvement Occupy Wall Street – deux hagiographies, et un brûlot contre la gauche américaine.

Ethno-nationalisme anti-immigration

A cet égard, il est un outsider au même titre que le futur 45e président des Etats-Unis, pourfendeur des « élites » malgré un passage par la Harvard Business School (comme M. Trump à la Wharton School of Business de l’University of Pennsylvania), et contempteur de la mondialisation. Son ethno-nationalisme anti-immigration doublé d’une défiance absolue vis-à-vis de l’islam l’a rapproché de figures telles que la polémiste Ann Coulter ou la militante islamophobe Pamela Geller.
M. Bannon s’est retrouvé spontanément dans la candidature de M. Trump, qui avait lancé en 2011 une croisade « nativiste » contre le président Barack Obama, accusé d’avoir menti sur son lieu de naissance et d’être en fait inéligible.

Cette proximité a été entretenue par une série d’entretiens sur une radio rattachée à Breitbart News. Des extraits donnés par le Washington Post, mardi, mettent en évidence l’influence du polémiste sur le candidat, notamment au sujet de l’islam.
Les deux hommes y partagent la dénonciation du politiquement correct, Breitbart étant devenu le refuge des républicains radicaux jugeant la chaîne conservatrice Fox News trop policée. Un puissant moteur de mobilisation, puisqu’une étude du Policy Religion Research Institute a montré, en octobre, que 69 % des électeurs blancs, la base électorale de M. Trump, jugent qu’il faut « parler franchement des sujets sensibles et des problèmes auxquels le pays est confronté même si cela peut offenser certaines personnes ».

Le blanchiment opéré par M. Bannon, via son site, des thèses radicales de l’« alternative right » ou Alt-Right, tenue longtemps à la lisière du camp conservateur, explique que sa nomination ait été perçue comme une victoire stratégique et saluée par le nationaliste blanc Richard Spencer, du National Policy Institute comme du site Vdare, classés racistes par le Southern Poverty Law Center. David Duke, ancien responsable du Ku Klux Klan, battu aux élections pour le poste de gouverneur de la Louisiane en 1991, a été également un des premiers à louer la nomination de M. Bannon.

Un ancien du site qui avait rompu avec lui en mars, Ben Shapiro, qui anime désormais sa propre plate-forme, The Daily Wire, a estimé après l’annonce de sa nomination que le procès pour racisme et antisémitisme instruit contre M. Bannon éclipse ce qui figure au cœur de la stratégie d’un guerrier idéologique fasciné par le pouvoir. A savoir la volonté de transformation du Parti républicain – qu’il abhorre autant que la gauche américaine – alignée sur les mots d’ordre des extrêmes droites européennes.

C’est ce conflit que M. Trump a importé à la Maison Blanche. Il a nommé en effet le même jour le patron du Grand Old Party (GOP), Reince Priebus, au poste également stratégique de chief of staff, proche à la fois d’une fonction de chef de cabinet et de premier ministre. Cette association peut s’avérer explosive. Pour Breitbart, un proche de M. Priebus, le speaker (président) de la Chambre des représentants du Congrès, le républicain Paul Ryan, jugé trop modéré, est en effet une cible à abattre.

M. Bannon a montré par le passé que la fin justifiait les moyens. Breitbart News a diffusé, mardi, un article sur la menace islamiste agrémenté d’une photo menaçante d’hommes masqués. Elle avait été publiée en mars 2015 par le site britannique The Independent avec une légende précisant qu’il s’agissait de soldats irakiens à l’exercice avant une offensive contre l’organisation Etat islamique.

La veille, un titre laissait entendre que M. Trump avait remporté le vote populaire sans préciser que, pour parvenir à ce résultat, l’auteur avait exclu les villes où les démocrates sont nettement majoritaires.

Javier Bardem et Penélope Cruz corrigent le tir à propos de leur position sur Gaza
▻http://www.lefigaro.fr/cinema/2014/08/01/03002-20140801ARTFIG00168-javier-bardem-et-penelope-cruz-corrigent-le-tir-a

Sur Twitter, le commentateur politique conservateur Ben Shapiro s’était déclaré « Triste que Javier Bardem et Penélope Cruz soient antisémites, mais pas surpris vu la très haute haine des Juifs en Espagne. »

Effrayant de bêtise et consternant de constater l’impasse de la pensée.