Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Real questions about Gloria Steinem

 Read Ann's "Just so we all rememer the truth " and agree.  Let me join her by posting this.



There are a lot of serious issues raised in that broadcast.  Gloria Steinem is not a leader of anything and the sooner feminism moves beyond her, the better.  I especially think the Finnish reporter's work cited in the above could not be as ignored and dismissed as it was then.  Not today.  


Gloria needs to answer for her role in spying on activists.  She needs to answer for the violence carried out against those young activists.


Until she does, that hag needs to get off the public stage.  I have no respect for her.  She didn't create feminism and she didn't do a damn thing to elevate it.  She just made herself a celebrity.


Now go read Stan's "TV thoughts."

"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Wednesday, December 23, 2020.  This is going to be a brief snapshot.  And I warned yesterday that it would be late.  I just got out of surgery and I'm still woozy so this isn't going to be very long.


Rakmini Callimachi has been exposed as a fabricator and a racist.  THE NEW YORK TIMES 'reporter' is in free fall.  Brian Cathcart (BYLINE TIMES) notes, "After a lengthy internal investigation, the New York Times (NYT) has issued a series of corrections and apologies relating to work by one of its star reporters, terrorism specialist Rukmini Callimachi, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and an Emmy. Callimachi, who has admitted only limited errors, has been moved to other duties."  Sana Saeed (AJPLUS -- scroll down) points out:


Caliphate, like most journalism around "terrorism" and "Muslim violence" or "radicalization," relied on unconfirmed sources, displayed disregard for usual ethical and factual considerations in reporting, and uncritically accepted the Global “War On Terror” (GWOT) narrative. The latter, in particular, introduced us to a lexicon of terms and ideas that reinforce the concept of a looming, amorphous threat of brown and Black bogeymen from the lands of sand and oil.

As an example, take the term “radicalization” – there’s no agreed upon criteria for how to define this term for any group. State bodies like the FBI have long exploited that ambiguity, and the media has followed suit. Think back to that moment when a horde of reporters in 2015 went into the San Bernardino shooters’ home and examined innocuous Muslim ritual beads and books as proof of brewing “radicalization.”

The Caliphate project and Callimachi's work were simply well-produced exercises in fearmongering rooted in racist tropes of Muslim/Muslim-adjacent subjects – even if you take out the fraudulent story of Shehroze Chaudhry, aka “Abu Huzayfah.”

Very rarely, if ever, does this strain of journalism focus on anything other than so-called “radical Islamist violence.” Other forms of nonstate political violence such as white nationalist or militias will be categorized under other beats. In doing so, nonstate violence by groups and individuals identified as Muslim or using language derived from Islam to package their political goals (whether or not it’s “actually Islam” becomes irrelevant) is pathologized; it becomes something unique, cosmic and disconnected from the historical circumstances and material conditions.

And in this process, there is a mass dehumanization of Muslims.


Irena Akbar points out:


Rukmini Callimachi’s post-2014 reporting in NYT stands officially discredited today but it has done the damage of creating the most evil, bizarre, barbaric stereotype of Muslims which has been used by Islamophobic governments around the world in their anti-Muslim propagandas.
6:32 AM · Dec 23, 2020


In the US, we pretend to be offended by anti-Muslim hate and racism against Arabs.  We pretend.  A blowhard like Donald Trump makes an idiotic statement and we all pretend to be outraged.  Pretend.  That's become so obvious.


Bill Maher continues to host a program on HBO despite his non-stop attacks on Arabs and Muslims.  And Rukmini's actions are ignored.


Ignored?  Why this or that reported on them!!!!


FAIR.  Where's FAIR?  FAIR calls out THE NEW YORK TIMES for everything.  Except racism against Arabs.  They've published posts at FAIR as late as yesterday but not one word on Rukmini.  What about the other media watchdog?  What about POYNTER?  Nothing.  This is the biggest media story of the week and not one word at the media watchdog POYNTER.


Again, in the US we pretend to be bothered by racism . . . except when the racism is used to justify war.  Then all our 'brave' watchdogs look the other way.  Racism that demonizes humans as 'the other' doesn't get called out.  They're all Bill Maher in the media apparently -- which means they are all disgusting.


BBC NEWS reports:


US President Donald Trump has pardoned four former Blackwater security guards convicted over their involvement in the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard opened fire in Baghdad's Nisoor Square while escorting an American diplomatic convoy.

The White House said the pardons were supported by the public and lawmakers.

But the father of a boy who died called them "indescribable" and a rights group said Mr Trump had hit a "new low".


Yes, that is disgusting.  But as the western media is making clear, the lives of people in the Middle East do not matter.  They won't waste time defending them.  There will be a little outcry regarding the Blackwater issue because it can be used to attack Donald Trump.  But it's all pretense and that's obvious by their refusal to call out Rukmini.

Again, in the US, it's Christmas time and that's supposed to be about humanity and peace and love and compassion and being grateful.  You'd never know as the intrinsic racist nature of the corporate media --and much of the 'alternative' media -- is on full display yet again.


Malaysia's HERALD notes:


Christmas is a propitious time "for reconciliation and to achieve peace," writes the Chaldean patriarch Card Louis Raphael Sako in his Christmas letter to the faithful, recalling the apostolic letter "Fratelli tutti" in which Pope Francis invites us to "be brothers, rather than fight each other".

He continues "Christians and Muslims should leave their differences aside, love and serve each other as family members. Let us join hands as one team to change our situation and overcome these crises and give the priority to our homeland, by mutual respect that consolidate values of coexistence."

For Iraqi Christians the Christmas holidays represent a double celebration: because, for the first time, it will be a celebration of the whole nation, without making distinctions between Christians and Muslims. A joy and satisfaction that are the prelude to the visit by Pope Francis, who in early March will make an apostolic journey - the first abroad since the beginning of the new coronavirus pandemic - to the Arab nation, touching symbolic places: from Baghdad to Mosul, passing through Ur dei Caldei and the plain of Nineveh, the cradle of the Christian presence in the country.

The Patriarch writes: "For the past two decades, we have celebrated Christmas in an insecure condition that continue to worsen significantly in 2020 due to Corona pandemic in an unprecedented way. Moreover, we were obliged to suspend prayers and pastoral activities in our Churches since March 2020 for the safety of our people.".


We live in a disappointing time in a disappoint nation with really no one to look up to.


AOC is a non-stop embarrassment,  Jimmy Dore has noted this repeatedly.  But did no one catch this Tweet from AOC?

.

@marcorubio

you stood by in total silence when your GOP colleague called a Congresswoman a “f— b—“ on the Capitol steps in front of press. You weren’t big enough to speak then, & you don’t get to sob now. BTW that is the right word for those who fleece & scam working families.


Marco Rubio didn't rush to defend AOC.  And so she thinks its payback that's she not defending him or anyone else as Joe Biden's staffer offers curse words about Republicans?


Payback, is that what you're offering, AOC?  Then you are useless and I'm sorry I defended you when you were called a bitch.  If you were offended when your were name called, you should be willing to step and defend others.  You're not doing that, you're being a hypocrite.  You have nothing to offer except to reveal what a tremendous fake you truly are.

Nancy Pelosi is awful, no question, but AOC is kidding herself if she thinks she herself has the maturity to replace Nancy.


New content at THIRD:




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Tuesday, December 22, 2020

A gripe this seasonal time of year

I don't know how it is in your circles but for people I know right now, kids are seeing it as Christmas time and excited -- and God bless them.  But most of us adults, due to the pandemic and other things, really aren't feeling it.


You'd think FXX and others would realize that.  I was tired and just wanted to watch some TV and relax.  I went to THE SIMPSONS but all FXX was showing was Christmas episodes of the show.  I go to ADULT SWIM and it's Christmas episodes of AMERICAN DAD and FAMILY GUY.  Am I the only one turning those off?  I can't believe it is just me but maybe it is.  

At THIRD, we did "All we want for Christmas" and I just want 2020 to be over.


I want the pandemic behind us. 


But with the new mutations everyone's talking about, does this mean the vaccine may be out of date?  I don't know.  I just want it over.  And when people say we won't be able to go back?  It just depresses me and makes me want to cry. 


And, no, that's not Christmas -- not to me.



"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

Tuesday, December 22, 2020.  We look at standards -- or the lack of them -- as well as the lack of compassion for the real victims of Rukmini Callimachi's 'reporting.'

Starting off with two e-mails to the public account.  Shirley says two people feel I am not noting RISING enough.  There are other things to note but when Shirley told me about those e-mails, I did go to RISING last night and look for something else to highlight.

And then I didn't give a damn.

We'll continue to highlight them but I do have standards.  I don't care if your commentary or interview or whatever reflects what I belive or not with one major exception.  I don't believe in promoting unethical people.

RISING needs to get some standards.  When I went to the website I saw yet another man as a guest.  They struggle to find women and that's really sad.  But when they can't find a woman more worthy of being a guest than Gerald Posner, that's outrageous.

He's a serial liar and a plagiarist and these are not new developments. This and his attacks on others (especially those who demanded the government release the records about the JFK assassination) were well known.  He was fired from THE DAILY BEAST in 2010 because he stole the work of others and passed it off as his own.  Though he claimed it was an accident, THE MIAMI NEWS TIMES looked at his articles and found more theft.  When he tried to dispute it, they then looked at his books and found even more.  He's a plagiarist.  

Why the hell would you want him on your show?  

Get some standards already.

Again you refuse to find qualified women for guests but you get a disgraced 'journalist' on as a guest?

And you're also a visual medium.  Meaning?  Maybe tell Ryan Grimm that the dye job's not working as is.  He needs to go to a lighter shade and he needs to do it all over his hair because the black shoe polish on top with the white sides does not look real -- it makes it look like the dark part is a toupee.  But Gerald Posner?  He's had more (and worse) plastic surgery than Kim Novack.  He should be considered a plastic surgery victim and, looking at him before and after, you have to wonder what look he was going for because the look he achieved was freak.  

We didn't promote the hideous Gerald Posner before he was outed as a thief and that's mainly due to the fact that Michael Ratner put me wise to him and warned me.  If that had happened, I might have promoted him and I'd owe an apology to people here as a result.  (So thank you to the late Michael Ratner who rescued me on many occasions.)  But, again, you have to have standards.

I can see you bringing on someone like April Oliver for example. The corporate media worked to discredit her for her CNN report but I believe her and the investigation didn't prove her wrong because it took the attitude of a legal investigation as opposed to what is required to report.  (Which is one of the reasons that CNN had to pay April a seven-figure settlement to avoid losing bigger in court.)  So bring on April Oliver and I have no problem.  But when you bring on a serial thief 



To wit: In the past week, doctoral student Gregory Gelembiuk and New Times — using special software and perusing texts — have come up with 16 brand-new instances of stolen prose by the author in Miami Babylon (as well as three formerly undisclosed examples from other work). We shared the thievery with Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar and plagiarism expert at St. Petersburg's Poynter Institute.

[. . .]

"These look like obvious cases of plagiarism to me," Clark says. "The fact that Posner at times changes a word or two is not nearly enough to qualify as paraphrase."

New Times sent Posner an email detailing all of the new problems we found in Miami Babylon. He didn't respond to the email or to multiple phone messages.

Posner, on his blog, defends his earlier transgressions by arguing "there are degrees of plagiarism" and that his is less serious because he accidentally copied other people's work.

"Mine is not a case like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass where there was either wholesale copying from others or in some instances fabrication," Posner wrote March 17. "Any sentences copied by me from published sources were never done with the hope or expectation I'd trick others and get away with it."

Posner, a San Francisco native and Berkeley grad, landed a job when he was just 23 years old with the blue-blood New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, according to his Simon & Schuster bio. By 1986, he had left to publish his first book, a biography of Nazi death doctor Josef Mengele.

Posner has been journalism royalty since 1993, when he made best-seller lists and was a Pulitzer finalist for his fifth book, Case Closed, which attempts to prove Oswald acted alone in killing JFK. Since Case Closed, Posner has added to his resumé six more nonfiction works on topics from 9-11 to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

In 2004, records show, Posner and his wife Trisha bought a $385,000 condo in SoBe's South of Fifth neighborhood.

When Tina Brown started her Daily Beast website in 2008, she hired Posner as chief investigative reporter. His writing included local stories about Fontainebleau heir Ben Novack Jr.'s death and national pieces on Michael Jackson's last hours. His 454-page book about the sordid history of his new hometown, Miami Babylon, debuted to positive reviews last year.

Everything began unraveling this past February 5, when Slate's media columnist, Jack Shafer, nailed him for stealing seven sentences from the Miami Herald in a Daily Beast piece. Posner said he was "horrified," apologized, and promised it was "inadvertent."

That's when the doctoral student, Gelembiuk, became involved. He's an unlikely journalistic sleuth. A 48-year-old who studies zoology at the University of Wisconsin, he teaches biology and researches invasive species.

For years, Gelembiuk has been using a website called Turnitin.com to catch students who plagiarize. In his experience, Gelembiuk says, plagiarists "never do it just once." After reading Shafer's column, he didn't buy Posner's apology. So he ran a half-dozen of the author's Daily Beast stories through the plagiarism site — as well as through software called Viper and Copyscape — and quickly came up with 11 more lifted sentences in three other Beast stories.

Shafer wrote another column, and on February 10, the Daily Beast accepted Posner's resignation. He again apologized, blaming the "warp speed of the Net" for his problems. He later explained he'd stolen only "the most mundane information." Shafer didn't buy it.

"You don't have to rob from Proust to qualify as a low-down plagiarist," Shafer wrote. "Even mundane information takes time and energy to collect and type up — sometimes more time and energy than it takes to toss off an original sonnet."

But even that excuse went out the window March 16, when New Times published Owen's discovery of eight stolen passages in Miami Babylon. Posner again admitted he stole them. But again he had a scapegoat: a new system of "trailing endnotes" that led him to undercredit Owen's work.

Now comes the new evidence turned up by New Times and Gelembiuk. For Miami Babylon, it seems Posner also borrowed from this publication, PBS, the Herald, Ocean Drive, and Men's Vogue. The pilfering seems to include both stand-alone sentences and longer passages.

Fourteen of the new problems were found by Gelembiuk, who purchased an ebook of Miami Babylon to run it through plagiarism software when Posner's second apology also rang hollow. In our own review, we found two passages that seem to be lifted from one New Times story.


Why would you bring someone like that onto your program?  Stephen Glass wasn't available?  


RISING needs to work at developing some standards.  Their efforts at rehabbing Gerald Posner are disgusting.

And let's note one more time, it's a visual medium.  In an earlier time, some may have (wrongly) insisted that Ponce de Leon discovered The Fountain of Youth but all the 66-year-old  Posner de Plagiarist discovered was The Fountain of Freak.


Second on the e-mails, Martha counted numerous e-mails to the public account about how dare I trash Glenn Greenwald for supporting the new Judith Miller Rukmini Callimachi.  At first, I thought they meant the posts at other community members' sites:




But Martha explained they came in before those went up so people are talking about yesterday's snapshot.  I didn't write anything new about Glenn.  I did want it established that I'd been calling Rukimini out for years and I quoted from a March 2014 snapshot.  Yes, Glenn was criticized in that snapshot -- he was promoting her.  With the exception of her theft of Iraqi records that belonged to the Iraqi people and that the Iraqi government lodged a protest over, any snapshot would have likely included Glenn because he was forever praising her.  

That's from 2014 before he left THE INTERCEPT learn to read.  

I have been very supportive of Glenn over the years.  I don't like him.  I don't like some of the positions he takes -- and were he set up better currently, I would explain that at length.  But when he broke the Ed Snowden story, I praised him repeatedly.  When he broke from THE INTERCEPT, I praised him repeatedly.

Now Glenn's never done anything for me so I don't get why some people are telling me in e-mails Martha read that I ''owe him."  For what?

Chris Hayes?  I owe Chris and that's why I refrain from watching his show because I don't want to criticize him.  Ava and I have on two occasions, I believe, at THIRD.  But a number of journalists and left figures (including the disgusting Matthew Rothschild) were asked by me to please cover Iraq Veterans Against The War's Winter Soldier presentation.  I got a lot of promises.  And Chris was the only one who kept it.  I've disclosed that before.  I do not forget that.  I praise Chris for that.  

To be clear, the others who promised did not pan the hearings, they just ignored them.  And you could pan them.  We did a whole edition at THIRD and we covered some great hearings.  We also called out the hearing on gender assault.  They had people who weren't assaulted.  Deciding to dance with someone is not an assault.  You made the decision to dance with him.  In addition, they had men on the panel who were not assaulted but wanted to talk about what ifs . . . That was an embarrassment and we weren't the only ones who felt that way, a member of IVAW who had been raped stopped me at that convention and expressed to me how outraged she was.  I shared that ourage.  We called out that panel -- and got a lot of cry babies with IVAW slamming us for that -- ignoring all the praise we heaped them, ignoring that we all -- every community site -- covered the hearings.  We wrote multiple pieces on that presentation.  But some of the cry babies on that panel were so upset and demanded that we unpost the piece on that panel.  We didn't.

But the Matthew Rothschilds who promised they'd cover it?  They didn't.  And I was very clear in my request that the coverage had to happen while the hearings were taking place so that people would know about them and could tune in -- KPFA broadcast them in full.

Jeff what's his name, Phil Donahue's friend. Jeff Cohen?  One of those FAIR refugees.  He covered Winter Soldier.  After the fact.  And still got it wrong.  And that pissed me off.  He said that WBAI and others offered live coverage of all the hearings.

No, they didn't.  KPFA did.  PACIFICA stations could have carried it.  Instead, WBAI offered their tired Saturday programming including a canned program hosted by Dead MUNSTER Grandpa.  They aired crap and garbage when they could have aired live programming.  So, Jeff Cohen, don't write your garbage praising people who didn't do what they were supposed to.  KPFA broadcast the entire thing and they broadcast it live.  

Glenn's never done anything for me except piss me off with his support for the Iraq War, his ongoing sexism and his praise of Rukmini among other things.  

Despite that, I do note him here.  Despite that, I did defend him when he was attacked for the NSA reporting and when he was (and continues to be attacked) for his departure from THE INTERCEPT and all that came with that decision.



One single op-ed, preaching violence against American protestors, led to the (rightful) resignation of editor James Bennett while the collapse of Rukmini Callimachi's entire reporting project that also put ('foreign') human lives at risk, led to her being reassigned.
11:17 AM · Dec 21, 2020


The west is not getting this story.  You've got idiots Tweeting junk like 'everybody gets something wrong.'  The problems go beyond her heavy drama podcast.  Her podcast had nothing to do with the paper's DC bureau telling everyone there to fact check anything she offered that they included in their articles.  The warnings from TIMES reporters came long before the podcast.  I was getting e-mails from her colleagues in 2014.  Then there are the whiners trying to make her a face for feminism.  This is not Bash The Bitch.  This is her being held accountable (finally) for the damage she did.

And in you're White centric, Anglo, possibly Christian worlds, you're not getting how much damange she did.  You're not grasping why Arabs complained for years about her coverage.  It was offensive.  

And as someone who knows Rukmini's work, don't try to play the feminist card.  That liar never gave a damn about Iraqi women and she didn't cover them.  So it's a little late for her defenders to pretend that somehow she's a feminist.  

She needs to be fired.  Not reassigned, fired.

And the idiots praising her for the stolen documents?  What she did was unethical.  And she only returned them because the Iraqi government demanded they be returned.

Talk about Western entitlement, all these idiots praising her for raiding and stealing documents.  You have no respect for national sovereignty and your entitlement is showing.

She has caused serious damage in the Middle East but, hey, you really enjoyed that plate of nachos while you listened to her dramatic podcast so what do the lives of 'others' matter anyway, right?

Shame on you.  You're disgusting.  You place no value at all on an Arab life but you rush to rescue a serial liar when she's finally put on the hot seat.  Shame on you.

The lack of compassion for the Arab world is especially sad when we stop a minute to think that this is Christmas.  We are three days away from Christmas.  Yet no one wants to address the way Rukmini victimized Arabs, the western commentators just want to play the girl-card and pretend like we owe a non-feminist who refused to ever cover the problems facing Iraqi women something because she has a vagina.  I don't owe Rukmini a damn thing except scorn.



As the Iraqi government now speaks of shuttering displacement camps where tens of thousands of these internal refugees have been sheltering since then and returning them to their villages, the prospect of retribution back home awaits.

“The Islamic State is gone, and we’re still living in their wreckage,” said Kadhim al-Khazaraji, a local Shiite Muslim sheikh as his gaze settled on a house that had collapsed like a half-melted candle. “If I see someone here who was with ISIS back then, I will kill them. They killed my family.”

This hostility represents one of the largest obstacles to the government’s plan, announced in fall, to move ahead with the camp closures as part of a program of “safe and voluntary return.” Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has made the shutting of the camps one of his marquee promises.

More than three years after the Islamic State was ousted from its territory in Iraq, at least 1 million mostly Sunni civilians remain displaced and communities they hail from remain divided, the psychological scars of war often as fresh as those still etched into the facades of Dujail. There is no ready answer for how to stitch society back together.


But the Baghdad-based government is forcing them out -- something we've been calling out here since October.  In the KRG, they are not closing the camps.  Elsewhere in Iraq, they are.  This is not about helping the Iraqi people.  This is about saving money -- Iraq's got budget issues.  (So does the KRG but, again, they are not moving to close the camps.)  It is not safe for these people to return home.  Use your brain and you'll grasp that returning home as opposed to living in an open-air camp?  Anyone who could would gladly return home.

This is a punitive measure, it is not about helping anyone.  It needs to be called out.


Finally, tomorrow's snapshot may be later in the day that normal.  That's your heads up.


The following sites updated:







Posted by at

Monday, December 21, 2020

Our useless Congress

Let me join the chorus:


Trina's Kitchen
Congress demonstrates just how much they hate the American people
2 minutes ago

 

 

Nancy Pelosi is outrageous thinking $600 is a good sum.  That doesn't even pay a person's rent for one month.  Congress has betrayed the American people throughout the pandemic.  Everyone of those bums should be tossed out on their ass.

 

Alan MacLeod (MPN) writes: 


Lawmakers in Washington agreed to a new $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package yesterday. The bill, like the previous CARES Act, appears to include huge new tax breaks for corporations and the very wealthy. However, of most note to average Americans is the means-tested check of up to $600 plus $600 per child that Republicans and Democrats decided on.

Although far less than the $1,200 checks mailed out to Americans in the spring, Democratic lawmakers are presenting the deal as a triumph. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York described it as “a strong, strong shot in the arm to get things going.” Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi agreed, although she blamed the GOP for holding the agreement up. “What took so long is because we could not get our Republican colleagues to crush the virus…Why would they not want to invest in the science?” she said at a press conference on Sunday.

The bill also includes a $300 boost to federal unemployment benefits (half of what it was six months ago) and a pause on evictions for an unspecified length of time.

Despite senior Democrats’ spin, it appeared that the primary public reaction to the deal was one of anger, judging by comments on social media. “Congress just decided you get $600. Add that to the $1,200 from March, and it totals $6.69 a day since the country shut down in March. Both parties don’t care if we live or die or sleep in a box on a sidewalk in January,” said Professor Anthony Zenkus of the Columbia School of Social Work. “This country sucks,” and “Congress is laughing at the $600. They don’t give a shit about you,” were also popular refrains. Others described the $600 as “a slap in the face” rather than a shot in the arm.


Nancy Pelosi needs to go.  She is a disgrace and she has yet again turned her back on the American people.  Vote them all out of office, as far as I'm concerned.  Screw 'em, they're useless.


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):

 Monday, December 21, 2020.  THE NEW YORK TIMES has another 'star' 'reporter' imploding.


Rukmini Maria Callimachi -- THE NEW YORK TIMES made her a star 'journalist.'  Not because of serious reporting but because of attention getting stunts.  Long before she broke every ethical rule in the book by smuggling evidence and records of terrorism out of Iraq, her journalism was already problematic.  The Sunnis were the first to complain on social media about her coverage which was reductive and racist.  Then we learned that she was lunching with the militants (militia members) she was covering and this after two journalists contacted us to state that she was not reporting the abuses the militia was carrying out -- even when she witnessed them.


Her fellow reporters at THE TIMES also had problems with the 'star.'  Eric Wemple (WASHINGTON POST) reports:

 

Several Times journalists who had long ago alerted their superiors to problems with Callimachi’s reporting felt that the Times’s mea culpa contained a gap: Where was the pointed acknowledgment that “Caliphate” was a wreck several years in the making? Sure, the editor’s note cited editorial breakdowns in the vetting of the podcast series. But why not admit that editors shunted aside complaints about Callimachi long before assistant managing editor Sam Dolnick approached Callimachi about making a podcast on the Islamic State?

Those journalists had reason to believe such an admission was afoot. On Thursday, top editors at the Times presided over a meeting with staffers who had worked with Callimachi over the years. Multiple sources who attended the meeting described it as a painful affair in which masthead officials acknowledged lapses in management and their subordinates blasted them for not acting on their flares.

Particularly outspoken was C.J. Chivers, a former foreign correspondent and now a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. Chivers was among the first Times reporters to channel his worries to editors at the paper. For his presentation at the Thursday meeting, Chivers spoke from prepared remarks. He said: “Warnings were not just dead letters. They became a basis to impugn people personally and professionally.”

 [. . .]

Staffers had a great deal to say. One objected that Callimachi’s work had embraced stereotypes of Muslims and that if the newspaper had treated African Americans in the same way, the Times would have much bigger problems. A staffer from the Washington bureau noted that a masthead official had warned journalists in the capital to independently verify Callimachi’s contributions to collaborative stories. Another gripe: Washington reporters were commonly hauled in at the 11th hour to buttress reporting in Callimachi’s stories. Such a scenario occurred in Chapter 6 of “Caliphate,” when three D.C. reporters were drafted to press U.S. officials on the alleged activities of Abu Huzayfah.


THE POST's Liz Sly summarizes Erik Wemple's article in the Tweet below:


New York Times staffers raised red flags about

@rcallimachi

's reporting for years before the Caliphate fiasco & were accused of "professional jealousy." Now they are furious those flags aren't being acknowledged by the

@nytimes

non-apology. By

@ErikWemple



Hashoomi Tweets:

The fact that
@rcallimachi
can still label herself a journalist at the
@nytimes
is a stain on organisation’s reputation and credibility. Ignoring native voices and false construction of narratives should not be encouraged in creative media, and film, let alone journalism
Image
6:27 AM · Dec 21, 2020


At MONDOWEISS, James North explains:


Genuine experts on the Mideast, West Africa and Jihadism have been raising doubts about Rukimini Callimachi’s reporting for years. One of the best critiques, by the journalist and author Laila Al-Arian, starts by providing simple information that the Times’s half-hearted apology left out. Callimachi’s podcast says she found Chaudhry, the ISIS fraud, “though a researcher named Anat Agron.” She didn’t add that Agron works for MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), the pro-Israel organization notorious for “mistranslating items and cherry-picking incendiary sources” that are aimed at portraying the Arab and Muslim world negatively, as Al-Arian says. She also notes that Callimachi speaks little or no Arabic, which would seem to be a drawback for a jihadism expert.

Al-Arian eloquently summarizes what’s been fundamentally wrong all along with Callimachi’s work:

I believe Callimachi’s reporting on ISIS over-emphasizes religious ideology while stripping the group’s emergence and growth from its geopolitical context, specifically Iraq, a country that was destroyed by the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, which also led to the destabilization of the region as a whole. A leitmotif of her work is that ISIS and other jihadi groups are a legitimate and perhaps revealing manifestation of Islam.

Another genuine expert who the Times did not seek out is Alex Thurston, a professor at the University of Cincinnati who has just published a remarkable book called Jihadists of North Africa and the Sahel. Thurston warns that Callimachi is an example of what he calls “terrorology” — by which he means “deliberately alarmist and reductive analysis of jihadist movements and ‘terrorist groups.’” He notes that Callimachi “has a pattern of outsourcing much of her analysis to terrorologists such as those at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and its spinoffs.” (The FDD, of course, is the pro-Israel think tank in Washington, D.C. that spends much of its energy trying to instigate the U.S. into attacking Iran.)


Let's drop back to the Jun 9, 2017 snapshot:


Let's check in on our decade's new Judith Miller: Rukmini Callimachi (yes, that does sound like a figure from the Brothers Grimm):



  9 hours ago
Replying to 
7. Analysts have long that the ppl running Amaq can't be just in Iraq/Syria bc of how quickly they claim attacks & bc they upload videos:
7 replies110 retweets165 likes

 

 






Rukmini fancies herself a terrorist expert.

Isn't that cute.

Judith Miller, of course, started with THE PROGRESSIVE.

You may remember that when the magazine was celebrating its anniversary (they said the 100th, but no, it wasn't), they failed to note Judith once in their look back on the past.

Judith Miller ended up a terrorism 'expert' herself.

Remember, that's how Oprah Winfrey presented Judith on her talk show when she brought Judith on to promote the upcoming Iraq War and then Oprah attacked the audience member who dared to point out that Judith was presenting non-facts as facts.


Glenn Greenwald loved him some Judith Miller back then -- part of the reason he supported the Iraq War.

Today?

He loves him some Rukmini.

Rukmini's been hired by THE NEW YORK TIMES mainly to prove that they learned nothing from the Judith Miller fiasco.

Which is how Rukmini was in Mosul (as an embed -- as they say, "embed roughly means 'legs spread'").

And we called out her nonsense.

But there was Glenn Glenn, in love again, reTweeting her because critical abilities are in short supply apparently.

While Rukmini filed her propaganda and Tweeted her nonsense about how wonderful things were, a real reporter did real journalism.


Ali Arkady did not file fluff.

His documentation of what is taking place in Mosul has been covered by RT and ABC NEWS.




"Negative coverage will get you kicked out of Mosul."

They had nothing to worry about with regards to Rukmini, did they?

From Brian Ross' ABC NEWS report:


 Officers of an elite Iraqi special forces unit, praised by U.S. military commanders earlier this year for its role in fighting ISIS, directed the torture and execution of civilians in Mosul in at least six distinct incidents caught on tape.

“That's a murder,” retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann told ABC News after reviewing the graphic footage. “There should be punishment for anyone doing it. It's reprehensible and it shouldn't be allowed on any modern battlefield."

The alarming footage was smuggled out of Iraq by a prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, Ali Arkady, who spent months embedded in combat with the elite Iraqi troops leading the fight against ISIS late last year. Since turning over his cache of photos and videos to ABC News, he says he has received death threats from the soldiers he once considered friends and has now fled Iraq to seek asylum in Europe.

"This is happening all the time," Arkady said of the war crimes he documented, which he recounted in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Brian Ross broadcast Thursday on ABC's World News Tonight with David Muir and Nightline.



Am I wrong that Glenn hasn't been eager to promote this story?

I know he's got a lot of problems right now because THE INTERCEPT burned a source -- intentionally or not, it doesn't matter, they burned her.

Nothing is going to change that.

There should be an apology (not a blood letting) and they should announce how they will do their best not to burn another source in the future.

So, yes, he has problems, but so does Iraq and he needs to be Tweeting about that if he can't write about it.

He has found time to reTweet Rukmini.


It's a shame he can't use his Twitter feed to amplify real reporting on Iraq.

But that's a shame many share and part of the reason the Iraq War is on year 14 and counting (more if we backdate to the sanctions, et al).





You can call Rukmini many things -- the new Judith Miller, the Hobby Lobby of Journalists, a disgrace -- you just can't seriously call her a reporter -- not a good one.  People need to grasp how serious this is -- that she saw the unit she was embedded with execute civilians and she didn't report it (we first noted that allegation March 3, 2017).  Not only that, when others did report it, she insisted she never saw any abuse on the part of Iraqi forces (militia).  

The paper learned nothing from the Judith Miller scandal.  


Rukmini's racism fed a narrative that is part of the paper's continued war on Muslims.  They ramped up that war after 9-11 and it's allowed them to run with any claim and present it as fact -- as verified fact.  Laila al-Alarian Tweets:


Since there seems to be no retribution for a monumental failure like Caliphate, which was downloaded by millions, helped shape narratives and policies, proves my original point that there's a double standard when it comes to media coverage of the Middle East and lack of scrutiny.
6:49 AM · Dec 18, 2020


Rabab Abdulhadi Tweets:

To
@deanbaquet
: a slap on the wrist "reassignment" is not a sufficient response to #Islamophobia & #racism. Firing
@rcallimachi
& taking down #caliphate #podcast series is the only option to remedy "institutional failure." Will
@nytimes
end #misrepresentations & #distortions?
10:37 AM · Dec 20, 2020



We need to all grasp that it's not just that Rukmini filed garbage, it's that the paper let her do so.  They do very little coverage of Iraq to begin with.  And they let her nonsense flood the paper, they created a podcast series for her and they called this Middle East reporting.  They pimped that garbage as evidence that they were covering the region.  Real stories and real issues were ignored so that Rukmini's garbage could 'flood the zone.'  The damage done is not just the lies that she wrote and the paper printed, it's that her garbage prevented other coverage from breaking through.


And when does NYT's Assistant Managing Editor Sam Dolnick get called to the carpet?  As I remember it, when they won a Peabody for the podcast (and were praised by Ronan Farrow), the first person named when Rukmini's partner Andy Mills accepted the award.  Am I remembering that wrong?  (No, I'm not.  I also remember Andy crying in his speech as he spoke of the importance of good journalism.  I thought his cry baby nonsense was comical in real time and it's only funnier now.)  


On that Peabody, THE TIMES has returned that award.  In addition, Australia's ABC notes, "The Overseas Press Club of America also said it was rescinding its honour for the series."




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