Soul Brothers: The Arab Street and The Mainstream Media

A weird similarity exists between the crazed Middle East demonstrators, many of them evidently high on Tramadol, and our own mainstream media.

Both are operating under an only slightly buried sense of shame.

Beneath the Middle Easterners’ rage is an obvious humiliation over the backwardness of their culture.

Beneath the behavior of our media is a fear of humiliation at the polls — that their blind devotion to Barack Obama was a mistake.

I am more sympathetic to the Middle Easterners.

And, ultimately, it is our mainstream media that are more dangerous.

The Middle Easterners can cause isolated outbreaks of mob violence, killing or injuring innocent people, more often than not themselves. The media can break apart the fabric of the Western world, destroying through their narcissism what it has taken generations, indeed centuries, to build.

So our media, terrified that their hero would be unmasked and themselves also then revealed as shallow and unworthy, focused their ire on Mitt Romney while the world burned, hoping that Romney had made a “gaffe” even when it was clear that his analysis, if not his timing, was correct.

Meanwhile, our government and its State Department have been revealed to be criminally negligent in the protection of their own people.

The roots of this negligence are a willed ignorance of the realities of the Middle East. The ideas of Lee Smith’s The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations are ignored in favor of a now almost comically naïve belief in some sort of Islamic democracy, a system completely at odds with the ideology of Islam itself.

But, as if to promote Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie in advance, the “anti-colonialist” Barack Obama preened before the Arab world, promoting himself (and us) as a new sort of American, a friend of Islam. They saw only Smith’s weak horse.

The villains in all this are our media who played the Greek chorus for Obama. But they were and are a lousy Greek chorus, because they never warned Oedipus of his hubris. They just chanted along, praising the master with hosannas.

When will they stop?

The media killed Ambassador Stevens. They are the ones responsible.

UPDATE: In a surreal addendum to my post, the White House’s own press secretary, Jay Carney, is now denying the protests are against America.

CARNEY: We also need to understand that this is a fairly volatile situation and it is in response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, or the American people, but it is in response to a video, a film that we have judged to be be reprehensible and disgusting. That in no way justifies any violent reaction to it, but this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.

Again, this is not in any way justifying violence, and we have spoken very clearly out against that and condemned it. And the president is making sure in his conversations with leaders around the region that they are committed as hosts to diplomatic facilities to protect both personnel and buildings and other facilities that are part of the U.S. representation in those countries.

Can you imagine the internal discussions that went on before that sent the hapless Carney out to spew that bilge? We are indeed in “interesting times,” as they Chinese say.