{"id":306,"date":"2003-10-16T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-17T03:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/uncategorised\/mahathir_speech_oic_2003.html"},"modified":"2006-10-15T18:56:59","modified_gmt":"2006-10-15T23:56:59","slug":"mahathir_speech_oic_2003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/politics\/mahathir_speech_oic_2003.html","title":{"rendered":"Malaysian PM Mahathir’s speech at the OIC"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t going to comment on Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad’s speech at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference<\/a>, but when I read Smuggy’s take on it<\/a>, I knew I just had to.<\/p>\n

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The CBC<\/acronym> is going halfway and manages to fit in with the whitewashers while pretending to be unbiased. […] Our media could at least give people the option of deciding for themselves whether this guy is a nut or not – why do they need to put the squirrel-yelling guy through two hours of hair and makeup before they roll the camera?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure which CBC<\/acronym> article Smuggy was reading, but the one I read<\/a> earlier today had a headline of “Malaysian PM urges Muslims to unite against what he calls Jewish domination” and an opening paragraph which read (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n

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In a blistering attack on Israel and hectoring criticism of the Islamic world, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a summit of Muslim leaders Thursday that Jews ruled the world and recruited others “to fight and die for them.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And in case you misread that paragraph, or thought it a misprint, the next one quotes Mahathir (again, emphasis mine):<\/p>\n

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“The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy<\/em>,” Mahathir, a widely respected statesman in Asia and the developing world, said in a speech as he became chairman of the 57-country Organization of the Islamic Conference.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You would have to be illiterate to come away from the CBC<\/acronym> headline, let alone the text of the article, without<\/em> the impression that Mahathir is a raving lunatic. The CBC<\/acronym>, and many Canadian papers, the Globe And Mail included<\/a>, do not, by any stretch of the imagination, leave it up to the reader to decide whether Mahathir is out of touch; they spell it out in the article headline and its opening paragraph<\/em>. A journalist could have easily opened with any number of Mahathir’s statements, many of them strongly critical of modern Islam. Instead, they focussed on the strongly anti-Semitic portion of the speech, and rightly so, as that is a far larger story.<\/p>\n

Certainly, a news article could be more critical<\/em> of Mahathir’s beliefs, but that job is for the opinion pages. If someone living in the 21st century can’t read the facts, or even simply the text of Mahathir’s speech<\/a>, and come away with the impression that Mahathir is a nut-case, at least as far as his beliefs of a Zionist conspiracy against Islam are concerned, then that person is as backwards as Mahathir and no comment editorial can spell it out for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t going to comment on Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad’s speech at the Organisation of the Islamic Conference<\/a>, but when I read Smuggy’s take on it<\/a>, I knew I just had to.<\/p>\n

The CBC is going halfway and manages … Read more<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[19,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crazedmonkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}