I reiterate my original argument on this thread. Gabriel has been posting what amounts to propaganda, restricting his channeling of reports on the Iraq war to anti-war & anti-American sources, many of which (though I grant, not all) are of questionable veracity.
My attempts to characterize what he was doing initiated the first real "ad hominem" tactic in this debate, which was to shift from the substance of the issue (ie. was Gabriel, or was he not, channeling massive amounts of biased reporting to the poetry lists, in what amounted to a propaganda campaign) to attacks on me: ie. claiming that I was "putting words in his mouth". In other words, he attempted to turn a criticism of what he was doing into some kind of dishonesty or misbehavior on my part. Rebecca Sieferle & Alison Croggan chimed in, for example claiming that I was showing anti-Arab bias by criticizing al-Jazeera, etc.
It may be that many of the news sources channeled by Gabriel were based on fact & interesting in themselves & downplayed by mainstream US media. But the cumulative effect of channeling only one side of the story, obviously biased against the war policy, and including several questionable reports & interpretations, has been : propaganda. Gabriel himself admitted he was not claiming "objectivity". But it seem to me that, if you are not presenting an analysis, if you are not placing your channeled reports in some critical perspective, ie. if you have make no attempt to evaluate the accuracy of a report, AND at the same time you are filtering your messages to exclude ANY reports which might support the war policy (statements of Iraqis in favor of the overthrow of the regime; evidence of coercion & human rights violations on the part of Saddam loyalists; etc) - that this is simply propaganda ; as I said in what I think was my first post on this thread, a condescending, manipul!
ative attitude to to your audience, predicated on "preaching to the choir" (ie. fortifying the assumption that all poets & all good people will oppose this war).
Henry
|