"Arabs Tend to Wear Red Shirts," Said the Man in the Red Shirt

You may have seen that National Review posted some glaringly false claims about Lebanon by a contributor, W. Thomas Smith, Jr. (If not, Thomas Edsall has written up the basics here.)

Now National Review is trying to explain what happened. Here's their online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez:

A few additional words on what the situation with the Smith Lebanon reporting is and what it isn’t: It isn’t a case of fabrication, as some of Smith’s accusers have alleged. With regard to the two posts in question, it is my belief, based on an investigation in which NRO discussed the matter with three independent sources who live and work in Lebanon (as well as other experts in the area), that Smith was probably either spun by his sources or confused about what he saw...[His sources'] claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: "The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas."

Yow. It's not often these days you see this kind of raw, open prejudice in American publications. And certainly you can only get away with saying it about Arabs. You won't be reading about the Asian or African or Jewish or Buddhist "tendency to lie" anytime soon.

And it's especially enjoyable this appears in National Review, which has something of a track record lying and exaggerating about the Arab world. In fact, as you may have noticed, they helped start a war based on it.

Of course, National Review did this not because lying and exaggerating about enemies is an American tendency, but because it's a human tendency. And one popular way humans lie and exaggerate about their enemies is by claiming their enemies have an unusual tendency toward lying and exaggeration.

Comments

Any comment about the recent revelations in the Mohammed al-Durrah affair?

Posted by: ralph kramden on 12/03/07 at 6:37 AM Respond

I blame this whole affair on the Republican tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies.

Posted by: nitpicker on 12/03/07 at 6:43 AM Respond

That would be the same "Arab" tendency to lie about your enemies that led this adminstration to lie about Iraq's WMDs.

Posted by: tballou on 12/03/07 at 7:15 AM Respond

I blame it on their being the overt servants of capital rather than covert or unwitting. But of course these two are precisely the same thing, so what you say must be true of Democrats too, and thus of all electable politicians.

Damn those servants of the people. They all need replacing with true servants of the rich with no conflicting interests, or with people who can't get elected.

Posted by: me on 12/03/07 at 7:35 AM Respond

Don't expect this to get anywhere. Saying good things about Arabs doesn't get you ratings or readers.

Posted by: me on 12/03/07 at 8:08 AM Respond

People seem to be under the impression that National Review is a journal of quality reporting and integrity.

It is not.

It is a just another arm of the neo-con PR machine.

Let's throw more soldiers and Marines into the meat-grinder so that we won't have to admit we're a bunch of liars and thieves.

Long live NR!

Posted by: jvill on 12/03/07 at 8:20 AM Respond

Next, I expect them to say, "Full retail for that Schwartze," tell the Micks there ain't no work for them, and remind the Chinks that neither they nor dogs are allowed in public parks. Their prejudice is all the more breathtaking because they seem not to be aware of it, or worse, think they can manipulate it to avoid fault.

My guess is that we now have a full generation of media "managers" who've never reported, whose notion of management is more superficial than the One Minute MBA, and who think that Murrow, Karnow, Halberstam, White and Mencken were partners in daddy's law firm.

They're the sort of "manager" who thinks it's not plagiarism if you got it off the Internet, whose notion of a professional apology comes from KKKarl Rove, not the J&J managers who superbly dealt with the Tylenol poisoning scare.

That's OK for KKKarl and Cheney; they don't want their boss, much less anyone else, to have an idea, let alone put it into practice. Good for us? Not so much.

Posted by: EOH on 12/03/07 at 10:34 AM Respond

Didn't National Review get its start as a mouthpiece for segregation supporters?

Posted by: commie atheist on 12/03/07 at 11:22 AM Respond

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