Ambrose Bierce observed that war was God’s way
of teaching Americans
geography. To anybody who questioned the wisdom
of invading Iraq,
however, nothing has been more disheartening
than polls that show many
Americans sharing two false beliefs: that Saddam
Hussein participated in
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that "weapons
of mass destruction" have
been found there. Where on earth do these people
get their information?
From talk radio, that’s where. Never mind that
the Bush administration
has repeatedly hinted at Iraqi crimes it cannot
prove; the main source
of right-wing agitprop in the U.S. is there 24/7
on your radio dial.
(Do spare me the angry e-mails, OK? One artillery
shell, provenance
unknown, hardly makes a WMD arsenal. With U.S.
help, Iraq fired
thousands of nerve gas rounds during its war
with Iran. There are bound
to be some lying around.)
I was reminded of talk radio’s mischievous role
by catching a bit of
"The O’Reilly Factor" last week. Bill O’Reilly’s
substitute host was FOX
News "personality" John Gibson. Since O’Reilly’s
Web site charges a
hefty subscription fee for replays, I can only
paraphrase. But the gist of it
was that the left-wing media were making too
much of U.S. abuses against
Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison and not
enough of the videotaped
beheading of Nicholas Berg by al-Qa’ida henchman
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
What the Berg atrocity proved, Gibson said, was
the triviality of U.S.
misdeeds and the disloyalty of our allies. To
me, it’s embarrassing enough
making alibis for American soldiers by comparing
them to terrorist psychopaths.
But what really struck me was Gibson’s use of
the most elementary trick in
the demagogue’s handbook: the logical fallacy
called the "appeal to ignorance."
What you don’t know proves what you want to believe.
Gibson predicted that the Arab press would ignore
the Berg incident, while
the cowardly Europeans would downplay it and
make excuses for al-Qa’ida.
He specifically mocked the French and the British—odd,
as the Brits are our
most steadfast allies. But what he didn’t do
while I listened was provide any
examples. Doubtless confident that few listeners
would read foreign press
accounts, Gibson built a straw man and demolished
it.
So I decided to do a little research. It’s easy.
Enter "France" and
"newspapers" on an Internet search engine and
voila, scores of French
periodicals are at your fingertips. I can’t read
a word of German, but a
search of Der Spiegel’s Web site brought up numerous
articles, including
an editorial thoughtfully translated into English.
It contemptuously rejected
al-Zarqawi’s rationalization of Berg’s killing
as revenge for American offenses.
"He died for the same symbolic reasons as those
for which Wall Street
Journal writer Daniel Pearl had died two years
earlier," Der Spiegel wrote.
"Like Pearl, he was an American and a Jew."
If anything, the British press made even more
of the Berg atrocity. The
tabloid Evening Standard wrote that "the murder
of the young American
businessman Nick Berg by Islamic militants in
Iraq surely reaches new
depths of depravity." The Telegraph thought it
demonstrated "why the
West is fighting, and why it must win." The anti-war
Guardian used words
like "horrific" and "repellent," and reprinted
editorials from American
papers like the New York Post and Detroit Free
Press.
Berg’s execution made front-page headlines in
Madrid’s El Pais and
Amsterdam’s Algemeen Dagblad.
Newspapers in Turkey, Lebanon and the United Arab
Emirates denounced
the Berg atrocity. For what it’s worth—not much—even
the militant
organizations Hamas and Hezbollah repudiated
the act as contrary to
Islamic values.
But the most vivid condemnation I found appeared
in a place gullible
talk show fans might find surprising. "What [al-Zarqawi’s]
men did is
pure barbarity," wrote Le Monde of Paris. "A
morally unexcusable crime
but also devastating politically for the cause
they pretend to defend.
If the indignation aroused in Arab countries
and the rest of the world
by the revelation of the prisoners ’ condition
in Abou Ghraib prison is
legitimate, this crime and its illustrating video
are unconscionable."
Appearing to address France’s large Islamic minority,
Le Monde demanded:
"How can one commend himself to a God, any god,
when he wallows in
barbarity? How can one suppose that one’s Creator
may rejoice at the
sight of a man’s beheading while crowds chant
‘ Allah is Great’? How
long can Moslem communities around the world
and in Europe continue to
trust imams who refuse to condemn clearly and
publicly such barbarous
atrocities?" True, Le Monde, dismissed as a "socialist
rag" by my French
friend Alain, to whom I turned for translation
help, couldn’t resist pointing
out that such "cancerous outgrowths" of al-Qa’idawere
exactly what France
warned the U.S. against. "Far from diminishing
the perils," it wrote, "the Iraqi
incursion has increased them." But that’s not
an argument right-wing talk radio
wants you to hear.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award.