Checking In With Dr. Ronen Bergman Part III

Here's Part I.

Here's Part II.

Ed West at the Telegraph (London) met with Dr. Bergman just before the start of the Iranian elections. In the course of his interview, he explored how the BBC was a propaganda tool of Ayatollah Khomeini back in 1979.

Yeah, I know, so what else is new?

Anyway, the interview:

When we met in a west London hotel not far from the notorious Iranian embassy, Bergman pointed out: “The BBC gave free hours of free broadcast to Khomeini from Paris. It is unbelievable. Every time there is a person who is fighting ‘royal’ forces, in the sense of their being autocratic, the BBC gives them a free hand and carte blanche, without trying to understand what their views are.

The European Left, he says, have always fallen for any group that is anti-monarchy without understanding their true ideology. The BBC did not realise Khomenei’s true nature, and nor did the socialists and Communists who sided with him.

No prizes for guessing, incidentally, what happened to Iranian Marxists.

The Left and the media (but I repeat myself) have had a long and sordid love affair with nasty elements around the world. I'm sure this example doesn't surprise anyone.

What it should become, however, is the large grain of salt you take when you see the western media sympathize with "freedom fighters" from around the world.

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'DisHonor Awards For The Lamestream Media'

The Media Research Center, parent organization of my sometime employer, NewsBusters.org, held their annual awards ceremony for some of the most ridiculous and outrageous "news" reports of the last year. John Fund has the report:

The Media Research Center handed out its annual "DisHonors Awards" to what some of its speakers called the "lamestream media" last night at a gala dinner in Washington D.C. The conservative group roasted what it called "the most outrageously biased liberal reporters as selected by a distinguished panel of leading media observers."

There were some truly rich moments provided by the nominees, many of them centered on the adulation reporters heaped on Barack Obama. Here is ABC News' Bill Weir reporting from the Obama inauguration: "Never have so many people shivered so long with such joy. From above, even the seagulls must have been awed by the blanket of humanity."

Some TV anchors went way over the top in Obamamania even as they insisted they were just reporting the facts. Take Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who said last February after listening to an Obama speech: "I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often. . . . He speaks about America in a way that has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the feeling we have about our country. And that is an objective assessment."

An award mocking the "worst pummeling of Sarah Palin" was given out. Among the contenders was Newsweek's Howard Fineman for his dismissal of the Alaska Governor's credentials: "Sarah Palin makes Barack Obama look like John Adams. I mean, it's just, it's no contest."

The final category at the MRC dinner featured an award for "the stupidest analysis." The winner was CNN founder Ted Turner, who said that if global warming isn't rolled back, "in 30 or 40 years basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals."

But my personal favorite was from that fountain of anti-America snobbery, the BBC. Correspondent Justin Webb stood next to an 18-wheel big rig truck while dismissing President Bush's tax rebate. He warned: "Many Americans drive private cars not much smaller than this truck, and the risk is that they use their tax rebate simply to buy fuel, boosting the profits of the oil companies but doing little or nothing for the wider American economy."

In the tradition of the MRC dinner, none of the winners showed up to accept their awards, so a conservative leader was chosen to come up on stage and acknowledge the award on their behalf.

I'm told good times were had by all.




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"Dear Mr. Obama" MUST WATCH

I first posted this back on 12 September. The BBC reports that since it first debuted the end of August, "Dear Mr. Obama" has become the YouTube video of the campaign.

With good reason. It is powerful. Watch it again and send it to your friends.




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World To Obama: We Want You

GlobeScan just concluded another one of those polls that do nothing for the Democratic candidate. In fact, it's gotten to the point where I think they do these polls--the ones where they ask the world which candidate they want for POTUS--to hurt Obama's chances of winning the White House. The reason? Most Americans could not care less who the world thinks we should elect.

Of course, all of this should be taken with a huge grain of salt. A similarly idiotic poll of the world found that only 46% believed that al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, while 15% (the 'truthers') blamed the U.S. government, 7% (anti-Semites) blamed Israel, and 7% blamed some other groups.

Those of you in the room for whom fickle world opinion of your next leader plays a large role in determining your vote, please raise your hand.

Everyone else, take a good look around. These are the people who sew Canadian flags on their backpacks when they travel abroad because they don't want people to think they're American.

That's patriotism, folks.


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Gordon Brown Does the Right Thing

Responding the only way they could, yesterday Britain expelled 4 Russian diplomats. Read press reports at the BBC and Sky News.

A quick primer for those not familiar with the case:

Last fall, frequent Vladimir Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko was killed by a heavy dose of Polonium 210. Polonium is a highly refined nuclear material to which few governments have access. British law enforcement followed the clues to Andrei Lugovoi who many suspect has ties to current Russian intelligence organizations and even to Mr. Putin. In typical Soviet-Cold War fashion, the Russian government has refused to cooperate with the investigation and thrown up a number of conspiracy theories to distract attention. The British government finally lost its patience and expelled the Russian "diplomats."

We put "diplomats" in quotation marks because in these instances, the first ones expelled are those suspected of being intelligence officers and usually carry titles like, "agricultural advisor." Those of you who frequent this blog know that we regularly attend the Intel Seminar at the University of Cambridge. Disclosure rules of Chatham House Rules being what they are, we can't reveal the source, but we've been told on a number of occasions by current and former British Intel officers that the number of foreign operatives and scope of spying by Russia and China is as high now as it ever was during the Cold War.

This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Vladimir Putin was a colonel in the KGB. He was a thug then and remains a thug now. We posted a revealing interview from the Wall Street Journal with Garry Kasparov earlier in the year. Russia under Putin has been dismantling the early democratic gains and is progressively becoming a fitting thugocracy under Putin. Dissidents, political opponents, the free press both at home (and, in the case of Litvenenko) abroad are being jailed or silenced--permanently.

Russia responded to the expulsion with a predictable amount of bluster and bloviation, calling the British move "immoral." Watch for Russia to follow suit on these expulsions with a few of their own expulsions.

But Russia isn't just killing their own. They are actively undermining US interests everywhere from Iraq and Iran to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa, Cuba, North Korea, the UN--anywhere they can try to make themselves a relevant world player. Putin's recent complaints about US missile defense are part of a larger strategy of bullying Eastern Europe and the rest of the EU. In this game Russia holds a strong trump card in the form of oil access which runs from Russia to the rest of Europe. We hope Europe will follow Britain's strong example rather than kow towing to Putin and his cronies.


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I'll take sour grapes, with a skosh of schadenfreude

In our last post we referred to an impending Cambridge trip. It ended up being positive and productive for a number of reasons. With the help of a professor friend there, we pounded out an idea for a PhD proposal, attended the Intelligence Seminar and listened to a CIA historian, and sat at the high table at Corpus Christi formal hall.

These intelligence seminars are interesting affairs. All in attendance agree to abide by Chatham House rules. Essentially this means that participants can use the information they learn at these seminars (or any other setting where Chatham House rules are invoked), but cannot reveal the source. As a result, we get some fairly interesting bits of information. Since I've already revealed who the source was, I can't really post what he said, other than to say, that the CIA had more things going on in China and Tibet going on in the last 50 years than I would have ever guessed.

During the seminar he also discussed the gross innacuracies of The Good Shepherd and its treatment of what is supposed to be "the untold story of the beginning of the CIA." Sorry to burst the bubble of all you cloak-and-dagger enthusiasts, but that movie is pure fiction. He (the CIA historian) also referred us to a fantastic story about two CIA operatives who were captured by the Chinese in 1973, imprisoned for 20 years undergoing all sorts of deprivations, and finally released, quietly when relations with China "thawed" under Nixon.

There's another interesting dynamic at these meetings. Most of those in attendance have or are working on PhDs, with a few MA students and undergrads kind of in the periphery. Though the invited speaker is a guest, it is a time honored tradition to put hard questions to these speakers. Having been trained in the self-esteem society that is the American education system, it is always a little shocking to hear just about anyone sitting around the large conference table in the hollowed halls of Corpus Christi College take a CIA historian or whoever to task.

While in this seminar, we met and briefly talked to Stefan Halper. Mr. Halper was an erstwhile assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney when Mr. Cheney was White House Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford and later an assistant to Mr. Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush. Prior to the 2004 Presidential election, Mr. Halper co-authored a book critical of the "neoconservative cabal" inhabiting the halls of power in Washington DC. In his own words, his name was "stricken from dinner party lists in DC." That line sounded like it had been repeated not a few times, with great delight.

Now, we don't want to jump to any hasty conclusions, but the schadenfreude that infects Mr. Halper's voice as he talks about the difficulties of his one time Republican colleagues and friends smacks of sour grapes at not having been invited in to government when the Republicans retook the presidency with George W. Bush in 2000. Mr. Halper now hosts a show over at the BBC.

Mr. Halper pointed out, and we found it funny, that Mark Steyn, probably the most consistently funny political writer we read, "stole" his book name, America Alone. He probably wouldn't be pleased to know that Mr. Steyn's book appears #1 on an Amazon search for "americal alone," while his comes in at #6.

We suggest, therefore, that you read Mr. Steyn's column from yesterdays New York Sun about Nicolas Sarkozy's win in the French presidential election (Congrats, Mr. Sarkozy). Good stuff.

Read also John Fund, from the Opinion Journal, about the same thing.

***Update: Also worth reading, a primer on George Tenet's new "slam dunk" of a best seller by the Weekly Standard's William Kristol. Turns out (thanks Marc) the intel about al-Qaeda in Iraq was even better than we thought. Thanks Mr. Tenet for that "inadvertent truth."

Until next time, enjoy.


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