And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
To Whom it May concern at FAIR-L,
There is a glaring gap in your coverage of the NY Times coverage of US
policy, that gap is filled with the victims of the US and Canadian
expansionism upon this North American continent, filled by the people of
the First Nations. Our graves are robbed in the name of science, lands
polluted by uranium tailings and nuclear waste dumps, our religion mocked
with every sports team that bears the name of our people, contracts
(treaties) with every First Nation termed as "welfare payments" not debt,
and the truth ignored within history texts, the murderers of our people
honored by monument and legal tender. The Presidential Commission on Race
relations didn't even include an Indian on the panel. Talk about the
invisible people.
Your expose below leaves us just as invisible..
WE ARE HERE..AND WE WILL NOT GO SILENTLY.
Ishgooda
Ed
-----Original Message-----
From: FAIR <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thursday, June 17, 1999 7:19 PM
Subject: [FAIR-L] ACTION ALERT: THE NEW YORK TIMES' YAWNING GAP
FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and news reports
ACTION ALERT: THE NEW YORK TIMES' YAWNING GAP:
Between Glowing Portrait of Western Idealism and Reality of U.S.
Policy
June 17, 1999
In the June 13 New York Times "Week in Review," Michael Wines
cautioned that despite America's "victory over Communism and
inhumanity" in Kosovo, all is not well in the world. Americans often
perceive their morals as universal, Wines says, but in fact there is
"a yawning gap between the West and much of the world on the value of
a single human life."
According to Wines, the war in Yugoslavia "only underscored the deep
ideological divide between an idealistic New World bent on ending
inhumanity and an Old World equally fatalistic about unending
conflict."
Amongst the "anti-West club" of Syria, Libya, Iraq, China and India,
Russians stand out "by temperament, history and current attitudes" as
a particularly amoral people, says Wines. As evidence of this, Wines
cites the anti-Jewish pogroms of the early 1900s, the Soviet policy of
ethnic gerrymandering and forced migration, and the large-scale ethnic
conflicts that spread through the Soviet Union as it collapsed.
Yet Wines ignores examples from U.S. history that would have
questioned the U.S.'s commitment to "ending brutality" and the actual
"value of a single human life" for U.S. policymakers.
Earlier this year, the New York Times ran several stories and
editorials on the release of a report by the Guatemalan Historical
Clarification Commission, a report that, in the words of a front-page
Times story (2/26/99):
"concluded that the United States gave money and training to a
Guatemalan military that committed 'acts of genocide' against the
Mayans during the most brutal armed conflict in Central America,
Guatemala's 36-year civil war.... The panel also found evidence that
the United States had knowledge of genocide and still supported the
Guatemalan military."
There is ample evidence to suggest that the U.S. is selective in its
objection to governments that orchestrate violence against internal
minorities. In 1992, at the height of Turkey's repression of its
Kurdish minority, a State Department spokesperson summarized U.S.
policy (National Journal, 4/15/95):
"There is no question of halting U.S. military assistance to Turkey.
The U.S. sees nothing objectionable in a friendly or allied country
using American weapons to secure internal order or to repel an attack
against its territorial unity."
Wines could have calculated the value the U.S. places on "a single
human life" by examining the U.S.'s policy of imposing sanctions on
Iraq. While malnutrition was almost unknown in Iraq before the Gulf
War, "from 1991 to 1998, children under 5 were dying from
malnutrition-related diseases in numbers ranging from a conservative
2,690 per month to a more realistic 5,357 per month," according to
U.N. figures (Seattle Post Intelligencer, 5/11/99). When 60 Minutes
(5/12/96) asked Secretary of State Madeline Albright whether sanctions
that left half a million Iraqi children dead were "worth it," Albright
replied, "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price--we think
the price is worth it."
A graphic demonstration of the Western attitude toward human life came
in the closing days of the war in Yugoslavia--after Belgrade had
already agreed to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, and all that
remained to be worked out were the technical details of an
international occupation--when the U.S. carpet-bombed two battalions
of Yugoslavian soldiers gathered in an open field near the Albanian
border, who were skirmishing with KLA fighters. News reports indicated
that the number of soldiers killed as a result in this meaningless
battle was in the hundreds (AP, 6/9/99).
( You can read the Week in Review article in its entirety at:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/061399rights-review.html )
============
ACTION: Please write to the New York Times and let it know that its
readers deserve better than simplistic, self-congratulatory analysis.
Encourage the Times to provide more thorough and accurate analysis of
the U.S.'s role in ethnic conflicts around the world.
============
New York Times
229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-556-1748
Fax: 212-556-3738
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Additional contacts:
--Michael Wines
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--Jonathan Landman
Editor, Week in Review
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------
Feel free to respond to FAIR ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ). We can't reply to
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Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html
doctrine of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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