Mad Cow Disease and Our Militant Media by Jack Engelhard Jul 28, '04
In this age of One-Hour-Photo, Same-Day Dry Cleaning, Instant Kabbalah, Drive-Through Zohar, While-You-Wait divinity ordination, it's no wonder we lose touch with the meaning of things and pervert the value of words. But words, even at the height of this sound-bite generation, are all we have to separate this from that and that from this.
Words are loaded like hot dice. "Death and life are in the power of the tongue." - King Solomon.
Flagrante delicto won't stop Sandy Berger as it never stopped his boss, Bill Clinton, master of the two-step smooth-talk.
"Israel Confirms Strike Killed Militant," read the morning headline from the Associated Press.
This militant, a Palestinian Arab named Hazem Rahim, seized the head of a slain Israeli soldier and ceremoniously played with it for the cameras.
(Decapitation is the number one sport with this crowd.)
Our newsroom worthies cannot distinguish between a terrorist and a militant, and there you have it, even cold-blooded murder is open for deconstruction.
In academic-speak, there are no facts, only interpretations. Or, truth is like the game of Scrabble.
Others, before me, have noted that our enemies have shanghaied our very language. Language, in case we've forgotten, creates facts, even facts on the ground.
Say "occupied territories" or "settlers" and the reflex is to think of Jews sitting on Arab land, not the (truthful) other way round. Which shows how they took our vocabulary and twisted it into "Man Bites Dog". That's partly our fault. As they played with our dictionary, we slept.
We're taught that God created the heavens and the earth by "simply" uttering the words. ("Let there be light, and there was light…")
Adam was chosen to name the animals with words that pertain to the exact characteristics of each species. A cow cannot be a fox. Finally, I understand Gertrude Stein: "Rose is a rose is a rose." Not until recently did I know what she meant, and maybe she didn't, either.
If, from the very beginning, we had taken the initiative and called Yasser Arafat by his real name - Thug - maybe we'd have spared ourselves a suicide bombing or two.
For thug is a thug is a thug.
But we call him "president". And remember his PLO? No more PLO. Suddenly, it's the Palestinian Authority. Same gangsters, but titled.
From a confederacy of violent misfits idling in Tunis came a "Palestine", a Palestinian prime minister, a Palestinian legislature, a Palestinian cabinet.
Thanks again, Mr. Peres and Mr. Beilin. Besides titles, you, and other post-Zionists, also contrived to give them 100,000 guns. Smart.
Back here, if we'd stopped those guys at the airport and called them terrorists, instead of tourists, maybe there'd be no 9/11. (The "9/11 Report" pretty much says so.)
Still today, after all that's going on, we still use PC linguistics.
Peaceful religion? Sure. Half of it probably is. Maybe more than half. Who knows? I'm willing to accept 90 percent of Islam as being OK, which leaves 100 million with their blades to our throats. These have become infected with something like Mad Cow Disease.
This has spread throughout the world and afflicted our mainstream news media, who, one by one, show the same symptoms of changing colors as in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, or, as he called the disease that turns humans into a movement of beasts, rhinoceritis. In our case, then, Mad Cowitis.
The sickness spreads to people (such as the Jeffrey Goldberg/Norm Finkelstein/Richard Ben Cramer Axis) who understand the beast's point of view. ("To understand is to justify.") Unfortunately for us dhimmis, there are no provisions for quarantine against human mad cows, however they mispronounce and misappropriate religion or journalism.
As for the raping and torture and killing by the Janjaweed in Western Sudan, just the other day, the US Congress named the purely Arab-provoked atrocity exactly what it is - genocide. Now there's a word that makes all the difference, but always comes too late. The distance between atrocity and genocide is the same long mile that separates the passive militant from the active terrorist. One is a lie, the other is truth - which they are too twisted or too cowardly to mention.
A word here, a word there, and the world gets turned on its head.
Roosevelt said, "A date which will live in infamy," and Japan Mon Amour.
Reagan said, "Tear down this wall," and down went the Soviet Union.
The words "I love you" change the entire chemistry between man and woman. (Well, nowadays also between man and man, woman and woman, but let's not get started.)
So we say terrorist and they say militant. Fine with me. I'm buying. This used to upset me, too. But I've changed my mind. In this case, we can bend the rules and accept the proposition that a (mad) cow can be a fox.
What I'm saying is that if they (the BBC, CNN, New York Times, AP, certainly Reuters…) insist on "militant," excellent, let it be, as long as we understand that militants are murderers, bottom feeders, the lowest scum of this earth, lower than mere terrorists. Let's buy the vowels, and the consonants, too.
This means that every time they say militant, we say thank you. We get the message. We know who they are, and we know who you are.
The Palestinian Arab who murdered Tali Hatuel and her four daughters, yes, he's a militant and they, the lords of reportage, share the same blood.
They built this Babel. It's for us to confound their tongues.
Language belongs to the people, not to the PC liberal press. (But I repeat myself.) Language evolves, and we decide what "is" is. Take the word gay, how it's changed over the decades to mean something else entirely. They didn't decide. We did. I say appeasement and right away you say Chamberlain. Words do all this. I say anti-Semite, you say Vaness… oh, never mind.
If we're going to win this thing, we've got to win back our language. Our dictionary versus theirs, those are the front lines of this war.
P.S. Somebody owes me a million dollars. I predicted the exact outcome a week before the International Court of (In)Justice ruled against Israel and the Fence. I offered a million dollars of my very own money as a wager. You can look it up at "Reading Is Bad For Your Health." (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=3859) troubles prevented me from collecting. One, I could not find a bookie to take my bet. Two, I could not find a million dollars.
The only surprise was this; the man who read out the sentence against Israel was from China, using the moral authority of Tibet and Tiananmen Square.
