Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Saturday, October 8, 2005

14:22 - The truth's still getting its boots on
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/true_believers/

(top)

Yesterday the news "broke" that Houston, we have confirmation of God in the White House�and of course everyone from incoherent LiveJournal authors to the world's most widely read editorialists pounced. Way too juicy a scoop not to, right?

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: �President Bush said to all of us: �I�m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, �George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.� And I did, and then God would tell me, �George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq �� And I did. And now, again, I feel God�s words coming to me, �Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.� And by God I�m gonna do it.�"

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: �I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

Now, it's funny: the last time I heard these quotes being attributed to Bush, it was in those TV ads solicited by MoveOn.org�entries for their "Bush in 60 Seconds" campaign to develop an anti-Bush ad to air during last year's Super Bowl.

GRAPHIC: Pictures Of Hitler
HITLER: (Speaking In German)
CHYRON: We have taken new measures to protect our homeland,

GRAPHIC: Pictures Of Hitler
HITLER: (Speaking In German)
CHYRON: I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator,

GRAPHIC: Pictures Of Hitler
HITLER: (Speaking In German)
CHYRON: God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them,

GRAPHIC: Pictures of President Bush
HITLER: (Speaking In German)
CHYRON: and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.

CHYRON: SOUND FAMILIAR?
BACKGROUND: Cheering German Crowd

That was at the beginning of 2004, which means the quotations were in public view by then�they were first reported by Ha'aretz, on June 30, 2003, right after the meeting in question took place.

So from Abbas' mouth to MoveOn.org patrons' ears. That's the credibility trail.

And now here they come again. Only now it's "the distinguished and highly reliable film-maker Norma Percy" making a new BBC series, filming Abbas and Shaath as they recite what they'd said back in June 2003... or maybe it was just stock footage shot at the time�this part is unclear. If the former, though, it meant that the Palestinians had apparently really rehearsed it well, so as to make a good show of it for Percy's eager cameras, or else the quotes were accurate (or had been mangled by a "helpful" translator). I wasn't about to dismiss either possibility, though the credibility of the source material remains entirely outside the realm of what I'd consider solid.

I did try to dig up commentary from the news stories at the time that would have debunked the quotes; I was sure I'd seen such a thing in the outraged reaction to the MoveOn.org Hitler ad, but no amount of Googling turned up anything substantive. I did, however, find sympathetic articles defending the ads and claiming that the quotes were authentic (though providing little in the way of citations or evidence).

Well, now it's the next day, and the White House has issued its denial, and so has Abbas�so I guess the footage must have been shot back in 2003 after all. And even the people inclined to dismiss McClellan's denial out of hand would surely pay attention to Abbas'.

But that wasn't fast enough for every editorial writer from here to Timbuktu to register their horror anew at the quotes which have been swirling around the toilet bowl of the Internet's seamier underbelly for over two years now. They've just been bumped into the spotlight again, this time by the BBC itself, and I haven't yet decided whether it's sadder that the BBC's very credibility is what's served to renew the world's interest in them�or that that same credibility has sunk to such abysmal levels that this kind of thing hardly even surprises me.

But do go see Tim Blair's latest on the matter, a roundup of all the highly-placed opinionmakers who have given this story the same immortality as the "plastic turkey" and the James Watt "Second Coming" libel.

And for the record: no, I don't think Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet.