Saturday, June 15, 2013

The Media Keeps America's Problems Going!

     Three stories, one from Reuter's, published by CBS News, one from AP, published by the Israeli YNet News, and one from the Egyptian paper, Ahram Online.

     The Israeli version contains this text:

Morsi repeated the allegation that Egyptians loyal to the now-ousted regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarak were behind the planned protests and that they were working against the January 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak.

     The U.S. version has this in a caption:

Morsi repeated the allegation that Egyptians loyal to the now-ousted regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarak were behind the planned protests and that they were working against the January 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak.

And while everyone mentions this, here from Ahram...

[Morsi] "[T]oday we stand against Hezbollah for Syria," he added, referring to the Lebanese fighters [Hezbollah] who officially declared last May their involvement in the fighting in Syria against "Islamic extremists who pose danger to Lebanon," in reference to anti-Al-Assad rebels.


...only Ahram Online Mentions This Part of his alleged condemnation of Hezbollah.

"The Egyptian people have stood by the Lebanese people and Hezbollah against the [Israeli] attack in 2006,"

Referring to Egyptian support for Hezbollah in the past.

And so, yet again, I say Fuck You, CBS!.

By ignoring the part where Morsi praises Hezbollah, Americans can only be surprised (Suprise!) when Morsi behaves in a more pro-Hezbollah fashion, particularly if Hezbollah manages to get connected to doing something heinous to people invading their country, like, say, Americans.

Bar Trivia Historian ++?

     So I was thinking about bar trivia, and how, for a non-historian, I am an awesome historian, and I was thinking that even for a historian, I'm not too bad a historian, because, apparently, I have done original work, and published it on the internet.  I'm referring to the way the divide, Catholic|Protestant, during the Reformation, followed the linguistic boundary.  Romance language governments sided with the Pope, Germanic language governments ( except a critical subsection of Germans princes, mostly ones with strong ties to Spain) sided with Luther, and Slavic Poland and Hungarian Transylvania were the only tolerant areas until the French Revolution, nearly 300 years later.

     I never mentioned before that in addition to having read Diarmaid MacCullough's award-winning book on the topic, which only took stabs at the reason the divide mapped out the way it did, I went to the New York Public Library and went through every book that mentioned "Protestant Reformation" and "language." All of it was irrelevant.  Luckily, to make it interesting for me, I found a nearly contemporary slanderous attack on Martin Luther, where he was portrayed as a drunk, who hung out in ale houses, with his other drunk friends, doing the devil's business, and he knows he is doing it.