Monday, November 22, 2010

The "experts"

A few days ago "experts "were telling us that Ireland needed between forty billion and one hundred billion euros. "Between forty and one hundred billion" .... clever these "experts" aren't they. The figure is appparently closer to one hundred billion and it is the Irish banks who will be getting the money, in case you didn't know. Still, aren't our "experts" marvelous .... well, they did say between 40 and 100 billion!

Oh, apropos of which ... we had another couple of "experts" on Anne Will's talkshow on Germany's ARD yesterday evening. There was Don Jordan, an American journalist and "expert" selling his little story about an empty bag at Cologne airport going unchallenged as proof of a lack of consciousness among the German population when it comes to the terrorist threat and as proof of his "expert" status, and we had a certain Melody Sucharewicz.

Melody appears to be a very fortunate young lady from Munich who emigrated to Israel a few years ago but very possibly hangs on to two passports while millions who were born in her adopted homeland ..... well, we won't go off on that tangent. No, suffice to say that Melody is also an "expert" on terror because she lives in Israel and Israel according to another guest, the German Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maiziére, is being bombed in the north by the Hezbollah and in the south by Hamas. Ah, and you all thought that it was the Israelis who bombed the Lebanon and Gaza!

Anyway, Melody told us a very sad story about how she is frightened to travel by bus and instead takes a taxi and she really had me thinking about the thousands who were too frightened to leave their houses in Gaza less than two years ago and how hundreds of them were murdered with their families in their homes. Which in turn had me thinking how nice it would be to get a couple of people into the studio from Gaza or the Lebanon or, indeed, from one of the countries that are being terrified by the American "expert's" countrymen. Of course, that just wouldn't work, would it? After all, a plump little American in a "nice" suit who speaks German fluently and a pretty, blonde, German-Israeli, they really tick all the "expert" boxes, don't they? No, a bearded illiterate tribesman having his tales of woe translated from Pashtu into German and a nervous little Palestinian lady who has had her family slaughtered by the IDF bully boys .... well, what do they know about terrorism? They are not "experts", are they?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

First-class post! Seriously, your blog entry encapsulates how rare quality media broadcasting has become, and again how impossibly difficult it is for the Palestinians to get airtime to present the truth of their situation to an honest, objective and unbiased audience - and how easily an unconvenient truth has been swept almost completely under the carpet.

Anonymous said...

Very good post really!
Jordan