Around the World

Movie Critique Ethics: Jay Carney’s Embarrassing Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There was a different arm up Ron Zeigler’s back, but the system, and the results, were the same.

Once again, allow me to express sympathy for Jay Carney who, like all official White House spokesmen (R.I.P., Ron Zeigler—who once offered me a job, by the way…but I digress) regularly lies his head off, sometimes for good reasons, usually just because his bosses want it that way. Still, the lies come out of his mouth, so he is accountable.

Yesterday, Carney came out with this jaw-dropper regarding the multiple protests being directed at U.S. embassies in the Middle East, as well as the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that left four dead, including our ambassador:

“This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting — that in no way justifies any violent reaction to it…But this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, but it is in response to video that is offensive to Muslims.”

I know that the fact that President Obama’s signature charm offensive with the Arab world has been an abject failure is a bitter pill, but it would be both admirable and encouraging to see the President accepting that he was naive and learning from the experience, rather than knowing that he is prompting his spokesman to insist, against all logic and evidence, that, no, really, they still love us—they just shot a rocket at our embassy because they didn’t like a movie trailer. Continue reading →

“Marion Berry’s Dirty Asian Summer Punch” and Attacks on Free Speech From The Left

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The United States’ has to be vigilant in protecting its unique Bill of Rights from dilution, degradation and manipulation. Once the threats came from the political right, as with the Red-baiting tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Now it more typically comes from the kinder, gentler, more hypocritical political left, often in the form of threats to “hate speech,” a term that can mean pretty much whatever the kinder, gentler censor wants it to mean, and is especially handy to stifle dissent.

This First Amendment assault was on view yesterday on MSNBC, as PR loud mouth Donny Deutch, columnist Mike Barnicle and University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the makers of the anti-Muslim video now being used as an excuse to attack embassies should be indicted. Uh, no. Making a movie cannot be a crime in the U.S.: this was what Citizens United was all about, and the principle is called “Freedom of Speech.” But bigger brains than Donny’s are trying to chip away at the right that makes America America, using the ever-popular “everybody does it” rationalization to argue that European nations prosecute those who “hurt religious feelings”, in the immortal words of our Cairo Embassy, so it must be the right thing to do.

Scared yet? If not read this post, and this, from the Volokh Conspiracy, on the arguments for limiting Free Speech being made by Prof. Peter Spiro and former Yale Dean Harold Koh, the latter now working in the Obama State Department.

Or just watch how much the bureaucrats in our nation’s capital respects the First Amendment. Or understand satire. Continue reading →

Ethics Train Wreck Forensics: The Cairo Embassy Statement

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Mitt! Mitt….get off the tracks!

Thus did the U.S. Embassy in Cairo respond to the growing local uproar over a cheapie anti-Islamic film produced in the U.S. and put on the internet. The statement preceded the disruption at the embassy itself as well as the deadly attack later, purportedly with the same motivation, on Libya’s U.S. embassy. Mitt Romney said, shortly after the latter,

“The embassy in Cairo put out a statement after their grounds had been breached,” Romney told reporters. “Protesters were inside the grounds. They reiterated that statement after the breach. I think it’s a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values. That instead, when our grounds are being attacked and being breached, that the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation. An apology for America’s values is never the right course.”

Later, Romney issued a statement that said, in part,

“It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

The next morning, the White House distanced itself from the Cairo statement. “An administration official tells ABC News that ‘no one in Washington approved that statement before it was released and it doesn’t reflect the views of the U.S. government,’” ABC News reported. Later, both the State Department, in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and President Obama, issued new statements. Clinton:

 “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior [in Benghazi], along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet. America’s commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear–there is no justification for this, none. Violence like this is no way to honor religion or faith.”

Obama:

“Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts.”

Naturally, the media got its oar in. Typical on the left was the Washington Post, which editorialized by calling Romney’s critique a “crude political attack,” asserting that the Cairo statement was before, rather than after the attacks on the two embassies, and declaring that President Obama’s statement “struck the right chord.”  On the rightward side of the ideological divide, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto criticized  both Obama and Clinton, saying, “…neither the president nor Mrs. Clinton vigorously, or even limply, defended the right of free speech.”

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

The Egypt and Libya Embassy Attacks: So, Are We Going To Have An “Everybody Make An Insulting Film About Muhammad Day” Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Why not? It’s your right!

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” said Steve Klein, a consultant on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s anti-Islam, Muhammad-bashing film. The film is apparently the reason two U.S. embassies were attacked yesterday, resulting in the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and others. That was the “this” Klein was referring to. Nakoula and his Isreali backers set out to make a film that denigrates both Islam and its prophet, knowing what the response in Muslim nations has been to such things, as well as the deaths caused by podunk bigot pastor Terry Jones, with his Quran-burning stunts.

Now people are dead, the Arab world is inflamed, and the perpetual tinderbox known as the Middle East is ready to ignite. The online film has had almost no audience yet, but don’t worry: international violence was probably part of the marketing plan. Maybe Nakoula will be really lucky, and have his First Amendment-protected agitprop start World War III, and he can take his place in history next to Gavrilo Princip, in the coveted “Insignificant Jerks Who Started World Wars” category.

Indeed, as an American citizen, Nakoula has a sacred right to make any movie he wants, write any book, draw any cartoon, burn any book. Americans have a sacred right to be irresponsible, and thanks to electronic communication, they can now be irresponsible on a grand scale, disrupting diplomacy, inciting international unrest, fanning racial, ethnic, international and religious discord. That means that sometimes an exercise of  the right of free speech can be legal, cherished, and terribly wrong. Among those times are when you know that shooting off your metaphorical mouth has a strong probability of getting people other than you killed.

I agree that there is something amiss when “The Book of Mormon” is winning accolades on Broadway, knowing well that if the satirical musical targeted Islam instead of Mormonism the Great White Way might be running red with blood. I agree that it reeks of a double standard when columnists like Charles M. Blow can tweet about Mitt Romney’s “magic underwear” but American Muslims are immune from similar indignities because, well, they might kill us. This elevates instability, intolerance and lack of respect for human life to an asset, and that is itself intolerable—but what is the solution? Charles Krauthammer, condemning our Egypt embassy’s conciliatory response to the mob attack on it  yesterday, said that our response should be “Go to hell.” In this he was endorsing the response of the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day crowd, which decided that an organized, mass insult to Islam was the intelligent response to one Islamic terrorist intimidating Comedy Central into censoring South Park. Their reasoning: “You can’t kill us all.”

They can kill our Ambassador, though, can’t they?

Since there is no justification for hateful, intentional denigration of anybody’s religion, there should be a bright line between caving to Islamic threats over satire and humor, which is disgraceful and un-American, and not setting out to agitate the Arab street with calculated insults, which is the domain of Jones and Nakoula. The latter is flagrantly irresponsible and reckless, and should not be condoned or excused, Constitutionally protected though it is. Nakoula, it was reported, was in hiding for his life.

If so, good.

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” said his colleague. Having to fear for one’s life seems like a fair punishment for someone who knew his hateful, rinky-dink movie might get other people killed and cause mass violence, and made it anyway.

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Sources:

Graphic:  No Short Corners

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Ethics Dunce: Novelist R J Ellory

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Jellybean”

Yes, he really did: best-selling British crime novelist R J  Ellory actually went on Amazon, and using fake names like “Jellybean” and “Nicodemus Jones,” wrote rave reviews of his own books . In one review, he called one of his novels a “modern masterpiece” and wrote that it “just stopped me dead in my tracks.”

How embarrassing. Sales a little soft lately, R J? He also used fake identities to post negative reviews of his rivals’ works. Continue reading →

When Late Is As Bad As Never: The Thalidomide Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Such a nice apology to the Thalidomide victims! Why no applause?

Harald Stock, Chief Executive of the Gruenenthal Group, has issued the company’s first apology and acknowledgment of responsibility for its role in manufacturing Thalidomide, the drug taken by pregnant women for nausea in the ’50’s and ’60’s. The women who took the drug, primarily in Europe, gave birth to children with deformed limbs or no limbs at all.  Stock  apologized to the surviving mothers and to their children, saying,

“We ask for forgiveness that for nearly 50 years we didn’t find a way of reaching out to you from human being to human being. We ask that you regard our long silence as a sign of the shock that your fate caused in us.”

Wow, that’s some case of shock—50 years! And the shock affected not just the executives of the company that were around when the drug was distributed without adequate testing and so-called “flipper babies” were being born in the thousands, but two generations of subsequent Gruenenthal management too. Let’s translate this apology, shall we? Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Rev. Pat Robertson

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“I’ve got a dear friend [who has]an adopted son, a little kid from an orphanage down in Columbia. Child had brain damage, grew up weird. And you just never know what’s been done to a child before you get that child. What kind of sexual abuse [there] has been, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation, etc. etc. You don’t have to take on somebody else’s problems. You really don’t.”

—-Televangelist Pat Robertson weighing in against international adoption on his syndicated TV show, “The 700 Club.” He was responding to a letter from a woman who had adopted three children from other countries, and whose social life had suffered as a result.

Worse than weird

No, of course you don’t “have” to take on anyone’s problems, especially those of helpless orphans in poor countries. You can ignore them completely. You can concentrate on helping people here, and that’s admirable, or you can just help yourself and fulfill your minimal societal obligations without hurting anyone. It is certainly strange, however, to hear a Christian minister discourage the sacrifice and courage of parents who choose to rescue international orphans, and express such callousness in the process.

A fellow minister, Russell Moore, properly put Robertson in his place: Continue reading →

Conservatives Take Note: Media Bias Doesn’t Explain Everything

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rep. Akin and his fans.

Pervasive media bias against them has the added affect of making Republicans and conservatives both paranoid and less likely to perceive their own flaws. In this it is like racism: that black Americans know that elements of society refuse to treat them fairly makes it difficult for them to assess their own accountability when they fail. Given the opportunity to blame failure on ourselves or others, most of us are inclined to choose the latter: psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error. That tendency, however, undermines our ability to evaluate areas where we need to improve, and to improve them.

The news media’s leftward bias warps public opinion, tilts elections and distorts public policy. A few candid  journalists acknowledge this, like ABC’s Jake Tapper, who opined to Laura Ingraham yesterday that the media “helped tilt the scales” against Hillary and John McCain in 2008, saying that “Sometimes I saw with story selection, magazine covers, photos picked, [the] campaign narrative, that it wasn’t always the fairest coverage.” Weasel words for unethical media bias, true, but for a member in good standing of the liberal Beltway media like Tapper, an admirable confession. This is justly frustrating to conservatives, but they can’t let it drive them stupid, for this is the Catch 22 of all pervasive bias. If a group blames everything on bias, it begins to make the bias look justified.

Hypervocal, a snazzy blog that delves into such matters and much else, has an excellent analysis of a current example of this phenomenon, as conservatives complain that the news media is ignoring a juicy Minnesota scandal involving a gay Democrat while overplaying Rep. Todd Akin’s self-outing as an ignorant fool regarding rape, abortion, and female biology. This is such a regular refrain now any time an embarrassing event occurs involving a Republican that it is both predictable and laughable, and it is always unseemly. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Men’s Breast Stroke Olymipic Gold Medal Winner Cameron van der Burgh

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“If you’re not doing it, you’re falling behind. It’s not obviously – shall we say – the moral thing to do, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my personal performance and four years of hard work for someone that is willing to do it and get away with it.”

—– South African Olympic swimmer Cameron van der Burgh, admitting that he cheated in his gold medal winning race because, you understand, everybody else cheats too.

Yechhh.

Maybe they won’t notice…

The commercialism is blatant, the nationalism is sickening, the warping of the lives of the young athletes as they prepare for the Games is disturbing. The one constant that has made the Olympics worth our attention is the opportunity to see great athletes in fair and intense competition with the most capable rivals in the world, and to see the best of the best triumph in the various sports by dint of superior effort, skill, training and character.

Who wants to see who the most effective cheater is? If you do, what’s the matter with you? The most disturbing aspect of van der Burgh’s admission is that there was no shame in it. He matter-of-factly explained that he cheated, how he cheated and why, and apparently believes that this doesn’t diminish his victory at all. And, also apparently, he’s right. Despite the fact that a gold medal winner blandly declaring that he cheated robs the Olympics of any pretense of integrity, it appears unlikely that anything will happen to the swimmer or his prize.

See? Cheating works!

And nobody cares!

Well, if the Olympics are going to stand for the cultural standard that cheating is acceptable as long as enough competitors do it, I have better things to do with my time, like making dust bunny sculptures under my bed. Just about everything we see and read about these days is corrupting and cynicism-producing; if the Olympics are just going to add one more toxic lesson to the array, what good are they? What’s the point?

Higher, faster, sneakier?

Wonderful.

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Pointer: Rick Jones

Facts: NBC

Graphic: Deviant Art

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

 

Quest for Fairness: What Will It Take For America To Treat Blacks Like Regular Human Beings?

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

“Look, a monkey! Must be racist.”

Two recent incidents at the London Olympics—really, really stupid incidents—-caused me to wonder anew what it must be like to be black in this country, and to despair. I’m not referring to discrimination, exactly.  I think a better term would be  “unhealthy obsession.” To be black in America is to be automatically a subject of controversy and conflict, and I assume this is a crushing, almost irreducible burden that makes daily life, happiness and sanity infinitely more difficult for African-Americans than for any other  group. It appears that the culture, the media, the public, interest groups and government just won’t ever leave them alone to just live.

Here is U.S.tennis star Serena Williams, and she has just won a Gold Medal in singles tennis. Williams, whose passion and effervescence is almost as attractive as her athleticism, does a little happy dance. Not too much of one—nobody could accuse her of preening or taunting like NFL players after a touchdown. And yet she is criticized anyway, by Fox Sports among others, because what looked like just a happy dance to me was really a version of the “Crip Walk,” a hip-hop move adopted by the notorious L.A. street gang, the Crips, about 40 years ago. Since Serena is black, some saw this as a poorly-timed reference to drug-dealing killers, or even glorification of gang culture. Three seconds of a little jig, and suddenly the Olympics is the site of a race incident—and this is an ethics alarm that should never have gone off.

Or should it? The “Crip Walk” is considered so provocative in some neighborhoods that schools have banned it. From that perspective, maybe critics have a point; it might have been irresponsible for an African-American athlete from L.A. to do the move.  Williams—I love you, Serena!—brushed off the controversy by saying, simply, “I don’t care.” Still, a pure moment of an athlete’s joy in victory was marred, because the victor happened to be black. Continue reading →