Source : Westender

There's a really good news program that runs every day, five days a week out of New York City. It's called Democracy Now. In Vancouver you can pick it up from SFU's radio station SJSF. If radio isn't your thing, you listen or watch on-line.

This is a news program that covers grassroots news issues and features interviews with real people. Folks like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Pratap Chatterjee, Dahr Jamail, Robert Fisk, and Seymour Hersh.

Democracy Now is becoming an ever more popular news program around the world. Last summer the host, Amy Goodman, came to Toronto for a simulcast with CBC radio's The Current. She has also broadcast from Europe, and this coming week she will be doing the show from the London School of Economics.

Any notions that this is some sort of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory show should have left your mind by now. 

Then I switch to the good old CBC. I have come to know and grudgingly accept the CBC as a broadcaster. It's not a very good broadcaster, but it's the only one out there that tries to not be completely owned by the corporate agenda.

In the run-up to the last U.S. Presidential elections, CBC Newsworld broadcast a number of Bush-slamming documentaries. This seemed in step with the majority view in Canada that Bush is an awful president, that the war in Iraq was an illegal adventure, and that Canada should distance itself from the U.S. plan for the Ballistic Missile Defense.

However, since the Bush visit to Canada in early December the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction.

Now the programs on CBC Newsworld seem to focus on the spread of al Qaida, the shadowy sleeper cells of Islamic terrorists eager to take over the west, and the inscrutability of these jihadis who could be sitting right next to you at this very moment. Quick, take a look.

As an example I cite this past weekend's edition of both CBC Sunday news shows. One is called CBC Sunday Morning, and the other is just called CBC Sunday.Veteran CBC correspondent Lynden Mcintyre sat down with Evan Solomon and hair disaster Carol McNeill to talk about the Fifth Estate's show [which aired this past Wednesday] about Ziad Jarrah, one of the 911 hijackers. News flash to CBC: 911 was four years ago. Mr. Jarrah is dead. It's over.

But you see, this debate between Solomon and Mcintyre was about the evil that lurks everywhere. About these young Muslims who are just waiting to get sucked into Salifay beliefs and then fly planes into buildings. Evan Solomon, who comes with all the energy of a Christmas puppy, kept yelping on about "evil", "evil", "evil." The older, and perhaps wiser, Mcintyre tried to calm Solomon down by making it clear that this wasn't a Manichaean or "Good versus Evil" debate. That kind of thinking would be simplistic, naïve, facile. Instead, Mcintyre said the argument is "normal versus crazy", at one point going so far as to frame it as "Evan Solomon becoming Charles Manson."
So, for those keeping track: 'Manichaean' simply means two opposing extremes. Therefore when McIntyre says it's not "Good versus Evil" it's actually "normal versus crazy"-. What's the difference?

Both Solomon and McIntyre scratched their heads and couldn't think why anyone would become so "crazy" and both admitted that there was no way yet devised to "pick these people out."

McIntyre then showed a piece of video that was taped from the dashboard camera of a U.S. police car which allegedly shows Ziad Jarrah being stopped by the police for speeding just two days before 911. Both Solomon and McIntyre shook their heads in disbelief. Two days. How about that?

Back during the Second World War area bombing of civilian targets was such a hit that everyone did it. During Vietnam war "heroes" like John McCain dropped thousands of tons of bombs on the cities of North Vietnam.

And of course during the "liberation" of Fallujah in November U.S. aircrews dropped the works on the once fabled "City of Mosques." Estimates are that it will cost at least a couple of billion dollars to rebuild Fallujah. And so far only a few thousand residents have returned to their city.

Are these men also crazy? Are they "evil"? Are they Charles Manson?

Just this past week Charles Grainor, the grinning torturer from Abu Ghraib defended himself by saying he was "just following orders." But as we all recall in the run up to the Iraq war Bush himself said on TV that would be no defense if war crimes were committed. Of course at the time Bush was talking about and to the Iraqis. Not his own soldiers. Ah, irony.

So, here is the CBC engaged in "How many jihadists can dance on the head of a pin" type debates while real news shows like Democracy Now continue to get the truth out, and without the hype, the spin, or in the case of the poor bankrupt-of-any-creativity CBC, the likes of bestudded and bescowled too-cool-to-know-it George Strombolopoulous and his new show The Hour, which is such a disaster it must have been conceived after a night of drinking bong water and watching Network.

© Westender