Those Dirty Arabs

I've been following from afar the National Review debacle. One of their correspondents was fabricating all kinds of things in Lebanon, claiming he witnessed accounts that he didn't see, etc. This is actually pretty much standard reporting for right-wing propaganda outlets, and barely worth a mention, except for the fact that these same outlets spent months and months hammering other news sources for their so-called bogus reporting.

But the proof in where the wingnuts lie on this issue came in Kathryn Jean Lopez' apology:

"[W]e “should have provided readers with more context and caveats” – the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn’t always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: “The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.” While Smith vouches for his sources, we cannot independently verify what they told him." (emphasis added)

Basically, the excuse for horrible reporting is that Arabs are filthy liars. I know, then National Review can leave the Middle East and stop relying on those sources. Just leave and stop endangering the world.

This assumption of superiority over the Muslim hordes can also be seen in Norman Podhoretz' reaction to the Iran NIE, which he views in the most obvious, sensible way: the CIA is trying to sabotage Bush, because they're promoting the views of those Muslim liars.

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations. As the intelligence community must know, if he were to do so, it would be as a last resort, only after it had become undeniable that neither negotiations nor sanctions could prevent Iran from getting the bomb, and only after being convinced that it was very close to succeeding. How better, then, to stop Bush in his tracks than by telling him and the world that such pressures have already been effective and that keeping them up could well bring about “a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”—especially if the negotiations and sanctions were combined with a goodly dose of appeasement or, in the NIE’s own euphemistic formulation, “with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways.”

The intimation here is obviously that the intelligence community will push to the front any lie given to them by "those people".

It should always be mentioned that N-Pod is a top national security advisor to Rudy Giuliani. This is the belief at the highest level.