News as made to order

Editorial

The trouble with new technologies that allow anybody to produce a newspaper is that anybody will.

Don’t misunderstand. This newspaper is 80 years old this year and the technologies that allow us to (relatively) easily alter a word that decades ago would have required a daunting realignment by typesetters, is the difference between beating our clothes on a rock and using a Miele washing machine.

But ease of access to design and printing, as well as instantaneous and universal publishing via the Internet, has changed the nature of journalism unrecognizably in recent decades. This is a recipe for ... well, let’s review what happened last week.

The Al-Ameen newspaper, which, according to its website, is British Columbia’s “most widely read Muslim newspaper,” ran an article that bore the stench of an ancient legend.

Titled “Ukrainian kids, new victims of Israeli organ theft,” the article asserted that Israel has brought 25,000 Ukrainian kids to the “occupied entity” in the last two years to “to harvest their organs.”

If this sounds familiar, we’ve been hearing it for going on 800 years now. It’s the blood libel. The ancient phenomenon with eternal elasticity that says Jews ritually use the blood of gentile children for baked goods, now amended to render gentile children even more utility.

The Ukrainian organ story, which was lifted directly from the Iranian government’s Press TV website and plunked into a B.C. community newspaper’s editorial content, alleges that Israel imports foreign children to use as “spare parts.”

This is becoming a bit of a trend, only the last such story came not from one of the most repressive Islamic theocracies but from erstwhile liberal Sweden. As we said, the fable is elastic. It has been used by paupers and princes, Christians and Muslims, leftists and fascists, across centuries.

The Press TV/Al-Ameen article describes a “Ukrainian man’s fruitless search for 15 children who had been adopted in Israel. The children had clearly been taken by Israeli medical centres, where they were used for ‘spare parts.’”

Well, clearly. Where else could they be?

To his great credit, a member of the B.C. Muslim Association condemned the Iranian hate material. But the reaction from the paper itself fell a bit short.

Mohammed Bhamji, the managing editor of Al-Ameen, should, at least, be given credit for honesty.

“I don’t have the facts,” he told the National Post. “When we got that story on the Internet we assumed it was true.”

Journalism is a vocation, not a profession. Combined with the fact that journalists, unlike, say, lawyers or accountants, have no authoritative governing body, there is very little stopping anyone from launching their own media outlet. But the least that could be expected is rudimentary critical thinking skills. When we got that story on the Internet we assumed it was true?

“We are not professional journalists,” the managing editor clarified. “We are just a community-based newspaper about anything that has to do with Islam. The best we can do is trust the sources. We don’t have the resources to find out if each and every story is true.”

Newspapering being a marginal enterprise at best, who has the kind of time to make sure that each and every story is true?

As the Post notes, Al-Ameen’s website declares that the paper “vigilantly strives to maintain its news contents purely in accordance with the Islamic teachings and have raised the bar high above all other news reporting agencies, in regards to the content, the quality, as well as the goods and services it promotes – which must also be in ‘strict’ compliance – falling within the realm of Muslim lifestyles.”

Good job. High bar.

To be devil’s advocate and also precise, even if Israel were using Ukrainians kids for spare parts, how does this relate to Islam? Only in that it is another symptom of an obsession with Israel designed to prevent Muslim societies from facing their own internal problems.

If Muslim media and societies spent less time focusing on Israel and more on democracy-seeking citizens being shot dead in Iran, the dehumanization of women in Saudi Arabia, the refugees of Darfur or the panorama of other catastrophes globally instead of plotting the demise of that tiny oasis of pluralism and freedom filled with Jews, everyone would be better off.

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