I read articles like this one from the Asswipe Propaganda (AP) machine and have to shake my head.
Calls to Postpone Iraqi Elections Grow
BAGHDAD, Iraq Jan 4, 2005 ? More Iraqi interim government officials are calling for postponing Jan. 30 elections to ensure a higher Sunni voter turnout, a sign that a campaign of violence might be taking its toll on Iraqi resolve. The country’s electoral commission, however, insists that voting take place as scheduled.
Funny how it’s always the “Iraq is a living hell” picture the MSM is trying to paint. Take a look at this recent poll, via Powerline
Haider Ajina adds further support for that view with this translation of poll results that appeared in the Iraqi Arabic newspaper Alsabaah this morning. The poll was of 4,974 Iraqis living in and around Baghdad:
Will the security problems cause you to?
Not come out and vote the day of elections = 18.3%
Come out and vote the day of elections = 78.3%
No opinion = 3.4%Do you support military action against the terrorists?
Yes = 87.7 %
No = 11.1%
Don?t Know = 1.2%
Or how about this from Arthur Chrenkoff
The latest public opinion survey paints a cautiously optimistic picture of Iraq:
The poll of nearly 2,200 people across most of Iraq found a resilient citizenry modestly hopeful that the Jan. 30 elections will improve life. Iraqis said pocketbook issues such as unemployment and health care are more pressing than the bloody insurgency that claims Iraqi and U.S. lives virtually every day. . . .
The poll, conducted Nov. 24 to Dec. 5, found improvements over the last two months in Iraqis’ feelings about the country’s direction and, to a lesser degree, about the interim Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi…
Nearly 54 percent said Iraq is generally headed in the right direction–compared with 42 percent in late September and early October–while 32 percent said it’s headed in the wrong direction. . . .
More than 71 percent of those polled said they “strongly intend” to vote, and 67 percent said they believe Iraq will be ready to hold elections by the end of January, compared with 24 percent who said the country won’t be ready.
Not surprisingly, pessimism about the direction of the country and the coming election is strongest in the Sunni areas. “The poll [also] found nearly 50 percent of Iraqis said religion and government should be separate. Forty-two percent said religion ‘has a special role to play’ in government, and of that smaller group, slightly less than half said either that the religious hierarchy has authority over political affairs or that supreme religious leaders and political leaders are the same. But by a margin of 52 percent to 20 percent, Iraqis said they preferred a faith-based party to a secular party.”
Which brings me to another point about the MSM. Also via Powerline comes this post about an speech given by Melanie Phillips mostly about Britain and their media but believe me you will see similarities. Here are a few excerpts you might be interested in.
At a recording of the BBC radio panel show Any Questions, in the solid Conservative heartland of Wokingham in Berkshire, an overwhelmingly conservative audience applauded and cheered the veteran far left activist Tariq Ali when he said that that America was the fount of world terror, that George Bush was more of a danger to the world than Saddam Hussein, and that if any country was a menace to world peace through its weapons of mass destruction it was not Iraq but Israel.
How has Middle Britain come to applaud the view ? hitherto confined to the most extreme left-wing circles — that the President of the United States is more of a danger than an unbalanced dictator with a terrorist history? How have such solid citizens come to view a democracy ? Israel ? that has been under attack since its foundation as the greatest threat to world peace? And how has the ancient libel of sinister global Jewish power been allowed to rear its head so openly once again?
Britain is gripped by an unprecedented degree of irrationality, prejudice and hysteria over the issues of Iraq, the terrorist jihad and Israel. All three are intimately linked; all three, however, are thought by public opinion to be linked in precisely the wrong way. This is because all three have been systematically misreported, distorted and misrepresented through a lethal combination of profound ignorance, political malice and ancient prejudices.
This systematic abuse by the media is having a devastating impact in weakening the ability of the west to defend itself against the unprecedented mortal threat that it faces from the Islamic jihad. People cannot and will not fight if they don?t understand the nature or gravity of the threat that they face, so much so that they vilify their own leaders while sanitising those who would harm them.
Yet that is what is happening. Public debate in Britain is now marked by a collapse of objectivity, truth, fairness and balance. Logic and morality have been stood on their heads. Victims are portrayed as oppressors, while mass murderers have to be understood and sympathized with. The outcome is an ugly and dangerous climate in which prejudice and lies have achieved the status of unchallengeable fact; a climate which is now being eagerly manipulated by terrorists who know that if they ratchet up their barbarism and distribute the video the result will merely be an ever greater public clamour for Tony Blair to split away from President Bush and shatter the coalition in defense of the free world.
The public has been grossly misled by the British media, and falsehoods have become accepted as fact, so much so that any statement of actual facts which undermine this mindset are excised from the debate altogether.
It’s a fantastic speech and you really need to go read it all. It is long but well worth it.
Lastly, for a well of information about the upcoming election go here, they have so much information on the election my head almost exploded. For example
midst intensifying acts of violence and many calls to postpone the elections, preparations for the balloting in Iraq scheduled for January 30 have been proceeding unabated. By the deadline of December 15, 107 lists carrying the names of 7200 candidates for the 275 seats in the National Assembly were submitted and approved by the High Commission for Elections. The lists represent 73 single political parties, 25 independent candidates, and 9 lists of various coalitions or combinations of political parties.
In addition to the lists for the national assembly, 382 lists with 7850 candidates have been submitted for the election of members of the 18 provincial councils (41 members for each council with the exception of Baghdad, which will elect 51 members). Finally, 499 candidates – submitted either on a joint list of the two major Kurdish parties or on a list of one of the 17 smaller Kurdish parties – will be competing for the 111 seats in the Kurdish National Council (independent Kurdish parliament). [1] A chart illustrating the election process in Iraq is attached as an annex.
The U.N. Secretary General’s special representative to Iraq, Ashraf Kadi, has declared that the logistical arrangements necessary for conducting credible Iraqi elections on January 30 are in place. However, unlike the cases of Afghanistan and East Timor where the United Nations ran the elections, in Iraq the responsibility for running the elections rests with the country’s High Commission for Elections. [2]
Everything you want to know about how the election will take place is there.
To cleanse myself of the MSM filth I believe I will post another Good News From Iraq blog tomorrow.
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