Monday, September 01, 2014

The journalism of Nicholas Blanford

It would not be an exaggeration to maintain that over the last ten years, Nicholas Blanford has proven himself to be the most unqualified, unprofessional, unreliable, unethical, incompetent, and propagandistic foreign correspondent working in the Middle East.  Basim sent me this:  "“I call on our parents and the people in the village to stop this apostate party [Hezbollah] from killing people,” says a soldier who identifies himself as Mahmoud Maarouf Hamiyah from the Shiite village of Taraya in the Bekaa Valley. Hamiyah is likely a blood relative of the secretive Talal Hamiyah, also from Taraya and one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders and allegedly head of the party’s external operations unit."  Do you know how many Hamiyahs there are in Lebanon?  This is like meeting somebody with a family name of Smith in the US and commenting: he is "likely" a blood relative of the wanted man Joe Smith.  How dumb is this?