Well, this whole quagmire seems to be getting worse, eh? I see the Yanks have now been reduced to staging fake scenes of supposed jubilation on the alleged streets of what the Pentagon assures us is Baghdad. If you pause the video, you’ll see the guy on the right jumping up and down thwacking his shoe on the head of Saddam’s toppled statue is actually Richard Perle disguised as an Iraqi cab driver and the woman standing next to him ululating “Blessings be upon you, o great Bush” is David Frum in a chador.
PFC Lynch
If there is anything you want or need to know about PFC Lynch, you should head immediately to the Hillbilly Sophisticate. And I really mean anything, as the Sophisticate is covering everything possible.
A New American Hero
And perhaps one day a new American:
New heroes have surfaced in the rescue of U.S. Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
Under the watchful eyes of more than 40 murderous gunmen, the 19-year-old supply clerk laid in Saddam Hussein Hospital suffering from at least one gunshot wound and several broken bones.
As her captors discussed amputating her leg, an Iraqi man leaned to her ear and whispered, “Don’t worry.” Lynch replied with a warm smile.
The man was already working with U.S. Marines to gain the critical information needed to rescue one of the first American prisoners of war in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Just a day earlier, the lawyer from An Nasiryah had walked 10 kilometers to inform American forces he knew where Lynch was being held.
Go read the whole story about how this brave Iraqi helped to save PFC Lynch’s life. I’d vote for him before I would vote for Kerry.
The Real Human Shields
Getting It
Many people have emailed me and asked me why I consistently and frequently speak positively about Jeralynn Merrit’s TalkLeft, since on the face it appears that we have nothing in common politically. While it may appear that way, it is most certainly an inaccurate perception- we agree on a number of important issues (which I am not going to go into detail about right now- most notably, the death penalty, the war on drugs, and prosecutorial misconduct). However, the real reason I link to TalkLeft frequently is because Jeralynn, despite, IMHO, being wrong about the war (and that is a disagreement- a difference of opinion- adults have them from, time to time) deals with facts like adults.
Go read the bile at the Democratic Underground regarding the rescue of PFC Lynch, which features statements like this:
This woman is a volunteer who willingly invaded another country.
She’s not a hero.
She’s just lucky.
Let her get a job at Dairy Queen.
Here’s a scenario. Fake MP’s stop the convoy take the people to a pre-planned destination. Take the West Virginia girl back to Kuwait to wait, give the others, wrong demographics, to a tame Iraqi pre-paid unit to set up a later atrocity story. Bad news day? Trot out the young woman on a bad news day. This stinks like a CIA Black Op mission.
Mac Diva innacurately speculated, as did many, that PFC Lynch was in the hospital for treatment. However, it appears that the real concern for Mac is this:
Though I wish Private Lynch nothing but the best, I have some reservations about how this story may be used by the Bush administration. They may not be above treating it as an example of American superiority and macho derring-do. While simultaneously painting the Iraqis as savages, of course. (Indeed, some of Bush’s supporters have already convicted these very same Iraqi irregulars of rape and murder.)
However, the fact she was rescued from an Iraqi hospital where she was being treated is significant. First, because the Iraqis, though irregulars, at least were decent enough to get her treatment. Second, because a rescue from a medical facility is a heck of lot easier than a rescue from a jail or other holding facility. An American POW has been rescued — but not directly from Iraqi armed forces.
This IS an example of American superiority, in both military prowess and in concern for human life. Has Saddam or his troops made any attempt to rescue his POW’s? No, of course not, for several reasons. For one, he does not care about them- they are merely disposable pawns for him to remain in power. Another reason is that they know we are not mistreating our POW’s, and they are probably receiving better food and medical treatment than they have received in years.
Mac also seems to want to believe the Iraqi propoganda over reality, and thinks that Jessica is being held in a hospital for treatment. This, despite all the evidence of IRaqi perfidy, despite the Saddamite thugs using hospitals as command posts for the duration of this conflict. It is mind-boggling, and as the evidence has shown today, there were maps, mortar rounds, car batteries (for torture), terrain mock-ups, and other various weapons in this command post in the basement of the hospital. The mistrust of the current administration runs this deep within many of our Democrat friends.
At some point, people are going to have to come to grips with reality. You may have been against this war, but you have to realize who we are fighting- which brings us back to TalkLeft. Go read Jeralynn’s account of the Lynch rescue. Despite being wrong about the war in general, Jeralynn knows who we are dealing with it, and doesn’t try to sugarcoat it, spin it, or to pretend that Bush, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld are worse than the murderous regime in Iraq.
*** Update ***
Chalk this up as a surprise (/sarcasm)- Mac Diva disagrees with my mischaracterization of her statements (which I linked to, so you can read them for yourself), and states:
John Cole, I don’t know why you chose not to cite my second Pfc. Lynch entry, which incorporates and responds to Jeralyn’s posts of both the 28th and yesterday. I emphasize the murkiness of what we think we know about the rescue. One of the claims I question, without further proof, is that the hospital room where Pfc. Lynch was treated was a torture chamber. No evidence has been offered to support that claim other than a wrongheaded desire that it be true. You are among the people actively promoting that unsupported claim.
I also believe you are misrepresenting Jeralyn’s position under the guise of applauding her. TalkLeft reported the allegations of a torture chamber being made by the U.S. military and a single embedded reporter. However, Jeralyn has not endorsed them as true, as you imply. She most recently said:
“Hopefully, if one of the bloodied uniforms was Jessica’s, the blood was from a gunshot wound, not from being tortured. However, MSNBC also is reporting that the gunshot wounds occurred during Jessica’s rescue, and that she had been held in the hospital since March 23 when she disappeared. The Pentagon is being very close-mouthed about the details of Jessica’s rescue and her captivity. We hope she wasn’t tortured and wish her a speedy recovery.”
That is hardly an example of someone swallowing the Pentagon’s claims hook, line and sinker, as you believe it is.
To which I respond:
There is ample reason to speculate torture (such as the treatment of POW’s in the Gulf War), including this widely reported piece of information:
Late last week, Yarsinske said she had thought Lynch was probably dead after hearing reports last week that the young woman’s bloodied uniform had been found by Special Forces soldiers inside a closed Nasiriyah hospital room — not the same hospital where she was found Tuesday. It was thought that the Iraqis used the room in the shuttered hospital for torture and interrogation.
The identification tag and American flag had been torn off her uniform. There was a car battery with wires hooked up to it found in the room, a primitive instrument of torture.
Some info on the use of car batteries as implements of torture can be found here, and here.
I have not misrepresented Jeralynn- she reported those views, did not refute them, and it is rather clear to her regular readers that she believes this to be the case. Check EVERY other post Jeralynn has written- when she disagrees with a news story or press report, is is virtually always followed by a lengthy exegesis.
The information will come out, thought. We can not be 100% sure at this point that PFC Lynch was tortured, but I am willing to bet that, regrettably, that that was the case. It is clear from current reports that this was just not a hospital.
Meme-Ufacturing
There has been a meme floating through the left flank of the blogosphere that has been driving me up the wall, and I am going to try to spend a minute here partially debunking it. If you have any helpful information to add, please put it in the comments section.
The first mention I saw of this meme was at Sean Paul’s Agonist on Monday at 12:22 and then 12:31:
12:22 EST Can anyone verify for me that the “thumbs up” gesture is actually an insult in the Arab world?
12:31 EST Ok, so it is safe to say, per my Arab and Persian readers that the thumbs up is a big no-no in the Arab and Persian countries. So, next assignment: can anyone find photos on mainstream media sites that show Iraqis happy to see us and greeting us with the thumbs up?
The comments were riddled with a number of different interpretations of the thumbs up gesture, but only the most negative connotations seemd to be appealing to the author. I remembered being given the thumbs up sign by grateful Kuwaiti’s when I was in the Persian Gulf, so I googled it, and I found this at the Defense Language Institute’s website:
Thumbs up- This gesture, expressing connotations of “I am winning,” historically is offensive to many Arabs. After the Gulf conflict, however, Middle Easterners of the Arabian Peninsula adopted this hand movement, along with the OK sign, as a symbol of cooperation toward freedom.
I posted this at 2:20 PM, but the damage had already been done. Four minutes after Sean-Paul’s second post, Atrios, the largest spreader of memes for the fringe left, had this post:
Thumbs Up is Thumbs Down
The Agonist informs us that in the Arab world, the thumbs up sign is not a good thing. So, all the tales of Iraqis greeting our soldiers with that sign may or may not be a good sign…
Again, the comments were riddled with a number of interpretations of thumbs up, including the following comments:
Hey geniuses, maybe the Iraqis aren’t so stupid as you think. Maybe they have learned that the thumbs up signal is a GOOD thing for our culture, and they are trying to adapt to our culture. The reports also say that the people are smiling, which doesn’t quite fit with the idea that they are trying to insult the soldiers.
and
I just spoke with my native born Iraqi brother-in-law and he confirmed that a thumbs up is an innocuous gesture. There seems to be plenty of contradictory evidence, but the bottom line is that some comentators may be making too much of this.
I also posted the same DLI link that I had posted earlier at the Agonist. As before, this killed the thread- neither Atrios nor Sean-Paul responded. In Sean-Paul’s defense, he has been posting like the Instapundit on crack, so he may have never seen my comments. Atrios, however, simply ignores what he doesn’t like. At any rate, we just witnessed the birth of a meme.
Twenty-Four minutes after his original post, Sean-Paul posted this:
12:46pm- Thumbs Up?
Are they really happy to see us?
As you are all aware by now, the thumbs up in the Arab world is not a sign of happiness. I have had this verified by several Arab and Persian readers.
The kids in these pictures are obviously smiling. But, what about the photos we haven’t seen?
You tell me?
The comments this time seemed to be more heavily loaded to those who lived in the region, and here is a sampling of what was said:
who said this! thumb up means in Arab world and Iran same as everywhere else! OK or good thing or Fine not a bad thing.. I am currently in Cairo EGYPT and lived 15 years in the Persian gulf NEVER HEARD that this means bad or hated.- Tarek Ali
and this from a poster who went to the Navy Taboos Webpage:
Hand Gestures: By and large Bahrain is cosmopolitan enough that most of its inhabitants have been exposed to Western ways. Still, there are several hand gestures used in the U.S. which could have a different meaning if used in the Middle East. There are the “thumbs up”, “peace (or victory), and the “okay” signs.
These comments also seemed to also make the case that ‘thumbs up’ was not an insult anymore in this region, if it ever was:
Having lived in the Middle East and in Napoli, thumbs up could be good or bad, depending on its trajectory upon being elevated.
Seriously, these kids are mimicking the GI’s.
and
I just spoke to my Iraqi brother-in-law and he confirmed that the thumbs up was innocuous.
He also said the they flip the bird upside down (finger down, not up).
and
as a middle easterner (persio-arab) i can say you guys are making a big deal about this. I’ve yet to meet an arab or iranian who takes offense to the ‘thumbs up’ gesture. I use it all the time. totally innocuous. i don’t why kamran is so sure it isn’t.
and
I’ve asked my co-workers, who hail from Tunisia, Kuwait, Egypt, and Iran about the thumbs-up gesture and have been told that it’s only equivalent to the middle finger in Iran. The arabs knew nothing about it.
I am not sure what Sean-Paul verified, but his comments certainly don’t seem to verify his conclusions. Again, in his defense, he has been posting like a madman and probably doesn’t have time to read all of his comments. Once again, I posted the DLI information I had googled, but it was too late and the thread was essentially dead. At any rate, let’s watch this meme spread like the ebola virus.
At 1:47 EST, Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy posts the following:
THUMBS UP: The Agonist reports that the “thumbs up” gesture is actually an insult in Arabic, and that Arabs giving American soldiers the “thumbs up” is therefore not what we might think it is. A seemingly official military site — apparently aimed at introducing American soldiers to possible peacetime misunderstandings caused by cultural differences — confirms this, saying:
And then he cites the Navy Taboo page, but comes to this conclusion:
Now this doesn’t tell us for certain what the thumbs-up Iraqis mean. They may well be aware that the thumbs-up signal is seen as positive by Westerners (Western TV makes that clear enough), and might thus be practicing some cultural understanding of their own. They may be trying to say “fuck you,” either not realizing that westerners will misunderstand it, or not caring, because they’re just doing it for their own sake or the sake of their Arab friends who don’t like the allies. Or they may just be enjoying the mild absurdity of the mismatch in meanings; these things can be a bit funny to some people, just like some people enjoy saying foreign words that sound dirty in English but are perfectly normal in other languages. But in any case, it is probably worth remembering that the gesture may have multiple meanings, and its likely meaning may be hard to figure out without considering the other cues that one is seeing — e.g., are the people cheering, smiling, or the like? — though of course some of those cues can be unreliable in certain ways as well.
Except that by now, there is more than just anecdotal evidence that thumbs up in Iraq means something different from thumbs up in Iran, and other places. I think the comments from the readers from the region and the DLI manual have made that clear by now. I should note that Eugene posted this one hour and 1 minute from Sean-Paul’s last post (Eugene’s post says 10:47, but he lives on the West Coast). But, we are on a roll- where else will this meme go?
Well, in the short run, nowhere. At 2:06 PST (5:06 EST), or, little over six and a half hours since Sean-Paul’s initial post, Eugene has a second posting on the issue, complete with some reader feedback:
I’m an Egyptian-American immigrant (moved here when I was 1, but still semi in the know) and I’ve heard nothing about the thumbs up sign. I figured if there was an issue with it, I would’ve gotten it during one of my many, “This stuff is ok at home, but you’d better not do it here,” speeches that my parents gave my siblings and I before one of our biannual trips back to Egypt. At the very least, they should recognize it as the American signal of “all good”, a la the “Ok USA” guy in Bloodsport. Hand signals may vary from culture to culture, but you can always read facial/body expressions. Those people don’t look like they’re giving us, the equivalent of, the finger. Of course, I wouldn’t take this as gospel, since my cultural ties are pretty loose nowadays, but it seems not to be something that we need to be too concerned about.
Eugene then elaborates:
Interesting point, and further evidence that we can’t infer too much from the thumbs alone. (Though since we’re sharing cultural data, let me just advise people who go to Russia not to make a fist with the thumb sticking out between the index and middle fingers. This probably isn’t necessary advice, since Americans don’t normally do that — except, as reader Dan Shmikler pointed out, when stealing children’s noses — but I pass it along just in case.)
UPDATE: Reader Michelle Dulak points out that the gesture has a long history in Europe; it’s mentioned in Dante and Shakespeare, where it’s called a “fig” or “figo,” which is still its name in Russia.
At this point, I am almost 100% convinced that the thumbs up sign being flashedto GI’s in Iraq is being interpreted correctly, and Pejmanpundit’s response to Eugene (which, btw, came 2 hours and 48 minutes after Eugene’s post at 7:54 EST) seems to confirm the Persian interpretation of the thumbs up as negative, but does nothing to define the meaning in Kuwait, Iraq, and the other Gulf States.
This inaccurate meme, IMHO, is not dead, and I have seen independent musings about it at MaxSpeak:
Liberated population gives U.S. soldiers thumbs up. Turns out this means ‘fuck you’ to Arabs
In the Arab world, the “thumbs up” gesture doesn’t mean what you seem to think it does. If I see this again, elsewhere, I will post an update.
My conclusions:
1.) Thumbs up has multiple meanings, but in the nationss we are currently involved in, the meaning seems to be either innocuous or exactly as GI’s are interpreting it. In Iran, it is pretty damned clear this is an insult.
2.) Memes, regardless of accuracy, spread pretty damn fast.
3.) If you have a comments section, read the damn thing. Blog readers have a lot to add to the discussion.
4.) Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. In fact, it could turn out that I am 100% bass-ackwards on this, and the thumbs up is an insult.
*** UPDATE ***
My sister, who works for a prominent firm that deals with international communication, called the Iraq Foundation and spoke with a member about the meaning of the thumbs up. Here is what she learned:
just actually called the Iraq Foundation and spoke to a gentleman (from Iraq) who told me that in Iraq the thumbs up is good–just like in the states, Thumbs down is bad, and the middle finger still means ‘F— You.’ (So it is all the same.) If the pictures are from Iraq, the kids are happy to see us.
Boo Oscars..
Not a bad night for the Oscars- Best Documentary is awarded to a fat, lying, prevaricator, whose research methods are almost as bad as his politics(more Moore lies here and here, Best Director awarded to a sexual predator and wanted fugitive from justice.
Not bad guys.