Little did I know this was the Rebecca prominently featured in my book on propaganda analysis. Posted on 08/27/2012 1:34:57 PM PDT by guyshomenet
It took a Qatar-based news organization to pit me against the princess of propaganda.
Whenever there is a public shooting, Al Jazeera English dials me up to explain to English speaking countries why Americans dislike gun control. Al Jazeera picks on me because I have been debunking gun control myths for more than a dozen years. This makes me an odd choice because Al Jazeera always frames the story as mystification over America’s lack of draconian gun laws.
It’s like a drag queen walking into a biker bar and asking “why don’t you like me?”
During discussions with the producer, she asked me framing questions concerning the recent assassination outside the Empire State Building in New York City. I could not resist biting a feeding hand when she asked what viewers should expect from that news story. I replied “Wait one news cycle. Everything you hear now is likely incorrect. Details will emerge.”
This was slightly more predictable than sunrise.
Patience and modern journalism are strangers. Nearly every major news network and wire service rushed to the airwaves and Internet, telling the world that there were two dead and nine wounded in a “mass public shooting” at King Kong’s favorite hang-out. Many “journalist” framed their stories as this being another in a seemingly endless stream of mass homicides. A couple of braver networks wondered publicly how such a “mass shooting” could take place in a city and state with some of the toughest gun control laws known to the nation. Before the two corpses cooled, New York Mayor and resident irrational Michel Bloomberg called for New York levels of gun control to yoke the entire country (you know, common sense stuff like $350 licenses, permission to purchase a firearm, finger printing and all the other elements that so effectively prevented the Empire State shooting).
In one news cycle we learned that it was a single victim assassination, that the assassin was killed by police and that the all nine of the wounded caught police lead.
So I stumbled into a San Francisco broadcast center, had the requisite microphones and ear plugs attached, and waited under broiling flood lamps staring into nothing more than a bright red dot. I chatted from time to time with the Al Jazeera director, discovering that someone named Rebecca would appear alongside me to represent gun control advocates and other enfeebled individuals. Without the aid of live video backfeeds, I had no way of guessing who Rebecca might be.
Little did I know this was the Rebecca prominently featured in my book on propaganda analysis.
Shamelessly quoting from my own work “[Rebecca] Peters’ hair – Roman emperor styled – must have spiked in porcupine defense when a Dutch government agency statistically kneecapped a primary message of her International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), a George Soros subsidized syndicate. In her manic maneuvers to bless the rest of the planet with the Australian-style gun bans that she helped engineer, Peters and her cohorts painted vivid contrasts of how America stood alone as a seething cesspool of incivility in contrast to the rest of the industrialized world.”
Yep, that Rebecca.
I’ll admit to being thrown a bit. I was expecting and prepared for a spokes droid from Bloomberg’s own Mayors Against Illegal Guns (given the number of Bloomberg’s buddies who have been convicted of everything from child pornography to violent assault, we would be better served by Guns Against Illegal Mayors). Yet I was pitted against the international succubus of servitude, the Sherpa of U.N. gun control usurpation. I was called slay a dragon and brought the wrong freakin’ sword.
Fortunately Peters is pretty much a one note musical – tragically long lived and repetitive. The first form of propaganda identified in Shooting The Bull’s chapter devoted to international gun control effluvium was her primary practice:
The Lie of Distance: Comparing places to which the average voter has never traveled to create a misleading policy analogy.
I’ll paraphrase Rebecca’s talking points because Al Jazeera has not yet posted our mutual interview. Peters perjured by proclaiming:
I hope readers – the smart and highly evolved folks you are – detected her rhetorical sleight of hand in the first point. Since guns can be used to prevent crime as well commit it, criminologists and other serious people (which excludes Rebecca) use violent crime rates as the universal measure. Rebecca cites only gun deaths as her justification for disarming humans. Yet as we have seen, “civilized” countries with strict gun control have higher violent crime rates – more rapes, armed robberies, assaults, mugging old ladies for their pension checks, child abductions – the entire perversion potpourri caused by criminals. The Dutch Ministry of Justice, in a rare and honest multi-national survey of criminal activity, concluded that residents of Australia, England, Wales, Scotland, Canada, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland, Denmark, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands were subjected to violence rates higher than that of the evil United States. The U.S. ranked 13 out of 17 on the Dutch violence survey.
In Rebecca’s own Australia, where she led their disarmament campaign, an Aussie is more than twice as likely to be mugged, sexually assaulted or beaten to a bloody pulp than Yanks. That’s why Oz is listed as the most violent country in the industrialized world.
That many (and certainly not all) industrialized nations have committed the tragic mistake of disarming their people is irrelevant, and given the accumulated Dutch data, positively perilous. Peters’ prevarication is one of false exclusion – an attempt to make Americans feel they are out of step with civilization. That we lead civilization escapes Rebecca’s notice, but more to the point, she seeks to shame people for a situation that lacks shame. Her propaganda tactic attempts to make Americans feel intellectually alone and isolated. Her failed foray did however earn Rebecca a new entry in the Catalog of Canards:
The Lie of Isolation: Making people feel as if they are out of touch with group consensus (a.k.a. The Gore Bore).
Rebecca’s last lie echoed the middle one and borrowed heavily from Al Gore’s favorite fib – that all the bright minds have agreed and thus there is no need to continue debate. She stated (again paraphrased) that anyone who has studied the matter knows that strict gun control leads to lower gun death rates, which comes as a huge surprise to anyone living in Mexico, Russia, Columbia, Jamaica … well, the list is rather long. But by positioning her false claim as a foregone conclusion, she fails in an attempt to marginalize the opposition – to swing undecided voters to think that anyone who advocates freedom is ill informed or insane.
The benefit of listening to Rebecca, aside from comedic entertainment value, is that she has laid the international gun control cabal’s strategy on the political poker table. The con is to cast foreign gun control as a success (which it isn’t) and international gun control as a foregone policy (which occurs over America’s dead body, and America is too ornery to die). Until Rebecca’s Australia becomes as civilized as America, we merely have to corner her at every juncture, insert the Dutch Ministry’s analysis into her cranium (choose your preferred orifice of entry) and enjoy popping her agitprop.
BTTT! I just ordered up copies of “Shooting the Bull” and “Gun Facts 6.1.”
Someone needs to tell these foreign know nothings to butt out of our business. If they don’t like the way our country works, they’re free to stay home.
She's foreign to me, not to you.
Born in Costa Rica to USAmerican parents, she sent less than 15 of her 50 years in Australia - it was never more than a way station to her ambition.
She's one of yours - deal with it.
I see, excuse me. The point still holds though. How many Americans do you hear of involved in whether or not Australia has the death penalty?
Smith's point of view is from that of individual rights, which does account for such differences. From that point of view there is no point in a "benign" state restriction that might prevent B from abusing C if A is left helpless as a result.
That is the fundamental reason why this issue is so irresolvable. The Constitution was very definitely written around a paradigm of protection of the rights of the individual; its relentless modifiers are working from the point of view that these are infinitely negotiable in the interest of the state.
Al Jazeera English is western funded.
No point in even discussing with people who think the way she does. To misquote a movie "Anti-gunners can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead, enslaved or they are dead."
her focus is on the welfare of society
I disagree - Her focus is on expanding the powers of government at the expense of freedom. Anyone with even a passing familiarity history knows that never ends well.
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