From The Telegraph
By Damian Thompson
Wow. I had no idea that some young American and Israeli Jews hated Barack Obama quite so much. Gawker provides a link to an age-restricted YouTube film made by documentary maker Max Blumenthal at a bar in Israel. The racial abuse and swearing is extreme. The kids are drunk, and I'm not saying that they are representative of Israelis (most are American or American-born). But it's a fascinating couple of minutes. The young people despise Obama for visiting Arab states, and one or two of them have decided that his racial heritage comes into the equation.
Blumenthal filmed this for the Huffington Post - but, guess what? The Obama-worshipping Huffpo has removed it from its site, not apparently on grounds of taste, but because it "doesn't have any real news value".
The filmmaker is furious. Here's what he says on Gawker:
Even though they're mostly just used to aggregating the news of others (or as 30 Rock so nicely put it: telling us what we already know), they're a news site, and this is news, and it's their job to - at the very least - provide some kind of context for this kind of thing. The video's clearly not fake or staged in any regard: why would these very clear faces expose themselves to the world like that? It's the worst kind of "viral" there is. And yes, they're drunk, but as we all well know by now, being drunk doesn't necessarily invalidate the kinds of things you say when you're trashed. Sometimes, in fact: the opposite.
If anything, The Huffington Post's deletion of the video looks like a political maneuver on their part. Maybe they just don't want to be a part of something so hot-button as this, or don't want to chance it on any of the risk that this story may or may not hold. Or it could be agenda-based.
Agenda-based? Here's a question for you. Supposing that the kids in question were not Democrat-voting Jewish-Americans (one of them worked for his campaign) but drunken young WASP Republicans racially abusing Barack Obama. Would the Huffington Post have decided that there wasn't a story there?
Warning: Offensive language:
By Damian Thompson
Wow. I had no idea that some young American and Israeli Jews hated Barack Obama quite so much. Gawker provides a link to an age-restricted YouTube film made by documentary maker Max Blumenthal at a bar in Israel. The racial abuse and swearing is extreme. The kids are drunk, and I'm not saying that they are representative of Israelis (most are American or American-born). But it's a fascinating couple of minutes. The young people despise Obama for visiting Arab states, and one or two of them have decided that his racial heritage comes into the equation.
Blumenthal filmed this for the Huffington Post - but, guess what? The Obama-worshipping Huffpo has removed it from its site, not apparently on grounds of taste, but because it "doesn't have any real news value".
The filmmaker is furious. Here's what he says on Gawker:
Even though they're mostly just used to aggregating the news of others (or as 30 Rock so nicely put it: telling us what we already know), they're a news site, and this is news, and it's their job to - at the very least - provide some kind of context for this kind of thing. The video's clearly not fake or staged in any regard: why would these very clear faces expose themselves to the world like that? It's the worst kind of "viral" there is. And yes, they're drunk, but as we all well know by now, being drunk doesn't necessarily invalidate the kinds of things you say when you're trashed. Sometimes, in fact: the opposite.
If anything, The Huffington Post's deletion of the video looks like a political maneuver on their part. Maybe they just don't want to be a part of something so hot-button as this, or don't want to chance it on any of the risk that this story may or may not hold. Or it could be agenda-based.
Agenda-based? Here's a question for you. Supposing that the kids in question were not Democrat-voting Jewish-Americans (one of them worked for his campaign) but drunken young WASP Republicans racially abusing Barack Obama. Would the Huffington Post have decided that there wasn't a story there?
Warning: Offensive language:
