EGYPT
Middle East unrest according to Glenn Beck and friends
Bored of balanced coverage from the lamestream, so-called news media? What you can learn about the Middle East protests from US rightwing commentators
Beck, the apocalyptically-minded TV host, has the most complete theory on Egypt: the protests there are part of what he calls the "coming insurrection".
[..]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/20 ... glenn-beck
Comments in chronological order (Total 38 comments)
3 February 2011 4:54PM
i seriously think it's padded room time for this lot.
where's nurse ratched when you need her?
3 February 2011 4:59PM
Stop giving Beck and his "end timer" ilk the benefit of column inches. They are mentally ill and should not be gawped at. I thought we were beyond visits to Bedlam for pure entertainment sake.
3 February 2011 5:03PM
Listening to Glenn Beck grapple with international affairs is like watching a drunken horse try to thread a needle.
3 February 2011 5:04PM
i'm in America at the moment. the only news channel i have is Fox.
and let me tell you that this sh*t is both silly and scary.
these dudes have no idea how they look to the rest of the world, they make the world seem like this evil anti american witches bru.
It's simple to them.
but whats really depressing is that 50% of the people i work with here watch fox, and dont have any issues with it.
quote in the office today "but the muslims hate us!"
again, this is seriously bumming me out, and any commentator that says anything grounded in perspective is shot down , talked over and dissmissed.
not cool.
thing is only the 'liberal, left wing nuts in america care about this. them and the rest of the world. seriously depressing stuff.
3 February 2011 5:07PM
I think we've found Andy Gray's replacement.
3 February 2011 5:08PM
All products of a very, very sick country. I have friends over there. They have no contact with Beck's parallel universe. But all around them of course, are people who do. It is a very strange and disquietening situation.
3 February 2011 5:12PM
Thanks
Nice summary of what the "tin foil hat" brigade are saying and how they explain away current events.
Whenever great change happens the conspiracy nuts on the American Right start up with their garbage. In the 1960's a best selling book named "None Dare Call It Treason" by a Bircher called John Stormer went over similar ground.
Beck, Savage et al are a modern day equivalent to them. It's not new.
3 February 2011 5:13PM
these people MUST be stopped. They are creating a fantasy world that large portions of a powerful nation are basing their worldview on. Are there no such things as journalistic standards in the US? How do they get away with it?
3 February 2011 5:13PM
I think Glen has got it all wrong...... The trouble in Egypt is just the start of a campaign by camels to take over the world. I saw them yesterday, the evil, evil camels.....
3 February 2011 5:14PM
@Datsun78
i'm in America at the moment. the only news channel i have is Fox
Try and get MSNBC.
Pity Olbermann left but Maddow and O'Donnell are worth watching.
3 February 2011 5:15PM
If there was ever an argument for promoting educational reform that focused on providing schoolchildren with the critical and analytical skills to discern fear-mongering bile from objective truth, the verbal diarrhea of Beck et al provide it.
3 February 2011 5:15PM
These guys are seriously f*cking insane.
But hidden in there is a tiny grain of truth - the needle in the midst of their haystack of bullsh!t (if that's not mixing too many metaphors), that is easily ignored when saying how batsh!t insane they are.
And that is the slight, but real, risk that radical Islam will actually use this as an opportunity to gain a strong foothold in the Middle East in a similar way to Fascism in the 1930s.
Problem is, it's so easy to mock that it's difficult to accept they might not be always 100% totally wrong: 99.9999999999999%, obviously, but still....
3 February 2011 5:15PM
fistofonan
3 February 2011 5:03PM
Listening to Glenn Beck grapple with international affairs is like watching a drunken horse try to thread a needle.
Ha Ha Ha, very good, oh God, it´s depressing looking at these loonies, i give up, i´m not watching it again, it´s sad.
3 February 2011 5:16PM
'Obama is on the side of radical Islam'
Michael Savage, who calls Obama the "socialist-in-chief", talks over the US president's recent statement calling for a transition to democracy in Egypt.
Obama: ... people want the same things that we all want. A better life for ourselves and our children ...
Savage: What the heck does that mean? This is the rhetoric you would have heard from the Black Panthers
Unfortunately this is what amounts to mainstream media nowadays in the US.
Sure there is still the moderate voice of NPR but it is outnumbered by the likes of Glen Beck and the myriad of neocon outlets.
That is why I personally hesitate to employ the term "Western" world anymore.
If this is the best what the "West" can come up with that I think the West is something to be embarrassed of.
Europe and USA should stop viewing themselves as part of the same "world".
For all its ills Europe will never be that trashy and simplistic or spawn such media personalities.
That is why Kilroy-Silk never became Albion's Beck and eventually was reduced to oblivion.
I mean even Richard Littlejohn seems a paragon of sanity (in all his nuttiness) when compared to the above exposed American TV shock jocks.
3 February 2011 5:20PM
T.W.A.T.S
And an insult to intellect.
3 February 2011 5:20PM
@Damondo
Don't be silly. I have it on good authority that it's crab people.
3 February 2011 5:21PM
Scorchio!!
3 February 2011 5:22PM
Has anyone studied the link between a bad diet and thinking like Glenn Beck et al? Someone should. There's a serious lack of intelligence displayed in these ravings. More broccoli and less lard would probably help tame Roger Ailes, Beck and O'Reilly.
But then again, maybe it's so far ingrained their DNA has probably altered. Makes Mike Judge's Idiocracy look less like speculative fiction and more probable reality with each passing day.
3 February 2011 5:23PM
once again dear folks in the UK I suggest you do everything in your power to keep Murdoch from owning your airwaves. If he succeeds,you too will be subjected to this filth.
3 February 2011 5:27PM
Chris Morris eat your heart out!! Glenn Beck and his band of loonies make "Brass Eye" etc look like complete sanity in comparison!!
Seriously though... I have to keep laughing... because I know the second I stop, I'll burst into tears of abject depression that some people actually take this nutter seriously!!!
3 February 2011 5:28PM
Looks like Beck's been playing too much Risk and it's melted his mind.
3 February 2011 5:30PM
I was in the US until Monday. I only watched CNN, but even then I was struck by how little they understood Europe (absurd statements about sharia law and forced marriages being the norm) or the Middle East.
The sad thing was that some of the people I spoke to made CNN seem knowledgeable in comparison...
3 February 2011 5:31PM
These paranoiac 'experts' are the argument against letting News Corps' power grow any further. Without Murdoch's Fox, Beck and his pals wouldn't have a platform and other US media outlets wouldn't have to compete with this piffle.
And could somebody please glue Beck's face shut?
3 February 2011 5:37PM
Says Glenn Beck, Fox News host:
This is not just happenstance. This is not just poor people mad at rich people. This is coordinated. Tunisia was the beginning. I think there is a chance Tunisia was our Archduke Ferdinand moment that I've been telling you about, warning that it would start in some place that wouldn't look like anything – and most of us wouldn't understand it. He was the guy assassinated in Sarajevo. Month later Austria and Hungary declared war against Serbia and the rest is called World War One
Unless Blackadder goes forth was misleading me, I was under the impression that it all started because someone shot an Ostrich. What does Glenn Beck know that I don't - it must be the 'experts' in their ivory towers making it up as they go along.
3 February 2011 5:38PM
On another website that I regularly use, a vast army of American psychopa- (Whoops!) patriots have their guns fully loaded and are ready to use them, once Obama's Evil Muslim European Homosexual Socialist Forrnerr Allies make their first, or any, move against good, Christian, American values.
On the plus side, at least they're all a-rootin'-tootin'-shootin'-stayin' right there in the States, which, to those of us out here in Here Be Dragons land, now resembles some kind of cross between Alcatraz and Arkham Asylum.
As disturbing as it is to know that there are lots of deeply weird people out there, with astoundingly ignorant, racist views. it's comforting to know that they're all willingly staying in the same place, far, far away...
3 February 2011 5:39PM
He's got Ireland on fire too and I can't got the life of me figure out why. There hasn't been a decent riot here in years!
3 February 2011 5:40PM
@Datsun78 i'm in America at the moment. the only news channel i have is Fox
Bullshit. If you have Fox you have cable. There is no cable network in the US that only carries Fox. There is no hotel room that doesn't at least have CNN too.
3 February 2011 5:41PM
Are there actually people who use Fox as their primary news source?! Who are genuinely under the impression that France, Italy and the UK are on fire? Its like listening to the maddest drunkest person you've ever met explain their view of the world.
3 February 2011 5:42PM
Yes, they're nuts.
But The Guardian is also nuts not to be giving equal play to the lunatics across Egypt and the Middle East who think the world is run by the Elders of Zion through the CIA and MI6, and all that anti-western junk. After all, people from that part of the world are moving to the UK in large numbers, not fans of the Tea Party. But it's much simpler to crank out the usual anti-American rants. No one will accuse you of being racist, neoimperialist, or orientalist if you attack Glenn Beck.
Recall: It wasn't the Fox network that ran a miniseries dramatizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That was Egyptian TV.
3 February 2011 5:49PM
You people really have a hard-on for Fox, don't you? I notice that no one in the Guardian ever writes about MSNBC--unless someone leaves, e.g. Olbermann--CNN, CBS, NBC or ABC...because no one cares about them. Yes, you hate Fox...but people only hate things they care about. I'm sure Fox is touched...asumming, of course, that they care about you.
3 February 2011 5:54PM
It was funny for the first bit, but then I realised why I don't really like my country.
It wasn't funny anymore. I just want to have a normal country! Is this too much to ask?
3 February 2011 5:55PM
I've been wondering for a long time how it is that all sorts of fundamentally illogical ideas somehow become mainstream currency in the USA, the things that 'everyone knows' all of a sudden.
Like health care reform is 'a government takeover' or 'state socialism', that the whole of Europe lives under Sharia law, and so on. The latest I saw was that the Muslim Brotherhood were founded as the Egyptian branch of Hitler's Nazi Party in the Second World War. So by next week, it will turn out 'everyone knows' they are unreformed Nazis with their SS tattoos intact.
I thought it must be that people like Beck had a huge following, who understood him in a way I can't, and these contrived fictions just spread; but I watched that video and I simply couldn't see how anybody at all could actually make any coherent logical sense of those dozens of disjointed non-sequiturs.
But I get how it works now. (And how it is that these nonsensical propositions spread as though they're rational, to be 'disussed' by other supposedly otherwide rational people.
it's not Beck himself, I now realise, it's people who 'interpret' his paranoid glossolalia so it looks as though it was logical and reasoned. And as though there was, once, somewhere, some factual basis for it.
Just as this article has done. I couldn't follow him at all; but the 'translation', however ludicrous, is comprehensible when the guy himself wasn't. And no doubt people will quote the 'translation' and refine it, drop in a few 'historical' illustrstions and 'examples' and hey presto! it's Beck the guru-prophet instead of Beck The Monster Raving Loony.
No wonder rational political discourse in the US seems to be impossible.
3 February 2011 5:57PM
The poor man is clearly mentally ill.
3 February 2011 6:02PM
As an American, I wonder sometimes if Europe appreciates just how crazy and dangerous we can be.
3 February 2011 6:04PM
Glenn Beck and his fellow U.S. shock jocks' influence is diminishing. His viewership/ratings are on a downward trend and advertisers are leaving his show in droves.
The situation in the U.S. today is this: about half the country is conservative; and the other half is liberal. For the past few years conservatives have been particularly noisy, but that is largely a reaction to their losing the White House and Congress in 2008 (and generally feeling stupid about the whole Bush Administration). Yes, they managed to retake the House last year, but that was mostly a reaction to the crappy economy that Obama hadn't managed to turn around in the year he'd been in office.
Is the U.S. a "sick" country? I'm not sure why you'd think the U.S. was somehow more sick than the U.K., Germany, Greece, or Italy or any other nation struggling during this global economic downturn.
Yes, we have some loud-mouth loonies like Beck, but I think there're similar types across the globe. As I understand there are significant anti-Muslim immigration movements in several different European countries as the Washington Post points out here:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-p ... hobia.html
I have great hope that the U.S. is climbing out of the hole. The election of Obama. The aging and death of an older generation of Americans that will clear away much of the racism/homophobia/zealotry that we've suffered through. We're getting there.
3 February 2011 6:04PM
Ref: Beck Vid
I was afraid to go out in case I got burnt, but by the end I was less concerned by being hit by a snowball.
Reassuring.
3 February 2011 6:05PM
Some here are incredulous that anyone would watch this trash but, sadly, millions do. I long ago gave up on any televised news in this country as there is no objectivity or depth to reporting. Fox news isn't news it's propaganda that panders to the poor, white, pissed off idiot who really believe that our President is a member of some covert muslim group and that he wants to impose shariah law here. Oh, and don't forget, he's a "furriner".....wasn't born here, not like "us".
3 February 2011 6:06PM
Right-Wing American Nut-Jobs - What a Laugh-Riot, eh?
The sooner China kicks their collective ass, the better.
(China has better food too)
by Black-Tulip » Fri Oct 22, 2010 1:02 pm 
