Posted by Leonard Steinberg on September 12th, 2012

This mornings grotesque headline of the killing of the US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Libya by a thuggish angry mob, leads me to believe that the extremists, liars and those who support them may actually be winning. An idiot produces an amateur video/movie mocking the prophet Mohammed…..a bigger idiot cleric uses this as a propaganda tool by broadcasting to his flock that the USA is about to launch a Spiderman-sized Hollywood blockbuster ridiculing the prophet Mohammed to commemorate 9/11…..the bigger idiot media of the Middle East broadcasts this message as fact, without doing any fact-checking whatsoever, and of course the extremist religious freaks go berserk, invade the US Embassy in Libya (a country the US just helped free from oppression) and kill four Americans who probably had absolutely no idea about this movie at all.

This is just another example of how lying, when broadcast by a media that does not fact-check, becomes fact. And the results can be deadly. Mostly the results are actually quite rewarding unfortunately……this cleric has probably elevated his status with this lunacy and will emerge as the winner. Outrageous. But let us not think this is an isolated incident in the insane countries of this world. Similar, if not significantly less serious, incidences of lying and distortion are happening in our own back yard.  Look at our political system: the negative advertising and interviews and statements that are never fact-checked, and if they are the fact-checking is always much more silent than than the lies. Look at ‘reality TV’…….this trash consistently conveys a lie to the entire planet and we buy it.

In real estate we have a large volume of liars too……brokers who simply lie about facts and statistics, not to mention their own accomplishments……and they achieve great success by doing so. The press regurgitates the lies by broadcasting them without fact-checking or imposing any recourse, and this only serves to endorse them. They win. The system almost encourages it.

Politicians, leaders, the media are all seeking that extremist position or message, as it appears these are the only messages that resonate in a world with less than sound-bite attention span. Think about Mitt Romney’s stupid response to the White House response to the Libyan killing: did he truly believe the statement he made or was it made purely because it would get the attention of the press (which it did) and was broadcast widely……firing up the extremists within the Republican Party. Where is the outrage by the sane Republicans?

Extremists are everywhere. In all religions, governments and societies. They are the vast minority, but they are holding our planet hostage. So what are we as the majority doing about it?