Tracking the Voices of Harm

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, June 25, 2004

 

Sticks and stones – and guns – are known to do damage, but words are not supposed to hurt us.

 

Whoever made that one up has not read much history. In the old days, all it took was a few well-placed words from the priest or the prince to set off the peasants.  They would invade the Jewish quarter, pillaging, burning and looting, and the Jews would be left to bury their dead. And eventually, when the Jews were bereft of possessions and had nothing left for the kings and princes to steal, they would be booted out of their homes, thanks for the memories now hit the road. A sad chronicle of church related anti-Semitism can be seen at http://www. fact-index.com/h/hi/history_of_anti_semitism.html.

 

Nowadays, it's a bit out of fashion to bash Jews from the pulpit, but that doesn't meant that aural anti-Semitism is a thing of the past; in fact, it's far easier to spread the word about Jewish perfidy today than ever before.

 

The Internet, of course, is a favorite forum for Jew and Israel bashing. There are plenty of Web sites dedicated to denigrating Israel and the Jews that live there, and Palestinian propaganda has found a secure foothold on many ostensibly "objective" Web sites. Likewise, there are more than enough newspapers, magazines and journalists to supply the seemingly endless stream of unreasonable and illogical canards that we have become subject to in recent years. You may not agree with everything Israel does, but there's a difference between criticizing policy, which is legitimate, and consciously refusing to honestly present both sides of the story, as documented at sites like http:// www. honestreporting.com and right here in the Post with our own Bret Stephen's Friday columns, which has taken on Israel-bashers of all stripes.

 

Most of the incidents discussed on sites like Honestreporting relate to abuses of the written word - which are bad enough. But words on paper are static – we read them and move on. They stay where they are, and we go on to the next stimulus. If the article we have read is especially interesting, a good point or quote will stay with us. And if we read enough articles that make the same point over and over, there's a good chance that our point of view will be eventually affected due to the incremental effect of being exposed to those ideas on a regular basis. Reading a counterbalancing article that corrects the errors or bias in the original story can go a long way to clearing the air, though.

 

As history tells us, the spoken word is far more effective than the written word. If you really want to deliver the goods, as they say in the speech biz, become an expert at public speaking. A smooth, effective speaker can raise a crowd's passions and actually will them to believe something – or even do something – with far less effort than a writer would have to expend. To paraphrase the famous idiom, "a sentence spoke by an effective speaker is worth a thousand (written) words."

 

And although, as we pointed out, you won't find many raging anti-Jew speeches being preached from the pulpit today in Western countries (Muslim countries, of course, are something else altogether), the church podium is passé as a tool for spreading the anti-Jewish word. Today, there's something much better – talk radio!

 

With the rise of FM radio in the 1970s in North America and Europe, most popular music stations moved over to the newer band, abandoning AM for FM's signals, which allow higher fidelity broadcasts that allow music to sound better. Most commercial radio stations acquired an FM frequency, and for a while simulcast their programs on both bands. But as more people acquired FM radios, AM radio listenership plummeted. Why not listen to your soothing sounds in super stereo?

 

AM radio station program managers began experimenting with different formats to win back listeners – and keep their jobs. All-news stations, foreign language formats, even all-kids programming became part of the AM mix.

 

And in the United States, talk radio became the most popular new format for AM stations. At first, most programs focused on local issues and politics, but eventually the format coalesced into a very influential political force; Rush Limbaugh, America's premiere politically conservative talk show host, has been credited with at least partially influencing recent elections in the United States. Nowadays, American airwaves are full of conservative chitchat, all directly or indirectly inspired and influenced by him. And he has even inspired political liberals to get into talk radio in order to combat Rush's "corrosive" effects on American politics ("http://www.rushlimbaughonline.com/links.htm").

 

Talk is cheap, but it is very influential, and talk radio reaches millions with its message on a daily basis. It may not seem like a big deal to us here in Israel, probably because we're not really exposed to much of it, but Americans know that talk radio is a political force to be reckoned with. As it happens, most of the popular talk show hosts are favorably disposed to Israel, but there are exceptions.

 

Running a talk show is like running a Web site – it needs fresh content to keep going, and the format usually has the host throwing out a topic or calling up or bringing in a guest to stimulate discussion. The guest's job is to get people talking about news issues.

 

A guest needs to be lively, interesting and well spoken in order to keep the listeners listening, and it helps if he or she has a "name" and is well known. And here's where our little talk show problem comes in: One of the most popular guests on talk shows in the United States on matters concerning Israel is the anti-Israel and likely anti-Semite Pat Buchanan, who once called Adolph Hitler "a man of great courage" (http:// www mtsu.edu/~baustin/buchanan. Html). Lately, Buchanan has been railing against the war in Iraq, accusing a cabal of "neoconservatives" (it's pretty clear to most people that he means "Jews") of pushing an unwilling America into a war that will only benefit Israel.

 

Now, of course there are plenty of politics to keep you busy in the rest of this newspaper; folks who read this column are interested in the computer connection here. Indeed, there is one. If you want to hear for yourself examples of Pat Buchanan's anti-Israel calumny – or, indeed, if you want to hear a higher quality talk radio program that interests you – you can now use a search engine that will check through voice recordings of popular public radio programs broadcast in the United States and either deliver you a transcript or play back a program for you, based on your search criteria!

 

The HP Speechbot has nearly 20,000 hours of radio recordings, mostly from talk shows that are broadcast over public radio and TV in the United States. Speechbot is a voice recognition engine combined with Web indexing search technology that will take the text you put into its search engine and check it against its library of recordings, looking for the word as spoken. Speechbot generates its own computerized transcripts of radio programs it covers and matches your search with likely looking – and sounding – audio!

 

If you have ever worked with speech recognition software, you know the technology is in its childhood - a step above infancy, but with a long way to go before it's ready for prime time. Indeed, the Web site warns users that they may not get what they were looking for, given the inaccuracies of speech recognition. But HP's system is pretty good, and the site says that it usually gets distinct keywords right – and that terms like names, places, and other proper nouns or specific words relating to the news (like "terrorism") come up clearly in searches.

 

I did my own searching, looking for programs where Pat Buchanan a guest. And indeed I found what I was looking for; I was able to find Buchanan on programs going back as far as 1996 (the index is updated daily with each previous day's program content). All the news and commentary I wanted about Israel, terrorism, and security fences were there for the listening.

 

Not that I necessarily liked what I was hearing – the airwaves are just as unfriendly to Israel as the written word these days. But I did find some content to my liking – and there is plenty to listen to beyond politic. The site indexes computer, sports, entertainment and music shows – these was even one about the paranormal, UFOs and the like. Personally, I enjoy programs of that type because they prove there are people out there even crazier than me! But let's not forget why we got into the Speechbot business: We want to search out and destroy the bad guys who are talking trash about us. And thanks to Speechbot, we can quote chapter and verse when we write complain letters to the networks that employ them!

 

The Speechbot engine is available free at  http://speechbot.research.compaq.com . Requires Realplayer to play audio.

 

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