The Politics of Fear…

The absurdity of the news...

I always knew when I started this blog that I intend to venture into more complex topics... It’s just that I did not expect it to happen so quickly. But the news I just watched on CNBC (Sunday, 25 July 2010) was just so outrageously absurd, and had me baffled so much I had no choice (I felt like I was driven to) but to flap open my laptop and scribe away to write this piece.

Now I have to confess here… I am a news junkie of note… I watch news as a form of entertainment… but I certainly didn’t budget for the kind of entertainment this news piece provided. Another confession… I very seldom watch CNBC, simply because it is not a part of my normal news bouquet… so out of the blue today I surfed through the long list of news channels looking for something interesting and stopped on CNBC. Like a regular junkie, I couldn’t resist to check it out and after a few moments, I figured out some sort of news documentary was on, a piece on counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is the illegal exploitation of trademarks or other intellectual property and placing these trademarks without consent on goods not manufactured by the owner of the trademark. Now, as an entrepreneur myself, I was sufficiently intrigued by the crime of counterfeiting to hang around a bit and check it out. Crime Inc. was running the program on CNBC. I have no idea who Crime Inc. is, but I suppose it is some sort of organisation that seems to use the media and crime to earn its money. In a serious attempt not to be dramatic, I have to confess that I almost fell over in utter amazement when the producers of this news documentary linked counterfeiting to the funding of terrorist activities. In short, the program, without any form of evidential proof, argued that counterfeiting is used to fund Hizbollah, the Lebanese based anti Israeli political party that’s participates in the democratically elected parliament of that country.

Two years ago the world saw Israel go to war with Hizbollah in Lebanon, and the lasting legacy of that military intervention is that the Western world have largely been sympathetic to Israel’s position and subsequently (at least tacitly) accepted Hizbollah to be a terrorist organisation. It is not the intent of this article to unpack the Israeli Lebanon war, or to provide an opinion on the legitimacy or otherwise thereof. Rather we are making the point simply to illustrate how Hizbollah is viewed, as a Islamic, anti Israeli terrorist group, as opposed to a political party participating in a democratically elected government.

The news documentary spoke about how Hizbollah, runs counterfeit cigarette scams in the US, purchasing counterfeit cigarettes in one state and moving it to a different state to dodge the tax implications. Now I am not for one moment suggesting that Counterfeiting is not a problem, but the attempt to use the boogie man of terrorism and Islamaphobia was just beyond belief…!

The more I watched, the more I realized I am watching a piece of lobbying from big business trying to create the awareness that counterfeiting is a very bad crime and could be tantamount to being a threat to national security. In fact, the piece stated that counterfeiting is so bad it now threatens national security.
And the more I watched, the more I realized that the presenter was actually serious, and the program made every effort to portray the boogieman not as the American citizen who trades in these crimes, but rather, it is China, it is the terrorists, it is the Muslims Hizbollah. Anyone who has a semblance of intelligence knows that Hizbollah can, if it so chooses, trade in counterfeit goods in their own back yards, and not under the noses of the US authorities, who boast some of the most expansive covert intelligence agencies in the world.

The reality is… the counterfeit industry thrives because counterfeiters can produce a product of similar look and quality for a fraction of the original item. Consequently, there is a huge demand for these fake products. Consumers want to own the most elaborate designer labels but simply cannot afford the real thing. In this climate of 10%+ unemployment in the US, widespread austerity programs in Europe, the real estate bubble that burst, the banking crisis of confidence, the stuttering of the world economy, is it any wonder that the only economy that is booming is the home of the counterfeit factory?

I suppose big business have every reason to protect its turf, and raise awareness of the damage caused by counterfeiting, but to equate counterfeiting to a threat to the USA’s national security, and invoke the terrorism bogeyman is a serious indictment of the lobby’s inability to tackle a very real problem in a very meaningful manner.
The reality is, if counterfeiting is going to be considered a problem, then most certainly it is for all intent and purpose, a global problem. Here in the GCC, you could purchase an exact replica of the latest Rolex watch and not even the CEO of Rolex would be able to tell the fake from the real one. Or, if you are a really snazzy dresser, you could walk into a tailor shop in any country in the GCC, ask the tailor, and he would be able to cut you the exact designer suite, complete with the same fabric and identical label. And to crown it all, it is likely to fit a lot better because it was cut to size, for the price of a fraction of the real thing.
During the Bush era, the USA became notorious for using the politics of fear to run amok in the world. However, not even during that are did we hear something so absurd that Hizbollah uses counterfeiting to fund its terrorist activities? I wonder if the producers of this program or big business who funds the campaign realize that by being so patently absurd, they do more harm than good to their cause?

The broader question is… how can journalists around the world even hope to occupy the moral high ground and demand press freedom when they can spew such drivel with no fear of reprimand, or no requirement of accountability?

CNBC's tag line is... First in Business Worldwide. With reporting like this, they might just soon have to change that to... Absurd in Business Worldwide!