Anti Americanism and Vikatan (Tamil Nadu's No.1 weekly magazine)

Ideally this post should have been written in a Tamil blog, but I do not have access to Tamil blogging at office. So if you are not from Tamilnadu you can safely skip this post.

If you have been reading Vikatan for the last three weeks you would have read articles by Pa. Raghavan on international issues. The tone of the articles is completely anti American and anti semitic in nature. It is the writer's choice on choosing how he writes. But these articles are peppered with truths, half truths and plain lies so that the reader can't distinguish between them.

Article 1: About the conspiracy theory that the neo cons were responsible for 9/11. It is a theory without any premises and even Michael Moore didn't propose it.

Article 2: About Israel's pull out from Gaza. This article states that the Israelis wanted to have Jerusalem and started the war in 1948. Any student of history knows that the Arab countries attacked Israel within hours of formation of the country and not the other way round.

Article 3: About Katrina and New Orleans. There have been serious failures of the Bush Administration in handling this. But to write things like "Only now the world comes to know that there are such poor people in America", "The Americans are so selfish that the voluntary contributions are not coming forth like they did in India for the Tsunami", "The federal army which should have been helping the citizens is stuck in Iraq", "Bombay was back in two days but New Orleans is still sruggling", "Bush says that he knew about the extent of damage only two days after the hurricane", etc is plain distortion to say the least.

Now it brings forth an interesting question - Why is Vikatan offering a platform for anti americanism? Vikatan as we know is a middle of the line magazine with purely commercial consideration. They haven't been leaning left for the last twenty years I have been reading them. They have become more commercial in the past few years shedding whatever little pretense of commitment they had and that helped them succeed against Kumudam, the previous no.1. My guess is that nobody in Vikatan reads the articles, they purely go by the writer's reputation. Whatever Sujatha writes is fine for them, so they must have felt similarly about Raghavan too. "He is a published writer, a publisher himself so he must know about things" they must have thought.

Since some Tamil bloggers do read my blog, if there is going to be a heated argument in the comments let me make it clear that I am not a software engineer, I am not in USA, I have never been to USA and I am not a right wing nut. The article left a bad taste, and I am venting my feelings here.

Update This has already been discussed refuted in detail in these Tamil Blogs. I was late to the scene because of my trip.