Category Archives: blogging

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

Posted on by

Michelle Malkin is on the warpath, literally, because YouTube is pulling what she calls “anti-jihad” videos from its servers.

She presents one such video, of which she is clearly proud, on her site. I say it’s not so much “anti-jihad” as “anti-Muslim.” The point of the video is to present Muslims as murderous, violent people who must be “stopped.” As I watched I noticed a photo in which a protester held up a sign calling for the beheading of anyone who insults the Prophet. At least the jihadists are upfront about their intentions. Malkin fervently stirs up hate and fear and says jihadists must be “stopped,” but doesn’t follow through with explicit proposals for how to do the “stopping.” The clear implication of the video is “kill them before they kill us,” but Malkin lacks the intellectual honesty to say that and will, I assume, deny that’s what she meant.

That’s why I say the video is not “anti-jihad.” More accurately, it is “counter-jihad,” albeit with the punches (or beheadings, if you will) pulled. An “anti-jihad” video would be one that proposes peaceful and rational solutions.

As the Buddha said, hate is never appeased by hate, but by metta (loving kindness; Dhammapada 1:3). Jesus had an opinion on this matter also:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, King James Version]

Is that not clear? Is there some other passage in the Gospels where Jesus threw in qualifiers (e.g., Thou mayest make hateful videos and post them on YouTube) that I’ve missed?

Awhile back Malkin threw a fit over alleged insults to Christianity. At least she’s speaking out for a religion other than her own, since she clearly isn’t a Christian herself. But let’s go on …

[Update: Right-wing columnist Jeff Jacoby says Jesus was wrong.]

Malkin also alleges that YouTube is being inconsistent with its standards, because videos posted by Islamic jihadists are allowed to remain. I’m going to take her word on that, as I’m not terribly interested in spending the next several hours checking out the content of YouTube. I’m all in favor of consistency in applying standards. However, “they get to do it, so why can’t we do it too?” is not a compelling moral argument.

Sharing of web content — text, music, photographs, or videos — brings up a number of issues touching on intellectual property, fair use, copyrights, and free access to information. I don’t want to get into most of those now, except to say that lots of people have some fuzzy notions about “rights” and “fairness.” As of this morning YouTube is, still, a privately owned company, I believe. It may be aquired by Google soon, which would make it part of a publicly owned company. What it isn’t is a public utility. That means nobody has a right to post whatever they want on YouTube. The owners are perfectly within their rights to restrict content to that which works well with their business model and doesn’t get them into legal trouble.

I feel the same way about blog comments. This blog is my property, I pay for the bandwidth, and I get to decide what stays and what goes. To anyone who gets pissed because I delete their comment, I say: Get your own blog. I am under no obligation to disseminate “information” that I believe is false or opinions with which I do not agree.

Which is pretty much what Tbogg says to Michelle:

Now Michelle could post her videos at her own site or at Hot Air but doing so indicates a lack lack of revolutionary zeal, not to mention that the cost of bandwidth would come out of her own mom pants pocket…. so I won’t mention it. This might cause the Great Leap Forward to become a mere Stumble on the Sidewalk-Crack Forward and those revolutions take way too long and then the proletariat masses get bored and they wander back inside to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and wonder if they could afford one of those refrigerators that has the TV in the door because that would be really cool and besides, if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait.

Shooby-do-wah.

Offensive speech was one of the issues discussed at the Clinton Global Initiatives conference, such as in this panel discussion. The discussion was interesting but not entirely satisfactory. For example, at one point Farheed Zakaria asked why protests in the Muslim world about speech — for example, over the Danish cartoons and recent comments by the Pope — so often turn violent, even murderous. Queen Rania of Jordan responded by calling for “more interreligious and intercultural dialogue between all of us,” which is nice, but it doesn’t answer the question. However, in another part of the same discussion she described how violence begets violence —

I would like to say for example, like two months ago, before the war in Lebanon began. Here’s Lebanon, which is made up of a group of people that are peace-loving. They are very moderate and open and modern by nature. They are the natural allies to the global community. Then this war took place. And innocent civilians were seeing, on a daily basis, bodies of babies being put into plastic bags. The vital infrastructure was destroyed. A quarter of the population was displaced. And I can say that over the course of two months, the Arab public became much more radicalized. Because they saw this injustice. They saw this grief. And even the moderates, what we thought was a moderate majority started to shrink, and you can see this shrinking taking place. And the extreme voices came out as the victorious ones. And you could see that the voice of moderation, the voices that called for peace and diplomacy and engagement, they are losing currency. They are being marginalized.

So, if you want to strengthen the moderates, we have to see ― people have to see the dividends of moderation. They have to see the dividends of peace. And now, they are not seeing them. So again, I just want to say that if we want to gain the moderates, if we want to increase ― it’s almost percentages, you know. The percentage of extremists to moderates. If you want to increase and strengthen your moderate block, then people have to really feel an important difference in their lives. They have to see justice. They have to see ― and as I said, an honest engagement and an interest in their cause.

As I explained in this post, at the CGI conference several speakers said we shouldn’t be talking about a war on terrorism, but about a war on extremism. And fighting extremism with military aggression is a bit like using heavy machinery to re-arrange a china shop. The china may indeed be re-arranged, but the end results may still be unsatisfactory.

Further, you can’t reduce extremism with counter-extremism, but with moderation. That’s why we as a society need to discourage extremism in our own midst, just as we wish moderate Muslims would speak out more forcefully about extremism in their backyards. I’m not calling for censorship. I’m just saying, one private citizen to another: The counter-jihadist videos are not helping any of us.

I mean, what is the point? As I say, Malkin doesn’t provide strategies for dealing with Muslim hate and anger; she’s just interested in stirring up hate and anger against Muslims. Does she think people need to be warned about Islamic terrorism? Are we not, in fact, perpetually and robustly being warned about Islamic terrorism?

As an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers, and as someone who spends time in New York City and its public transportation and other infrastructures (likewise my children and friends), believe me, I don’t need to be warned about the dangers of terrorism. I am genuinely worried about train and subway bombings, à la Madrid and London. I worry that eventually we’ll be plagued by suicide bombers in our major cities.

There’s free speech, and there’s irresponsible speech — yelling fire in a crowded theater, and all that.

It seems to me that the video Ms. Malkin is so proud of serves no other function than to fan the flames of hate. If she presented information that is not already very public, or provided some kind of strategy for dealing with Islamic jihadism, that would be different. But she doesn’t. The video is nothing but hate speech, IMO.

Back during the Danish cartoon flap I mused over whether American news outlets were right not to republish the cartoons. Malkin was heading up a crusade to get those cartoons re-published all over America, saying that not publishing the cartoons was giving in to terrorists. I said in the earlier post that solidarity with the free speech of Danish newspapers was certainly a compelling stand.

But then I looked at the cartoons, and for the most part they were crude and hateful and conveyed no other message than Muslims are bad. They were not cartoons most American news editors would choose to publish without the controversy. And it’s not like the cartoons were hidden, as they were all over the web. So what do you call it if newspapers allowed themselves to be bullied by righties into publishing something they didn’t want to publish? Is coercion ever acceptable?

One of the commenters wrote, “Sorry, but I can’t see how cultural sensitivity and respect (which are good) should EVER trump a fundamental value in our own culture.” I respect that. On the other hand, the fact is that news media self-censor themselves all the time for the sake of cultural sensitivity. Racist, sexist, anti-semitic, and other bigoted expression once common in the American press are pretty scarce now. This self-censorship is inspired mostly by marketing — publishers don’t want to drive away readers by offending them. Ah, the magic of free markets …

Freedom of speech is a fundamental value in the West. Yet it has never been absolute, even here in the Land of the Free. The German Opera of Berlin was slammed recently for canceling a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo in which Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha are decapitated, a scene not in the original opera. Police had warned the opera company management that the production might incite violence. As a matter of principle I think the production should have been performed, even though (as an opera buff) most artistic revisionism of standard repertoire annoys me. Just get the best singers you can get and put them in pretty costumes and perform the damnfool opera, I say.

But it’s also realistic to assume that few if any opera companies in the U.S. would have scheduled that production at all. That’s because grand opera is so expensive to produce that opera companies cannot support themselves with ticket sales. This is true even of Big Shot companies like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which consistently sells out performances even though the tickets ain’t cheap. The Met draws more than 800,000 attendees every season, their web site says. Yet the Met seems to be in perpetual telethon mode; I get solicited for donations at least once a month. In fact, this report says the Met gets more of its funds from “contributions and bequests” than from the box office.

I don’t know about the Met, but most opera companies in the U.S. depend in part on government grants to stay afloat. If you care to study it, here’s a financial statement from the Los Angeles Opera Company, for example.

That’s why I doubt any opera company in America would even consider mounting the Idomeneo production that was bounced in Berlin. Beheading Jesus might piss off too many contributors, corporate and private. Forget about selling ads in the program. And as for government grants — the wingnuts still get worked up about the photograph “Piss Christ” that was exhibited in bleeping 1987. They’ve been on a rampage to reduce or eliminate public funding of the arts since, in spite of the fact that public funding underwrites preservation and exhibition of traditional sacred art and objects (including Bibles) and uncounted performances of Handel’s Messiah.

Take also reactions to the Terrence McNally play, “Corpus Christi,” which depicts Christ and the Apostles as gay men living in Texas. These include death threats against actors and arson threats against theaters. What’s not documented are the number of theater companies that might like to produce the play but wouldn’t dare touch it with a ten-foot pool.

I’m rambling on longer than I intended to. My general point is that we’re real good at pointing out the logs in others’ eyes when we’re not so quick to notice the logs in our own (Matthew 7:1-5, sorta). And, really, nobody needs counter-jihadist videos on YouTube.

Update: Reuters reports:

Danish state TV on Friday aired amateur video footage showing young members of the anti-immigrant Danish Peoples’ party engaged in a competition to draw humiliating cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

The video images have surfaced little more than a year after a Danish paper published cartoons of the Prophet that sparked violent protests worldwide.

The images, filmed by artist Martin Rosengaard Knudsen who posed as a member of the party for several months to document attitudes among young members, show a number of young people drinking, singing and drawing cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Mohammad.

The faces of the young people were blurred in most of the footage. One cartoon appeared to depict the Prophet Mohammad as a camel, urinating and drinking beer. The competition took place in early August, according to Danish media.

Another cartoon strip aired in the partly masked footage on state TV seemed to show the prophet Mohammad surrounded by beer bottles and included an image of an explosion.

The news story is titled “Danish TV shows cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammad,” but it appears Danish TV was not mocking the Prophet but presenting a news story about young people mocking the Prophet, which is somewhat different.

Some of the children on the blosophere — by which I mean some rightie bloggers — have embraced the cartoons as their newest cause célèbre and are posting as many bits and pieces of the broadcast as they can get their virtual hands on. This is done in the same spirit of concerned interest that you find in any gang of eight-year-olds with a purloined Hustler magazine.

Somebody, please call their parents …

Welcome

Posted on by

Justme sends a photo of the newest Mahablog reader, Paulie. Justme writes,

He drinks from the cup you see him holding. He leaves the cup in his water dish, picks it up with his beak when he wants a drink and tilts his head back and chugs…then he says”bottoms up!”.. AND he has only been here a few days…who knows what he will do once he comes out of his shell and starts to feel at home…Yikes, now I am afraid!

I’m glad it’s water and not Kool-Aid. Anyway, Justme hopes Paulie will learn to say BUSH SUCKS! like the famous Sammy.

Delicious

Posted on by

I dearly love a good Victor Davis Hanson smackdown.

VDH also has the chutzpah to call Carter “historically ignorant”, a fascinating charge coming from a man whose grasp even on his specialty is tenuous, and the bulk of whose professional career has been an (often successful) effort to make Americans MORE ignorant of the history of military affairs.

Canada Probably Doesn’t Want Us, Anyway

Posted on by

This seems a good time to plug Bill Scher’s new book, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada!. Bill is the very smart guy who runs Liberal Oasis. You might have caught him on Tucker Carlson’s show on MSNBC last night. You probably didn’t, because I can’t imagine many of you actually watch Tucker, but maybe some of you do. (If so, why? I’m sure you could find a Law & Order rerun if you flipped channels.)

In the last post I wrote that it’s time to decide if the nation is salvageable or not. Lots of people have decided it isn’t. As I said, these people may be right. But if you think it’s too late to fight, then please step out of the way. Some of us haven’t given up yet.

Wait! Don’t Move! is a handbook for liberals who want to fight but aren’t sure how. Thankfully, Bill moves beyond cheery little checklists reminding you to write your congressperson. Suggestions for action are presented within a Big Picture framework. It’s not just about defeating Republicans, but about making America safe for liberalism again. Throughout, Bill challenges readers to be clear about what we want. Instead of just reacting to the Republican agenda, we should be showing the nation an alternative way to look at issues. We should fight from a position of clarity and purpose rather than defensiveness. We should not, for example, try to counter the Religious Right with our own public displays of religiosity, but instead promise to preserve religious liberty by keeping government out of religion.

And, anyway, if we cede the U.S. to Republicans, sooner or later they’ll invade Canada. Might as well stop them here.

More CGI

Posted on by

Yesterday Colin Powell was riding around the halls of the Manhattan Sheraton on a scooter. I swear this is true. Sometime yesterday I stepped on an elevator and, just before the doors closed, Mr. Powell himself scooted in on a scooter. He scooted out on the next floor. Weird.

In spite of the fact that I spent a big chunk of the morning venting about how the book publishing industry got screwed up, I am still at the CGI conference, which should wrap up early this afternoon. You can tell we’re coming down to the wire, because this morning the breakfast spread put out next to the press room, which yesterday featured a generous selection of baked goods, was down to three bran muffins. And I got here early. Too bad about everybody else.

The big news yesterday was Richard Branson’s pledge of $3 billion to combat global warming. As of the most recent press release total commitments for this week’s conference totals $5.7 billion. This money doesn’t go to the Clinton Global Initiative organization but directly to the projects and people doing the good work.

Right now, Mr. Clinton is announcing that Jim Zogby is committed to a project in the Middle East. It seems to be a youth outreach project, but don’t quote me. Eventually the details will show up on the CGI web site, I trust.

Also just announced: Wal-Mart is committing $1 million this first year to repackage products in a way to save oil, trees, and whatever else goes into packaging. (Speaking of Wal-Mart, Ezra is right about Item #2.)

There really is a lot of good work coming out of this conference, and the best part is that it isn’t all talk. My frustration with the Take Back America conference last summer was that it was all talk. Panels would convene and say, this is a problem, and somebody ought to do something. And everybody would say yep, and that would be it.

Now Barbara Streisand is on stage committing to something. I’m watching on a screen from the press room, btw; I’m not seeing La Streisand in person. Oh, well. This morning some of us bloggers got a how d’you do and handshake from Senator Hillary Clinton, who was very warm and gracious and friendly. She looks great, too.

I saw the real rock star yesterday, though — Al Gore. He took part in a panel called “Building a Sustainable Future,” at which I took notes, but my notes are at home now. The gist of it was about sustainable use of resources and business practices for both the public and private sector.

I’m about to pack up my laptop and head home. See ya later.

My Cause Is My Country

Posted on by

We’re still dealing with the fallout of the meeting with Bill Clinton. Yesterday I provided some links to the Boobapalooza Brawl; here are some more: My buddies Julia of Sisyphus Shrugs and Lindsay B. at Majikthise, as well as Jessica herself, offer opinions. I have nothing more to add.

A more legitimate criticism is that all of the attendees were white. I think it was a major gaffe that Steve Gilliard wasn’t invited, although Steve says he wouldn’t have gone, anyway. “If the choice is loyalty to a politician or loyalty to my supportive, generous and desperate for information readers, that isn’t really much of a choice is it?” he writes. That’s fair, but that was not the choice offered by the meeting. Mr. Clinton neither asked for our loyalty nor said anything particularly surprising or newsworthy in the off-the-record portion of the meeting.

The most controversial things Mr. Clinton said involved mild criticism of some other Democrats (although no one currently running for office) and some nudges at the Right in general. None of this was a big whoop-dee-doo, so why off the record? Because, I suspect, if there’s a massive blowup over somebody’s boobs, for pity’s sake, what would rightie bloggers do with nudges at the Right? Or any mention in any context of Republican politicians? Or suggestions that maybe so-and-so made a mistake when he campaigned on such-and-such an issue? And may I add that Mr. Clinton didn’t say anything that wasn’t extremely mild and tolerant compared to the stuff I say about the same people.

But did he say anything off-the-record that was really blogworthy? That you readers would find fascinating and illuminating?

Not really. Of course, you’ll have to trust me on that.

The overall purpose of the meeting was to open more dialogue between liberal bloggers and the Democratic Party. And when I say dialogue, I mean dialogue. As in a two-way conversation. Clinton praised liberal bloggers — not just the ones in the room — for our ability to respond quickly to the Rightie Media Noise Machine with facts and logic. He’s come to realize that the Democratic Party is nuts to treat us merely as ATM machines and believes the Dems should start listening to what we have to say.

This is all good, I say, for all of us, whether at the meeting or not. This is what many of us have wanted from the Dems for a very long time. We’re all hoping the meeting was only a first step in a process that will involve a far larger group of bloggers in the future.

(And may I also say to those who want to fight about who was invited, and who wasn’t — I choose not to participate, thanks. I’ve got quite enough neuroses of my own to manage without trying to deal with yours, too. So, feel free to snark away, and I will continue to ignore you.)

Christy Hardin Smith says that she checked with Peter Daou, who told her some African American and Latino bloggers were invited but could not come on such short notice. The meeting was thrown together quickly. I had known for about a week that a meeting was being planned, but didn’t know for sure if it was really going to happen (and where, and when) until the day before. I suspect a lot of people had to make a mad dash for the nearest airport to be there, although for me a trip to Harlem takes about 17 minutes on the Metro North Railroad.

There’s one seriously misreported detail I want to correct — I say it was red devil’s food cake (with cream cheese icing), not cherry cake.

On to the main issue: The question of how the Dems and liberal bloggers might work together is problematic. The Right Blogosphere more or less functions as the web auxiliary of the Republican Party. That’s not a model I want to follow. Yet when we — liberal bloggers and Dems — do pull together on an issue (the recent “Path to 9/11” flap being a good example) we’re a whole lot more effective than when we work separately.

As Peter Daou wrote in the first “triangle” essay:

Looking at the political landscape, one proposition seems unambiguous: blog power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment. Forming a triangle of blogs, media, and the political establishment is an essential step in creating the kind of sea change we’ve seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Simply put, without the participation of the media and the political establishment, the netroots alone cannot generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom. This is partly a factor of audience size, but it’s also a matter, frankly, of trust and legitimacy. Despite the astronomical growth of the netroots (see Bowers and Stoller for hard numbers), and the slow and steady encroachment of bloggers on the hallowed turf of Washington’s opinion-makers, it is still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people’s political views. That is not to say that blogs can’t be the first to draw attention to an issue, as they often do, but the half-life of an online buzz can be measured in days and weeks, and even when a story has enough netroots momentum to float around for months, it will have little effect on the wider public discourse without the other sides of the triangle in place. Witness the Plame case, an obsession of left-leaning bloggers long before the media and the political establishment got on board and turned it into a political liability for Rove and Bush.

The larger question surrounding the meeting is who is using whom? I’ve been amused, but not surprised, at the number of people who assume the meeting was about Hillary Clinton’s alleged presidential ambitions. Let me be clear. First, the Senator’s political career was not discussed at all. Second, most of us in the room have long been on record that we do not want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic presidential candidate in ’08. I can’t speak for everybody, but no amount of fried chicken is going to change my mind on that.

Of course, some people are still going to interpret either Clintons’ every bleat as part of their campaign to re-take the White House, no matter what I say.

Other complaints can be found in this comment thread at the Guardian “comment is free” blog. Like this guy:

The Usual Suspects were present for the soiree with Clinton because they represent the “left” that constitutes brand-name consumers. They would vote for *anything* labeled ‘Democrat,’ and Clinton knows it.

Yeah, like we all supported Joe Lieberman … oh, wait …

As I wrote in the same comments thread, why is it everyone assumes Bill Clinton is using us? Why can’t it be equally true that we are using him?

Yes, the man is flawed. Yes, he did things as President I think he shouldn’t have done, and I’m not just talking about conduct, but policies, as well. But I if the man offers himself as a tool to enable my agenda, why not take advantage? Access to power, even a tiny bit, doesn’t exactly fall into my lap every day.

If you look back at history, you see that everyone who has ever accomplished anything was flawed. Abraham Lincoln was a racist. Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, messed around with alchemy and astrology. Most of the great men of history, including the historical Buddha, were sexist. Show me somebody who accomplished anything who was without flaw or foible, and I’ll show you someone who paid off his friends to keep their mouths shut.

So to those who claim we bloggers somehow sold out our feminism or liberalism or anything else by meeting with President Clinton, I say: Bite me.

So what is my agenda? As I also wrote in the comments thread, I got into blogging to help restore some sanity to America’s sick political culture, which has become so skewed and twisted we can no longer engage in rational political dialogue, never mind make rational political decisions as a nation.

More than 50 years ago the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that the hard right-wing fringe of American politics was creating “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.” Folks, they have succeeded.

The Right’s got a big chunk of the electorate conditioned to vote against their own self-interests. Mindless repetition of Republican talking points has replaced dialogue. The mainstream news media shuts out true liberalism, and in the heads of most “pundits” the extreme Right is now the “center.” Our political institutions are dysfunctional except as engines to move power and money into the hands of those in control.

In truth, the federal government of the United States of America is no longer functioning as a representative democracy. Congress and the White House are just going through the motions. If we don’t turn this around, pretty soon they won’t even bother to go through the motions.

Restoring enough sanity to my country that it can function as a representative democracy again is my cause. Beyond that, I hope that once people remember what government is supposed to be about they will stop being afraid to use government for progressive ends, such as establishing national health insurance. I want to move the political center back to, you know, the center. I want to see balance and responsibility in news media. But the overall aim is healing the sick political culture so that the government can be a government. What happens after that is, well, what happens after that.

Blogging is a means to that end, as is the Democratic Party and Mr. Clinton. But blogging or Mr. Clinton or the Democrats are not my cause. My cause is my country.

Too Cool

Posted on by

A little group of us bloggers ate lunch with the last elected President of the United States today, in his Harlem office. I’m afraid if I try to name everybody I’ll leave someone out, so I’m not going to try, but attendees included (in no particular order) Dave Johnson of Seeing the Forest; Matt Stoller of MyDD; Duncan Black of Eschaton; Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who has photos up already; Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith from firedoglake; Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis, and, um, more people. And moi. I’ll post the full list eventually.

The purpose of the meeting (as near as I can tell) is that Mr. Clinton has been reading blogs and just wanted to do a little outreach, facilitated by Peter Daou. We had a lovely time schmoozing about, you know, political stuff.

No big bombshell revelations, but it was certainly an interesting discussion. Lots of smart folks in the room. I took a few notes, but I think I’ll wait until I get the official meeting transcript to write in detail.

But how cool was that?

Update: John at AMERICAblog has more photos. McJoan at Daily Kos has more details.

Judge Not

Posted on by

I didn’t comment on the kidnapping of two Fox newsmen in Iraq. This was not because I didn’t care, but because I had nothing original to say beyond “gee, I hope they get home OK.”

Now that they are home, they’re being slammed by righties because they didn’t die.

I’m serious. Check out this post, titled “Kidnapped Fox Newsmen Let Us Down By Not Dying.” [Update: OK, I was snookered. This post is a satire. I missed it. Me bad.]

At first, conservative bloggers were pulling for Centanni and Wiig. They clamored for their release and attacked their kidnappers, knowing that the more they blogged about it, the more likely that the kidnappers would capitulate in the face of this virtual onslaught and release them.

The forces of evil tremble in fear of the wrath of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders.

They were outraged that the story wasn’t getting the attention it deserved from mainstream media and speculated that it was because of bias against Fox News. … Although Fox News President Roger Ailes later revealed that he had asked the rest of the media to keep a lid on its reporting while negotiations were going on, which might have accounted for the lack of stories by the MSM,”

Ya think?

“that does not negate the possibility that they did, in fact, have contempt for the Fox News journalists anyway.

Nor does it negate the possibility that every professional journalist in America prayed mightily for the safety of the two Fox News guys. But now that the newsmen are released, the Right wishes them dead. A rightie named David Warren explains why. [Note: This post is not a satire.]

They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they’d be safe.

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives, because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenceless martyrs.

Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew 7:1-2, King James version) I’m not saying Mr. Warren won’t be allowed into heaven, but Saint Peter is gonna make Mr. Warren write the first two verses of Matthew about 20 million times on the celestial blackboard first.

[Update: More about Warren here.]

But let’s go back to the writer of the first post cited, who calls himself Jon Swift.

Michelle Malkin even quoted some liberals who expressed contempt for Fox News and seemed to feel the men deserved to be kidnapped, including such well-known and respected thinkers on the Left as Bob Laurence, the TV critic for the San Diego Tribune and former Snohomish County, Wash., Democrat party official Mike Whitney. They seemed to be speaking the unexpressed thoughts of all liberals.

First off, let me express gratitude to this blogger for telling me that the TV critic for the San Diego Tribune is a “well-known and respected thinker on the Left.” I generally don’t look to TV critics for political insight; maybe I’ve been missing something.

Next: We lefties do express contempt for Fox News, but “seemed to feel the men deserved to be kidnapped”? Really? Of course every groups has its assholes. But here is Mr. Swift’s first example of liberals expressing contempt: Glenn Greenwald, who wrote:

Justifying the targeting of Fox News journalists in a war zone, on the ground that they are so biased in favor of the Bush administration that they are basically propaganda agents, is outrageous. It is in everyone’s interests to ensure that journalists of all stripes are free to operate in war zones and report on what is happening without fear of being targeted, and there is no legitimate moral basis for celebrating attacks on them. For that reason, anyone publicly justifying the Fox kidnappings would be viciously stigmatized and probably permanently shunned.

Hello? But then Glenn linked to a Power Line post by John Hinderaker, who wrote in a different context:

Given Reuters’s coverage of the conflict in Lebanon, it would perhaps be understandable if the Israelis started firing on Reuters vehicles.

So if a leftie wishes death on a journalists it’s bad, but if a rightie does it, that’s just fine.

Another example of an evil liberal expressing contempt for the Fox News journalists came from Bob Laurence, TV critic of the San Diego Union-Tribune. But in the linked article Laurence does not express contempt for the journalists. Instead, he speculates that the lack of MSM coverage reflects some coolness between Fox and the rest of the media.

Starting at the top with Roger Ailes, the Fox sales pitch has been to deride other media, to declare itself the one source of the real truth, the sole source of ‘fair and accurate’ news reporting. As a result, there’s not a reservoir of kinship or good will with Fox on the part of the rest of the news media. You can’t keep insulting people and then expect friendship when you need it.

That’s actually not too far from what the righties were saying — the MSM is not covering the story because they don’t like Fox News. And it’s no where near expressing contempt for the captured journalists or wishing they come to harm.

But at last, the frantic search through the Internets for liberals being hateful turned up former Snohomish County, Wash., Democrat party official Mike Whitney. Whitney wrote an opinion piece that does veer rather close to saying the journalists deserved to be kidnapped because they work for Fox News.

And you know the rightie rule — if one “liberal” says something nasty, no matter how obscure that liberal may be, he is “speaking the unexpressed thoughts of all liberals.”

I love the way righties believe they understand our thoughts even when we don’t express them.

For the record, I think Whitney is out of line, and that no journalist attempting to cover a war deserves to be kidnapped or fired upon by anyone for any reason. There, Mr. Swift; that’s an expressed thought.

Comment Moderation Is On

Posted on by

I’ve had to flip the “moderate comments” on switch because some spambot has figured out how to get around my spam filters. I’ll turn it off again as soon as I install another spam filter.

[Update: the spamswarm seems to have slowed down; I’m going to switch moderation off again and hope for the best.]