On Pathetic and Hateful Leftist Tantrums for Attention
Unless one is a professional contrarian (we're thinking Chris Hitchens attacking Pope John Paul II the week that the Pope passed), strict propriety imposes the expectation that one will refrain from attacking the ill or dying. Social conventions being what they are, there are few rational reasons for these norms to exist - if you dislike someone's past with cause that past doesn't go away as time passes - but they are nonetheless and properly adhered to as markers of respectability.
But since PM Sharon collapsed, the international vilification of him continues - it remains only somewhat abated and still largely wrong:
Compared to past international media coverage of Ariel Sharon, which on a number of occasions in recent years has gone beyond personal demonization to outright anti-Semitism, the reporting on Sharon since he suffered a massive stroke last week has been relatively benign. Sharon the butcher, the bulldozer, the war criminal, the "successor of Hitler" has suddenly been humanized in several usually hostile quarters such as the BBC. But only up to a point. Even amid this improved coverage, as Sharon lies fighting for his life many articles in the Western media have retailed untruths, almost in passing, as though they were incontrovertible historical facts: Sharon initiated the second intifada, Sharon ordered the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and so on.
According to a Google search, there were over 24,000 articles published on Sharon in the 24 hours following his stroke last Wednesday night. But only four days later, in Monday's Washington Post, was there the first mention of Sharon's protracted and successful libel battle in the 1980s against Time magazine for its inaccurate suggestion that he had encouraged the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Equally, there has been almost no reference to the fact that the Sabra and Shatila massacres were carried out by (Christian) Arabs against (Muslim) Arabs, in response to massacres by Muslims, and virtually no indication that the Palestinians themselves had carefully planned the 2000 intifada. This is by their own admission.
This refusal to adopt the circumspection demanded by age-old norms of propriety is often accompanied by a snide, smirking kind of brashness: "maybe everybody else is willing to pretend - but I'm not going to keep my mouth shut just because he's dying." This is a kind of intentional obtuseness - cheap moral exhibitionism conveyed through vulgar and intentional insult.
There will always be a few people like this. Pathetic "activists" and neglected "radicals" want for attention, and they inevitably try to abuse the better sensibilities of others to get it. They're the social equivalent of a ill-trained dog ruining furniture. But the problem is particularly widespread and acute in relation to Prime Minister Sharon (even far Left Jews participate in this shameful posturing). The notion that cheaply slandering him is within the spectrum of "enlightened dialogue" is accepted at the highest levels of intentional diplomacy and has reached something of a shibboleth in the lowest poseur circles of self-styled activists and radicals. Of course, the demonization is only in the rarest of circumstances based on factual claims - we will commit to the claim that literally none of the unshaven, unbathed college students handing out pamphlets in front of cafeterias understand the nuances of ICJ jurisdiction or the brute reality of what happened Sabra and Shatila. But being able to throw out a cheap line about Prime Minister Sharon being a war criminal has been a badge of respectability and a handshake of recognition in certain Leftist communities for decades, and change happens only at the most glacial of paces in these self-enclosed and self-justifying swamps of moral fashionability.
And so, if what you pathetically tell yourself about yourself is based on being "unconventional" and chanting the words "Sabra and Shatila", you'll take every opportunity to be vulgar and to demonize Sharon. A time when everybody else is trying to act decorous turns from a time to follow suit into an opportunity to be particular offensive - all the better to prove to yourself that you remain, in this dark night of Rumsfeld-ian fascism, an unafraid voice for the oppressed. Pathetic.
But since PM Sharon collapsed, the international vilification of him continues - it remains only somewhat abated and still largely wrong:
Compared to past international media coverage of Ariel Sharon, which on a number of occasions in recent years has gone beyond personal demonization to outright anti-Semitism, the reporting on Sharon since he suffered a massive stroke last week has been relatively benign. Sharon the butcher, the bulldozer, the war criminal, the "successor of Hitler" has suddenly been humanized in several usually hostile quarters such as the BBC. But only up to a point. Even amid this improved coverage, as Sharon lies fighting for his life many articles in the Western media have retailed untruths, almost in passing, as though they were incontrovertible historical facts: Sharon initiated the second intifada, Sharon ordered the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and so on.
According to a Google search, there were over 24,000 articles published on Sharon in the 24 hours following his stroke last Wednesday night. But only four days later, in Monday's Washington Post, was there the first mention of Sharon's protracted and successful libel battle in the 1980s against Time magazine for its inaccurate suggestion that he had encouraged the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Equally, there has been almost no reference to the fact that the Sabra and Shatila massacres were carried out by (Christian) Arabs against (Muslim) Arabs, in response to massacres by Muslims, and virtually no indication that the Palestinians themselves had carefully planned the 2000 intifada. This is by their own admission.
This refusal to adopt the circumspection demanded by age-old norms of propriety is often accompanied by a snide, smirking kind of brashness: "maybe everybody else is willing to pretend - but I'm not going to keep my mouth shut just because he's dying." This is a kind of intentional obtuseness - cheap moral exhibitionism conveyed through vulgar and intentional insult.
There will always be a few people like this. Pathetic "activists" and neglected "radicals" want for attention, and they inevitably try to abuse the better sensibilities of others to get it. They're the social equivalent of a ill-trained dog ruining furniture. But the problem is particularly widespread and acute in relation to Prime Minister Sharon (even far Left Jews participate in this shameful posturing). The notion that cheaply slandering him is within the spectrum of "enlightened dialogue" is accepted at the highest levels of intentional diplomacy and has reached something of a shibboleth in the lowest poseur circles of self-styled activists and radicals. Of course, the demonization is only in the rarest of circumstances based on factual claims - we will commit to the claim that literally none of the unshaven, unbathed college students handing out pamphlets in front of cafeterias understand the nuances of ICJ jurisdiction or the brute reality of what happened Sabra and Shatila. But being able to throw out a cheap line about Prime Minister Sharon being a war criminal has been a badge of respectability and a handshake of recognition in certain Leftist communities for decades, and change happens only at the most glacial of paces in these self-enclosed and self-justifying swamps of moral fashionability.
And so, if what you pathetically tell yourself about yourself is based on being "unconventional" and chanting the words "Sabra and Shatila", you'll take every opportunity to be vulgar and to demonize Sharon. A time when everybody else is trying to act decorous turns from a time to follow suit into an opportunity to be particular offensive - all the better to prove to yourself that you remain, in this dark night of Rumsfeld-ian fascism, an unafraid voice for the oppressed. Pathetic.
