Hollow Men

Why Israel’s enemies will always be the darlings of Western intellectuals


Lee Smith
Tablet Magazine
14 July '10

It’s nothing new for Western intellectuals to lavish attention and admiration on the resistance forces aligned against Israel, whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah or even organizations like al-Qaida that are less interested in Israel than in killing and maiming Western civilians. Last week, when CNN’s former Middle East editor, Octavia Nasr, tweeted that she respected the late militant cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the cards were out on the table for all to see. But usually the pro-resistance vibe is more subtle, as when Nasr’s defenders demanded a more nuanced understanding from knee-jerk Americans who were shocked by Nasr’s support for a suicide-bomb-sanctioning man of faith. After all, Fadlallah was a relatively pro-feminist radical Islamist cleric—and if his talk about Israel was genocidal, well, that’s just part of the package when dealing with a complex place like the Middle East.

Media consumers in the United States are by now well aware that Hezbollah and Hamas provide “social services” for their communities. For the writers and television personalities who push such supposed palliatives on their audiences—“Yes, they do chant ‘kill the Jews!’ and they do act on their rhetoric, but they also educate poor kids in clean, well-lit schools (please ignore the slogans painted on the walls)”—respect for the resistance is a polite way of indicating one’s tolerance for murderous anti-Semitism. The issue is whether this attitude is in danger of seeping into the mainstream of the U.S. public. Poll numbers show that U.S. support for Israel is consistently high—in February Gallup found that a near-record 63 percent of Americans were more sympathetic to the Jewish state than to the Palestinians. But ideas can change, and it’s intellectuals who often lead the way. Remember that Israel was a popular cause among the intellectual classes until the 1967 war. It is true that the American people and the bulk of their intellectual class are far apart on the subject of Israel, but all the massive and popular evil of the last century started among a small ideological elite.

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The Western Press and Hezbollah

Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
10 July '10

Even after Octavia Nasr apologized for her ill-advised “tweet” over the July 4 holiday expressing her “respect” for the recently deceased Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, CNN fired its senior editor for Middle East affairs. And now bloggers and journalists are up in arms. Some are blaming the job action on “neoconservatives,” which presumably includes THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Daniel Halper who commented on Nasr’s “tweet” here. Israel Lobby author Stephen Walt writes that CNN’s “spineless response” is “one more reason why mainstream journalism is increasingly seen as morally bankrupt.”

Walt and some of the others have half a point--why is Nasr being singled out for openly expressing the U.S. media’s default position on Hezbollah, Fadlallah’s one-time colleagues? For instance, does anyone doubt that the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh “respects” the late cleric’s even more vicious rival, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah, whom he interviewed in the pages of the New Yorker?

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Why was Octavia Nasr fired?

Soccer Dad
11 July '10

There is currently a rumor going around that CNN reporter, Octavia Nasr was fired for a uncritical eulogy she tweeted for recently departed Sheikh Fadlallah. Don't get me wrong, Nasr clearly showed a bias that is all too prevalent in the MSM. It is mindset that romaticizes terrorists and finds the West (and Israel) a constant source of misery in the world.

In 1972, one of the first major terror attacks on Israel was carried out by Black September, a branch of the PLO, killing 11 Israeli Olympic ahletes at the Olympic games in Munich. Martin Peretz has, on more than one occasion, recalled how Peter Jennings portrayed the attack. Here is one presented at Honest Reporting.

"I first saw Jennings on ABC when, as a young TV journalist, he reported from the Munich Olympics. And I was filled with disgust that his subsequent career has only deepened. At Munich -- I still remember it, 30 years later -- Jennings tried to explain away the abductions and massacre of the young Israeli athletes. His theme: The Palestinians were helpless and desperate. Ipso facto, they were driven to murder. That's life..."

Ten years later Israel was fighting the PLO in Operation Peace for the Galillee and the Washington Post's correspondent, Edward Cody, wrote a front page eulogy for a PLO terrorist (Soldier or Terrorist; July 7, 1982):

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A man of great understanding, not

Soccer Dad
11 July '10

Robert Mackey of the New York Times's The Lede blog weighs in with Online Praise for a Cleric Draws Fire, Again. To Mackey, what's (distressing) news isn't that supposedly objective people (in this case a diplomat) praised a terrorist leader, but that Israel objected to it.

A British diplomat's words of praise for a Lebanese cleric who inspired the founders of Hezbollah disappeared from her blog on Thursday after Israel's foreign ministry expressed outrage.

In a blog post headlined, "The Passing of a Decent Man," Britain's ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, mourned the death of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the country's leading Shiite cleric.

Mackey uses the occasion to reprint Ambassador Guy's eulogy in its entirety. He offers no rebuttal to the eulogy. One may assume that Mackey agrees with Guy's assessment.

Further he uses the opportunity to castigate Guy's and Ocatvia Nasr's critics.

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