I’ve long been a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald, perhaps the supreme foe of the Bush/Obama Forever War ever since the hostilities started. That’s why I’m so pained to read his reaction to the reaction to PEN America’s decision to give an award to Charlie Hebdo.
Part of Glenn’s problem is that he’s reacting to the reaction—if Ross Douthat is down with something, it must be shit, right? Well, I have, on occasion, descended to the near-Hebdo level of referring to Ross as “Ross Dumb Fuck,” so I obviously think that Ross doesn’t always get it right, but still.
Glenn begins by pointing out that critics of Israel have a tough time too, and they don’t get saluted by PEN America. Well, that’s true, but Glenn doesn’t state his case quite as dispassionately as one would like. He tells us that one can draw a long jail term for “expressing harsh criticism of Israel.” If you follow Glenn’s link, you reach a New York Times editorial condemning then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush for attempting to fire University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian for saying “Death to Israel!”, which definitely is “harsh.” The full story of the professor’s long-running harassment and imprisonment by the U.S. government is in fact disgraceful (Wikipedia fills you in here), but saying that it all happened on the basis of “harsh criticism of Israel” is a bit of a stretcher. And unwarranted legal harassment and imprisonment, while brutal, is not quite the same thing as murder.
Greenwald also implicitly though not explicitly endorses one of the most tedious of the current crop of PC memes, “punching down”, when he argues that Muslims in France are “largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population,” an assertion he “proves” by linking to an article on anti-immigrant “crusader” Marine Le Pen. Since they are “marginalized,” they should not be criticized.
Naturally, Greenwald ignores entirely the bloody second shooting that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, when a kosher market was attacked, resulting in the death of four Jews. Wide-spread unrestrained anti-Semitism on the part of the “marginalized” French Moslem population is also ignored, in favor of attacks on the likes of Bill Maher, for being “too anti-Muslim.”
Above all, I would say, Glenn is so interested in attacking the “reactors” that he doesn’t focus adequately on the “actor,” Charlie Hebdo. It’s clear that he doesn’t know much about the magazine’s content,1 nor does he seem to grasp that there’s a difference between making fun of the Moslem fondness for fatwas and denying that the Holocaust happened. Free speech, yeah, but don’t we give points for accuracy as well?
Afterwords
It should be legal to “deny” the Holocaust in France, as it is here. And it should also be “legal” to make fun of high school football in Texas without being shot at, which apparently it is not.
