June 04, 2007

More Peretz

Marty Peretz:

Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for Alan Johnston, who is among the people he loves, the people for whom he did the kind of propaganda in which the BBC specializes, authoritative in voice, lachrymose in message, banal in argument. And I don't think that his taped message to the world is one of those pathetic instances of the Stockholm syndrome in which people have been won over by their captors. His captors, who call themselves the Army of Islam (what else?), may not be poor Johnston's friends. But, in the objective sense, he is theirs. Unless, of course, when and if they release him into the arms of the British National Union of Journalists, which has pronounced an interdict against Israel, his three months as a prisoner may have swayed him a bit towards understanding that a cause that incarcerates innocents (and sympathetic innocents, no less) is not a just cause at all.

In any case, as an AP dispatch in Ha'aretz makes clear, Johnston has blathered the entire line--both narrative and sentient--of the terror international and its armed divisions in Gaza. The only problem he had was distinguishing who was responsible for what. There were three guilty parties in his recitation: Israel, America and Great Britain. The Brits took the brunt of his critique. Why not? He's a Brit himself. You can't prove your fidelity to fanatics these days simply by mouthing slogans at Israel and at George Bush. You have to kick your mother.

(Hat Tip: David Rieff, in conversation this afternoon).

You'd expect this fare at thinly veiled hate mongering sites like Little Green Footballs, but it's really quite something to see the editor-in-chief of The New Repubic spout on like this. I'll call it a new low, but Peretz has had so many of late I've frankly lost track. Related, it's sad when a 70 year old man is reduced, much like an incontinent prig, to jousting (and poorly) with a 26 year old (is that how old Matt Yglesias is?) blogger. Can Franklin Foer (or CanWest?) do something about this growing train-wreck? This is getting rather embarrassing for TNR, I'd think.

Posted by Gregory at June 4, 2007 02:25 AM