Tag Archives: hate speech

Glenn Greenwald On Intellectual Credibility

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Glenn Greenwald never fails. I was just catching up on the infamous Leon Wieseltier-Andrew Sullivan ethno-politico-theological brouhaha of last month that I completely missed while trekking around Latin America, and I found this simple but wise paragraph:

“What one thinks of Andrew Sullivan, or how angry he’s made one over the years, ought to be about the most irrelevant factor imaginable in determining one’s reaction to this TNR attack.  Sometimes, even people you don’t like are the targets of odious and harmful accusations, and sometimes, even your Bestest Friends, fellow party members and listserv pals might do wrong things that merit criticism.  Wieseltier’s polemic is a classic example of anti-semitism accusations tossed around with no conceivable basis and for purely ignoble ends.  It’s the very tactic that has caused significant damage in the past.  So obviously unhinged is this particular assault that it actually presents a good opportunity to discredit behavior like this once and for all.  That’s all that should matter; how many grudges one nurses towards Andrew Sullivan is nice fodder for gossipy listserv chats, but no responsible or even adult commentator would allow it to influence one’s views on this matter.”

And that’s why Glenn Greenwald is one of the very few mainstream writers on politics I can read regularly without a bad case of moral indigestion.

Other good responses to Wieseltier came from Sullivan himself, and from Matthew Yglesias and  Joe Klein.

Yglesias’s post minced no words:

“For the purposes of intimidation, after all, baseless charges work better than well-grounded ones. Nikolai Krylenko, Bolshevik Minister of Justice, said “we must execute not only the guilty, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” And it’s much the same here. If you call anti-semites anti-semites, then people who aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism will figure “hey, since my political opinions aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism, then I’m safe.” The idea is to put everyone on notice that mere innocence will be no defense.”

The only problem was I wasn’t actually clear from reading Yglesias (apparently a long-time sparring partner of Wieseltier’s) where exactly runs the thin red line you can’t cross. Maybe that takes years of hanging out at MSM confabs, a future I’m as likely to encounter as sequestration in a Saudi harem.

Reading Sullivan, on the other hand, I felt I was reprising some of my own intellectual history:

“As a Jew and a Catholic, we read Buddhist scriptures together. We were, in fact, somewhat painfully alike in many ways: religious traditionalists whose reverence for our faiths was also marked by our rebellion within them. We share a commitment to secularism and religion, these days a very rare combination. His mentor was Isaiah Berlin; mine Michael Oakeshott.”

But, finally, it’s Jeffrey Goldberg, taking Wieseltier’s part, who – with minor adjustments-  gets the final word on the whole sad business:

“I wish that he (Lila: all of them) would open up  that their hearts to complexity.”

More anti-Christian Bile at Vanity Fair

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I was trying to get a grip on the mentality that produced the Sarah Palin smear job (I carry no water for Palin and think she was a poor choice for veep, but…)

..and I came across this gem, “Blame America (and Jesus), for Jaycee Dugard kidnapping,” from the September edition of Vanity Fair. It implies that belief in the divinity of Jesus is somehow linked up with some kind of kinky sexuality. I kid you not…

[ Just try substituting a few other religious figures for that.

How about “Blame India (and Krishna) for sex-trafficking in Mumbai slums”? How do you think that sounds?

Or “Blame Saudi Arabia (and Muhammed) for terrorism? (Sorry, we already have that going around)

Ok. Here’s a anothr one. What about “Blame Israel (and Moses) for torture in military prisons.”

Has a ring to it….

[Note to religious fundamentalists – the above is satire meant to deride Vanity Fair’s bigotry – no offense is meant to Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Krishna, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Offense is meant to Vanity Fair, however, mainly for terminal idiocy and obvious bigotry].

Here’s the piece:

“It’s an American Gothic thing—or, by any other name, a white trash thing. On the fringe of communities across the country there is a mutant culture: trashy, marginal, uneducated, unhealthy, and nutty. People cluck about it, and are fairly careful to avoid it, but are, too, remarkably laissez-faire towards it. This is partly because white trash means…white. And partly because, in America, a white man’s home is his castle (no matter how much debris is in the yard), and you just don’t ask too many questions (and because so many homes in America look like the homes of sex offenders).

And partly because of Jesus.

If Phillip Garrido ranted about there being no God, if he passed out atheist tracts, instead of bizarre-o Jesus-saves stuff, he would likely have been carted off years ago. But Jesus saves you not just from your sins but from public opprobrium. It may not make you any less weird in people’s eyes, but it makes you part of a protected class of weirdos. Jesus is an acceptable refuge for the sex offender. God knows, Jesus may even incite the sex offender.

No matter. If you believe hotly enough in Jesus, you’re a good American—at least for all the other weird Christians with piles of crap in their backyards, which is a considerable demographic.”

More here, by Michael Wolff.

GOP’s Operative’s Racist Remarks About Michelle Obama

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Just as I was blogging about hate [this is government jargon] speech having the ability to become inflammatory and harmful (something some libertarians don’t seem able to understand), along comes a GOP operative to provide the requisite moronic example – he compared a gorilla to Michelle Obama.

Frankly, this isn’t only bigotry, it’s an example of such oral incontinence the man shouldn’t be let outside without Pampers around his mouth.

Animal imagery is an important clue to racist tendencies in a speech. Calling someone a “bitch” is fairly generic, but thinking up specific animal comparisons that have clearly racist histories to them is inflammatory and offensive. How do people not get that?

And by the way, why do these terms always seem to come out of people who don’t particularly look like the flower of the human species themselves?

I feel personally offended by this.  Not having Scandinavian features and a bustless, hipless physique doesn’t make you ugly. That’s cultural conditioning.  You don’t have to subscribe to the Michelle-is-Jackie-we’re-all-back-in-Camelot-whoopdeedoo being peddled, but what is this ugly reference?

And then I noticed in the blogosphere recently a few references to Jewish people that also use animal imagery – parasites, vipers.

With women, it”s bitch, dog, and body parts – but that’s almost standard.

We don’t want to recognize the faces of other people. Reducing them to bodies, body parts, animals, animality…is a way of  doing that.

Very troubling.

Words are powerful. We can’t use freedom in essentially cowardly and self-destructive ways without causing a reaction. People remember attacks like this for a very long time. They don’t forget them. I recall reacting to some of the language about Jerry Falwell at his death. I loathed many of Falwell’s Christian Zionist positions. But the language used about him was so venomous and degrading, I felt the critics lost their own self-respect and dignity when they wallowed in it. [The piece is “God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother and the Rest of Us ‘Ho’s”- at Dissident Voice, 2006].

And then people ask what a middle-class, privileged black women has to be angry about…  How about – not being able to escape this sort of thing even when your husband is in the White House?

Criticize the Obamas as savagely as you want for their policies. Leave their children, their bodies, their private lives alone. Same with the Palins.