This Man Must Be a Prophet

It's going to be a while before it's certain who carried out today's terror attacks in Norway, but some of the response already has been revealing.

Apparently a "jihadi" group claimed responsibility for the bombing, which the New York Times and some other papers promptly reported:

The response to this report was predictable, as shown by the comments to this MSNBC piece: Kill the ragheads! This shows that the Muslims hate our freedoms! Nuke Mecca! Glenn Greenwald pointed to part of the New York Times article which declared "the attacks appeared to be part of a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation." As Greenwald noted, "This is simply inaccurate. Norway is a nation at war -- in more than just one country", namely Libya and Afghanistan. (What the Times probably meant, though, was that things are normally peaceful in Norway, not that it doesn't wage war elsewhere; much as news reports of quiet in the Middle East usually mean that although many Arabs have been killed or wounded, no Israelis have been hurt.)

For pointing this out, Greenwald was immediately smeared by some of his hostile commenters, for (so they imagined) claiming that the attacks were justified. That's only to be expected, of course, because Americans who leap to advocate violence against foreign civilians (when they're forced to notice it) naturally assume that anyone who is critical of American violence must therefore welcome violence against America.

The creepiest thing I've seen so far about the attacks is by a BBC commentator, who suggests sadly that the Oslo attack will mean "the end of innocence" in Norway.

To the outside world, the lives lived by Norway's people, both the elite and ordinary folk, may seem naive.

Though up to now they have not seen any reason to protect themselves.

Like Sweden before the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, the Norwegian people have collectively resisted any calls for greater home security.

To them, living in an open society has been not just a privilege, but also a statement to the rest of the world; a display of how it is possible to live together in peace. ...

Norway's attitude to risk might now change, quickly and dramatically, as private individuals withdraw and as central authorities bolster security.

If so, a possible goal of the attackers may well have been achieved, in that they have robbed Norway of its innocence.

This is concern trolling at its most shameless. There has not so far been any indication that Norwegians are rushing to follow the US and UK by converting their country into a locked-down security state; the writer simply wants them to, as the crocodile tears course down his cheeks.

Soon afterward, though, it emerged that the gunman "dressed as a police officer" who attacked a Labor Party youth camp, and appears to be connected to the bombing, is a Norwegian. Those who are old enough to remember the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 will recall that there were initial reports of a swarthy Arab-looking guy fleeing from the scene, which inspired a similar flurry of anti-Muslim frenzy -- until the suspect turned out to be a blond American veteran of the first Gulf War. Similarly, the attempt by white supremacists to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane earlier this year excited very little interest in the corporate media. Greenwald remarked in an update to his post:

... if indeed it turns out to be a domestic rather than "terrorist" (i.e., Muslim) attack: American interest in these attacks and the desire to be seen publicly denouncing them will quickly diminish -- almost to the point of non-existence -- if the perpetrators are not Muslim.

In his Twitter feed, Greenwald also quoted a tweet from MazMHussain:

Reports terrorists are Norwegian; but let me say any planned racism/ethnic profiling of white Nordic men is UNACCEPTABLE

Hear, hear!

This Man Must Be a Prophet

It's going to be a while before it's certain who carried out today's terror attacks in Norway, but some of the response already has been revealing.

Apparently a "jihadi" group claimed responsibility for the bombing, which the New York Times and some other papers promptly reported:

The response to this report was predictable, as shown by the comments to this MSNBC piece: Kill the ragheads! This shows that the Muslims hate our freedoms! Nuke Mecca! Glenn Greenwald pointed to part of the New York Times article which declared "the attacks appeared to be part of a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation." As Greenwald noted, "This is simply inaccurate. Norway is a nation at war -- in more than just one country", namely Libya and Afghanistan. (What the Times probably meant, though, was that things are normally peaceful in Norway, not that it doesn't wage war elsewhere; much as news reports of quiet in the Middle East usually mean that although many Arabs have been killed or wounded, no Israelis have been hurt.)

For pointing this out, Greenwald was immediately smeared by some of his hostile commenters, for (so they imagined) claiming that the attacks were justified. That's only to be expected, of course, because Americans who leap to advocate violence against foreign civilians (when they're forced to notice it) naturally assume that anyone who is critical of American violence must therefore welcome violence against America.

The creepiest thing I've seen so far about the attacks is by a BBC commentator, who suggests sadly that the Oslo attack will mean "the end of innocence" in Norway.

To the outside world, the lives lived by Norway's people, both the elite and ordinary folk, may seem naive.

Though up to now they have not seen any reason to protect themselves.

Like Sweden before the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, the Norwegian people have collectively resisted any calls for greater home security.

To them, living in an open society has been not just a privilege, but also a statement to the rest of the world; a display of how it is possible to live together in peace. ...

Norway's attitude to risk might now change, quickly and dramatically, as private individuals withdraw and as central authorities bolster security.

If so, a possible goal of the attackers may well have been achieved, in that they have robbed Norway of its innocence.

This is concern trolling at its most shameless. There has not so far been any indication that Norwegians are rushing to follow the US and UK by converting their country into a locked-down security state; the writer simply wants them to, as the crocodile tears course down his cheeks.

Soon afterward, though, it emerged that the gunman "dressed as a police officer" who attacked a Labor Party youth camp, and appears to be connected to the bombing, is a Norwegian. Those who are old enough to remember the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 will recall that there were initial reports of a swarthy Arab-looking guy fleeing from the scene, which inspired a similar flurry of anti-Muslim frenzy -- until the suspect turned out to be a blond American veteran of the first Gulf War. Similarly, the attempt by white supremacists to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane earlier this year excited very little interest in the corporate media. Greenwald remarked in an update to his post:

... if indeed it turns out to be a domestic rather than "terrorist" (i.e., Muslim) attack: American interest in these attacks and the desire to be seen publicly denouncing them will quickly diminish -- almost to the point of non-existence -- if the perpetrators are not Muslim.

In his Twitter feed, Greenwald also quoted a tweet from MazMHussain:

Reports terrorists are Norwegian; but let me say any planned racism/ethnic profiling of white Nordic men is UNACCEPTABLE

Hear, hear!

I Know I Am, But What Are You?

What would I do without RWA1, my right-wing acquaintance who enlivens Facebook with the most amazing-yet-predictable outbursts against Teh Left and Teh Liberal Media? Tonight he linked to a commentary by P. J. O'Rourke at The Weekly Standard, announcing that The New York Times has "lost it." RWA1 commented: "The NY Times has become a partisan rag in its political coverage of this country, the equal of William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader or Pulliam's Indianapolis Star." Like he considers that a bad thing?

The Times has always been partisan, though not in the way that RWA1 means. It has always represented the political "center," and spoken for the ruling elites. When Ronald Reagan was turning Central America into a charnel house in the 1980s, the Times dutifully passed along the party line. (Ironically, it was right-wing publications like U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal that exposed Reaganite lies.) When Nicaraguans voted out the Sandinistas after a decade of US-sponsored and managed terrorism, the Times printed a banner headline on their front page, "AMERICANS UNITED IN JOY," which as Noam Chomsky said was "the kind of headline you'd see in some weird, exotic, totalitarian state, like Albania." When it came time to make war on Iraq again, the Times not only went along with Bush, its reporter Judith Miller helped invent the propaganda.

Of course there were occasional lapses, like the publication of the Pentagon Papers almost forty years ago; we don't have a controlled press in the US, so adherence to the party line is not complete. This causes fury among folks like RWA1, to whom I once recommended Mark Hertsgaard's fine book On Bended Knee (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), which documented how the mainstream American media knowingly and deliberately collaborated with the Reagan administration from the start; RWA1 was nonplussed, because media submission had not been total, and all he could see were the deviations from perfect discipline. Happily, the Moonie Washington Times became the Reagan administration's house journal, setting a standard of partisanship that the New York Times couldn't hope to match.

Now we also have The Weekly Standard, an overtly right-wing rag that is nothing if not partisan; but that doesn't bother RWA1, nor does the equally blatant partisanship of the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, or National Review Online, or Commentary, or the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are his main sources on Facebook. Is it that he expects better of the New York Times and the Washington Post? I find that hard to believe. He clearly thinks that P. J. O'Rourke, Joe Rehyansky, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, and the other modern Demosthenes whose work he cites are sensible, sober commentators, speaking truth to power. It's great to have these constant reminders that the "sober" Right (as opposed to the flamingly deranged Right, the regular beat of Roy Edroso) is still so completely dishonest, as to make even the Obama Administration look halfway sane by comparison.

I Know I Am, But What Are You?

What would I do without RWA1, my right-wing acquaintance who enlivens Facebook with the most amazing-yet-predictable outbursts against Teh Left and Teh Liberal Media? Tonight he linked to a commentary by P. J. O'Rourke at The Weekly Standard, announcing that The New York Times has "lost it." RWA1 commented: "The NY Times has become a partisan rag in its political coverage of this country, the equal of William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader or Pulliam's Indianapolis Star." Like he considers that a bad thing?

The Times has always been partisan, though not in the way that RWA1 means. It has always represented the political "center," and spoken for the ruling elites. When Ronald Reagan was turning Central America into a charnel house in the 1980s, the Times dutifully passed along the party line. (Ironically, it was right-wing publications like U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal that exposed Reaganite lies.) When Nicaraguans voted out the Sandinistas after a decade of US-sponsored and managed terrorism, the Times printed a banner headline on their front page, "AMERICANS UNITED IN JOY," which as Noam Chomsky said was "the kind of headline you'd see in some weird, exotic, totalitarian state, like Albania." When it came time to make war on Iraq again, the Times not only went along with Bush, its reporter Judith Miller helped invent the propaganda.

Of course there were occasional lapses, like the publication of the Pentagon Papers almost forty years ago; we don't have a controlled press in the US, so adherence to the party line is not complete. This causes fury among folks like RWA1, to whom I once recommended Mark Hertsgaard's fine book On Bended Knee (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), which documented how the mainstream American media knowingly and deliberately collaborated with the Reagan administration from the start; RWA1 was nonplussed, because media submission had not been total, and all he could see were the deviations from perfect discipline. Happily, the Moonie Washington Times became the Reagan administration's house journal, setting a standard of partisanship that the New York Times couldn't hope to match.

Now we also have The Weekly Standard, an overtly right-wing rag that is nothing if not partisan; but that doesn't bother RWA1, nor does the equally blatant partisanship of the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, or National Review Online, or Commentary, or the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are his main sources on Facebook. Is it that he expects better of the New York Times and the Washington Post? I find that hard to believe. He clearly thinks that P. J. O'Rourke, Joe Rehyansky, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, and the other modern Demosthenes whose work he cites are sensible, sober commentators, speaking truth to power. It's great to have these constant reminders that the "sober" Right (as opposed to the flamingly deranged Right, the regular beat of Roy Edroso) is still so completely dishonest, as to make even the Obama Administration look halfway sane by comparison.