Thoughts, comments, musings on life, politics, current events and the media.



Blogroll Me!


Comments by YACCS

 

Sticks and stones...

As we all know by now, beating Robert Fisk over the head is perfectly acceptable to him, as long as the attackers are Muslim. (Well, that's his prerogative -- but he also endorses the beating of "any other Westerner" by Muslims, which seems slightly presumptuous.) From that, you'd think he had a thick skin to go along with his thick skull. But apparently not, because criticizing Fisk and his ilk is completely intolerable:

The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone – people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children – in an attempt to shut them up.

Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum now run a website in the United States to denounce academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors already on this contemptible McCarthyite list – it is grotesquely called "Campus Watch" – committed the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism".

And he quotes Said, approvingly:

Mr Said himself has already described all this as a campaign "to ask students and faculty to inform against pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom".

In other words, letting people know what a professor is saying "intimidates" him and "curtails" his freedom.

On the other hand, hitting them with rocks is fine.
posted by David Nieporent at 10/21/2002 08:22:00 AM |