I never joined in the sanctification of Matthew Shepard. What happened to him was appalling, evil, horrifying. But what gay rights groups made of it was, in my view, exploitative and crude. I gave up counting the number of direct mail requests for money I received using Matthew Shepard’s name. I wrote about my misgivings here. My opposition to hate crime laws is laid out here. Harper’s Magazine has already sketched the role that crystal meth may have played in the scenario that led to Shepard’s murder. Now ABC News has prepared an important, thorough and debunking review of what happened. I was tangentially involved in the documentary, but wasn’t privy to its most closely held findings. I have a feeling it will reveal how dangerous it is to rest an entire political argument on one incident, whose details were always murky and subsequently turned into myth.
WEEPING FOR ARAFAT: Here’s the BBC correspondent, Barbara Plett, finding herself in tears at the demise of Arafat:
To be honest, the coverage of Yasser Arafat’s illness and departure from Palestine was a real grind. I churned out one report after the other, without any sense of drama. Foreign journalists seemed much more excited about Mr Arafat’s fate than anyone in Ramallah. We hovered around the gate to his compound, swarming around the Palestinian officials who drove by, poking our microphones through their dark, half-open windows. But where were the people, I wondered, the mass demonstrations of solidarity, the frantic expressions of concern? Was this another story we Western journalists were getting wrong, bombarding the world with news of what we think is an historic event, while the locals get on with their lives? Yet when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry… without warning.
Do you think she’d shed a tear for the Pope? Or Mother Teresa? The far left’s attraction to foreign murder and tyranny endures, doesn’t it? Notice also this BBC timeline for Arafat’s life. The last two dates are his Nobel Peace Prize and the 2001 Israeli blockade in Ramallah. No mention of Camp David or Taba. The BBC has the historical objectivity of Stalin.
The Dish 