Out of fairness, here’s an actual full transcript of Clinton’s remarks to Georgetown. In context, the remarks aren’t as inflammatory as they first appear. They are merely platitudinous and, in some passages, thoroughly ill-advised rather than outrageous. It’s clear that he believes that America has been responsible for terrorism itself – and he absurdly equates civilian hate crimes with terrorism. He gives no history of terrorism except that committed by Americans or Christians. Here’s a critical passage: “Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.” I’m not quite sure what he means by this, but the context is perilously close to saying we deserve to pay for ancient horrors committed by people roughly from the same gene pool as ourselves. Huh? And this in a context that is arguing – against much history – that terrorism has never worked. Still, it’s not equivalent to saying that America asked for the 9/11 massacre, as I implied from what I now see was an appallingly slanted piece in the Washington Times. The speech is interminable of course. It has almost an internal contradiction in every paragraph. But it’s not Noam Chomsky. For that, we should give thanks.
SHUGER ON HERSH: Here’s a useful and highly convincing take-down of Sy Hersh’s overblown account of an alleged Special Forces screw-up in the current New Yorker, by Scott Shuger of Slate. Shuger has military experience and a very sharp and fair mind. Worth a read.
LETTERS: I really shouldn’t have brought up the subject of body hair, should I?
CENSORSHIP MADE MEANINGLESS: My friend Norah Vincent writes an unfortunately bizarre column in the Los Angeles Times, arguing that a university professor who is fired after voicing idiotic views about the war has suffered from censorship. Ditto poor Bill Maher, if his dreadfully strained show, Politically Incorrect, goes under after advertiser flight. Personally, I’m no fan of colleges firing professors for their idiotic views (who’d be left?); or of activists launching boycott campaigns to kill off television shows (like Dr Laura); or even patriotic attempts to actually fire (rather than roast) some individuals on the government payroll because of their stupidity or malevolence. But this is still not censorship. Censorship is when the government forbids the expression of certain views, period. It is the punishment of opinion by force. Everything else is the rough-and-tumble of public debate, in which equal measures of glory and ignominy are part of the process. If the public raises an outcry about the unremitting left-wing bias of NPR, and forces it to change its tune, it’s still not censorship. If an editor fires a columnist for endorsing the wrong presidential candidate, it’s tough, but not censorship. If the NEA is forced by public pressure not to fund a hedgehog-turd-on-a-rosary as art, it’s still not censorship. Losing your job is always tough. But it’s not censorship. I thought Norah was sensible on this kind of thing. I say: let’s do all we can to ensure that people with whom we disagree are exposed and criticized. Let debate ensue. But please: no whining about censors.
The Dish 