A reader wants to know what the silence is all about:
The radio silence on Lebanon from the left-wing blogosphere (i.e. Kos, Atrios) is fascinating, and your reader from the ‘Liberal Blogs and Israel‘ post had it about right. To sympathize with Hezbollah would expose these bloggers to a potentially career-damaging backlash. However, to take the mainstream Democratic line of say, Chuck Schumer, would be to seriously alienate a chunk of their readership.
And for sure, Hezbollah sympathizers do exist on the left. One only has to listen to KPFA, the ‘free speech network’ broadcast out of Berkeley to get a taste of unfiltered Hezbollah propaganda, in which Mullah Nasrallah is characterized as the new Che Guevara. The Weekly Standard might have done better to listen to some of these transcripts, rather than to desperately fish around the diaries on Kos.
I’ve actually been skeptical of beating up on Kos on this. But I just read the last three pages of posts on the main site, and there’s only one even vaguely alluding to the crisis with Hezbollah. That’s just plain weird. I know we’re not supposed to notice silence on blogs – people are free to ignore all sorts of stories. But the silence can be instructive (hey, I studied with a Straussian). This is Atrios’ second-hand excuse:
I’ve said nothing about war in Lebanon or Ethiopia because I have nothing to add, and also because – as you may or may not be aware – the United States is actually involved in a hugely bloody war right now, and this is more of a pressing concern to me personally. I don‚Äôt know the secret formula for unshitting any of these beds – I promise I wouldn’t be shy if I did – but I currently only have to sleep in one of them; and, as it turns out, that’s the one bed where I actually have some miniscule chance of influencing the situation. So that‚Äôs my concern.
This would make sense if there were no connections between Hezbollah and Iran and Iraq. Are lefties unable to grapple with complex regional wars? Nah. They’re just wimping out. My reader gives one plausible reason why. Is there a more persuasive one?
The Dish 