Post of the Day: Hewitt Calls out “The Appeasement Press”
Hewitt surveys the reports on Ahmedinejad’s UN speech yesterday: WaPo, NY Times, LA Times, and The Associated Press (his post has no link; link found by me).
He finds all terribly wanting in substance and wholly missing the point:
When the fanatical president of a strong and ambitious for nuclear weapons country appears at the United Nations, that’s news. When that president has repeatedly threatened Israel with destruction, denied the Holocaust’s existence, and sent long rambling letters to the leaders of the U.S., France, and Germany, people will want to know what he says and what it means.
When he delievers a radical address that –in soft tones, yes, but urgent ones– declares the U.N. to be illegitimate, the war against Israel by Hezbollah to be a creation of the U.S., goes out of his way to alert Christians that Jesus was just a prophet, and then closes with an apocalypse-welcoming appeal to God, that’s not just news, it is very crucial news, news that underscores many important facts for the West and the U.S., chief among them that “diplomacy” leading to a “better deal” isn’t on this radical’s mind. He wants his nukes. He wants the apocalypse.
And the appeasement press does not convey this; doesn’t even bother to report the closing appeal to the Almighty.
Because I played the speech live on my radio show, and saw and heard the reaction in the e-mails and the calls, I and my audience know what he was saying, and I know that it was big news of intense interest to Americans with any eye on the world.
And it is underplayed at best and ignored at worst.
Why such negligence by the appeasement press? A lot of reasons.
Because the appeasement press favors the party of appeasement, and stories that depart from the agenda journalism that wholly favors the Democratic Party platform of retreat from Iraq and the Democratic Party ideology that believes all evil in the world is either the fault of the U.S. or can be bargained away will not get much ink, if any.
Because it is lazy and incurious about such things as long speeches that have to be listened to in translation, and even when listened to, not to the end, and even when listened to to the end, not comprehended because most of the appeasement press don’t read widely or deeply.
Because the appeasement press is bigoted and at best agmostic, and don’t believe the religious beliefs of an odd-looking fellow from a mullah-run state can pose any sort of real threat to the West. Israel, maybe, but hey, they’ve got it coming to them, right? If the Jews had given the Palestinians their land back a couple of decades ago, we’d all be past this, right?
Read Princeton’s Bernard Lewis’s recent address, “Freedom and Justice in Islam,” in which the professor quickly covers the past century in the Middle East and charts the conditions we have confronted for the past ten years. America’s greatest scholar of Islam concludes, “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us.”
Read “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and The Road to 9/11,” by The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, which details the menace of Islamist extremism that stands opposite of the Shia extremism represented by Ahmadinejad. “The most frightening aspect of this new threat,” Wright recounts early students of al Qaeda as understanding, “was that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive, and exotic.” Wright was referring to the mindset of 1996.
Ten years later, that mindset is back. And not even addresses from the pulpit of the U.N. can change that deep-seated indifference in the appeasement press.
The appeasement press’s studied ignorance continues despite the fact that Iran has been a principal funder of terror, particularly the Palestinian version that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, since the late 1980s (scroll down a little to “Background”), if not earlier.
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UPDATE: Dean Barnett at Hewitt’s place recommends a Lileks post. Good idea. If you’re pressed, start about 60% of the way through at “Today two important speeches were made at the UN …..”
