Bloodthirsty Liberal

being dead is no reason for a journalist not to get a statement.

Because journalists have a beeline to the other world.

Less than 48 hours after the Washington Post published a major, 5,000 word exposé that portrays Mitt Romney as a homophobic, high school bully, the story has started to unravel. Jason Horowitz’s profile alleged that Romney high school chum Stu White has “long been bothered” by an unconfirmed incident in which Romney supposedly cut the hair of a fellow student. But White wasn’t present at the alleged incident, Romney doesn’t remember it, the alleged victim has been dead for eight years, and White only learned about the incident decades after it supposedly happened.

In response to that, the Post today airbrushed the story. Until today, Horowitz’s story read:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident. “But I was not the brunt of any of his pranks.”

Today it reads:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before being contacted by The Washington Post. “But I was not the brunt of any of his pranks.”

The Post did not publicly acknowledge that alteration for hours — more on that below. It just appeared in the online version. Also today, Lauber’s family has come out to contradict key parts of the story, and they further suggest that the Post smeared their deceased family member, who obviously is in no position to defend himself. Despite Lauber’s having been deceased since 2004, the Horowitz story directly quotes him, through another so-called witness to the haircut event. Is it standard Post practice to quote the dead, and use them as props in political stories?

Thursday afternoon I tweeted and emailed Horowitz directly about the White discrepancy. Horowitz never responded and has gone silent on Twitter, but today, the Post quietly altered the story to clean up that problem. The paper is evidently paying attention to criticisms of the story, but not responding directly to queries about it. This morning, I emailed the Post ombudsman about the White timeline problem and the Lauber family’s reaction to Horowitz’s story. I sent the ombudsman two polite emails on the subject. The ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton, has not responded at all. But while I have been putting this report together, the Post did publish an editor’s note regarding the White timeline.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story reported that White “has long been bothered” by the Lauber incident. White later clarified in a subsequent interview that he has been disturbed by the incident since he learned of it several weeks ago from a former classmate, before being contacted by The Washington Post.

The editor’s note raises more questions: Who is the classmate, and where did the classmate hear about the haircut story? In what context did the unidentified classmate tell it to Stu White? It’s possible that Horowitz brought it up to the classmate over the course of working on the story, who then told it to White. If that’s the case, Horowitz tainted the witnesses.

The Jason Horowitz story is no small matter. Its release coincided perfectly with the week’s messaging from President Obama. It depicted Obama’s rival, Mitt Romney, in a sharply negative light. It was a front-page, 5,000+ word story that must have taken weeks or even months to write. Significant resources went into the production of that story. Yet the Post has gone silent as cracks have started to appear in it.

I have sent Mr. Pexton a third email on the subject, asking questions raised by the editor’s note. The ombudsman, who is supposed to be the readers’ representative at the newspaper, has not responded.

It is beginning to look like the Washington Post made it up entirely:

The older sister of Mitt Romney’s former high school classmate said she has no knowledge of any bullying incident involving her brother and the GOP presidential candidate.
…

When ABC News showed her the story, Christine Lauber’s eyes welled up with tears and she became agitated.

She described her brother as a “very unusual person.”

“He didn’t care about running with the peer group,” Christine Lauber said. “What’s wrong with that?”

Betsy Lauber, one of John Lauber’s three sisters, spoke with ABC News Tuesday night regarding the accuracy of the story.

“The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda. There will be no more comments from the family,” she said.
…
Romney has since apologized for what he said were “pranks” in high school but has said he doesn’t remember the specific event.

Romney said “homosexuality was the furthest thing from his mind” when it came to the jokes he played on classmates.

So we’ll never know and it doesn’t matter. I am soooo much more interested in Obama’s applications to college (did he apply as an American citizen?) and please, please, please tell us what he studies and what his grades were. I am not interested in the high school record of either man. But, since the can of worms has been opened, how were Obama’s high school grades? I asked because he started out at an ok college and transferred to an Ivy League school. What is the story there?

Even more importantly, journalists, how can we have a functioning society if the people entrusted with sharing important news just refuse to do their jobs?

Coincidentally the Obama administration decided to make an issue of gay marriage just as this story broke. Is there a single adult in America with an IQ higher than a turnip who believes that wasn’t coordinated between the White House and the media?

- Aggie

He’s talking my issue folks – media bias.

- Aggie

Can this be real?

Nothing like civilized, fair, balanced, thoughtful media with my morning coffee.

- Aggie

Israeli family of 5 killed in ‘terror attack,’ military says

Israeli family of 5 killed in ‘terror attack,’ military says

CNN, like NPR, is a “news organization”. They employ “journalists”.

Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a “terror attack.”

According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 a.m., made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.

Military units were searching the surrounding area for the assailant, the spokeswoman said. The military would not provide more details. But local media reported that the attack was made with a knife, and neighbors reported hearing shots fired as well.

Military spokesman Maj. Peter Lerner said more than one person may have carried out the crime.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the Palestinian Authority assist in finding those responsible and “halt the incitement in the mosques and via the Palestinian Authority-controlled media.”

He did not explicitly blame Palestinians for the deaths.

“This is a heinous act of a murder of a whole innocent family — parents, children and baby — while they were sleeping in their home on the Sabbath night,” Netanyahu said. “Israel will not accept such a heinous murder and will act strongly to keep the safety of the lives of Israeli citizens and punish the murderers.”

He added, “We all know, as do those who want to strike at us will know, that the future of the settlements will not be decided upon by terror.”

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad denounced the killings.

“I say that in regards to what happened (Saturday) in Itamar settlement — and the victims were a toddler and two children, the father and mother — exactly as we have always said against violence … we refuse this and condemn it,” Fayyad said, according to his spokesman, Ghassan Khatib. “We refuse and condemn violence, whatever the reasons are or the perpetrators or targets or victims.”

The White House condemned the slayings “in the strongest possible terms” and said the killers of the “heinous” act must be held “accountable.”

“There is no possible justification for the killing of parents and children in their home,” it said in a statement.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added that she was “shocked and deeply saddened” by the incident.

“The murderers must be found and brought to justice,” she said, asking the Palestinian authorities “to assist in every way possible.”

One of the things that this blog does best is to peek into the lives and thoughts of our neighbors in nearby universes. Today we look at the NY Times and how they have interpreted the failure of Barack Obama to close GITMO.

People in this universe look at Obama’s promise to close GITMO and he decision not to, and say either: He lied! or He’s finally accepting reality.

People in other universes often blame Bush.

The Prison That Won’t Go Away
Published: March 8, 2011

The prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long been the embodiment of Bush-era arrogance and lawlessness, and Barack Obama raised the hopes of millions around the world in 2008 when he campaigned on the promise of closing it. On Monday, that promise crumbled, the victim of Congressional spinelessness and President Obama’s inability to create political support for a way out of the moral quagmire created by his predecessor.

The president announced that military commission trials for detainees would resume at Guantánamo after a two-year suspension. That became inevitable in December after members of Congress from both parties, in an act of notable political cowardice, banned moving those trials to the United States. The ban, inserted in a needed defense bill, also makes it virtually impossible to release prisoners to other countries willing to take them.

The White House says the president remains committed to closing Guantánamo, but, given the political cast of Congress, it seems likely that the prison camp will remain a scar on the nation’s conscience for years.

To be fair, the NY Times is also blaming Congress. They are circling their wagons around this empty suit of a President, hoping to protect his sorry behind.

- Aggie

Brilliant.

There is a short, short video piece, made a few days ago, of a discussion between Professor Althouse and a Leftist (not sure who he is). He is arguing that if a politician gives a speech, and someone in the crowd makes a racist remark, the politician should interrupt the speech to address/scold the miscreant. She says that the media feels that way when it works for democrats, but not when a conservative has been harmed.

And the brilliant part is that she remembered the conversation and connected it to the fact that NPR’s Schiller sat there quietly while his potential donors were making antisemitic comments.

Will the Left be upset by his silence? Historically, I would say that the Left has always gone along with Jew hatred, so this is unlikely to break the mold.

- Aggie

Not so much

I always wonder where the feminists are when this kind of stuff rears its ugly head.

When the U.S. Agency for International Development sought bids last March for a $140 million land reform program in Afghanistan, it insisted that the winning contractor meet specific goals to promote women’s rights: The number of deeds granting women title had to increase by 50 percent; there would have to be regular media coverage on women’s land rights; and teaching materials for secondary schools and universities would have to include material on women’s rights.

Before the contract was awarded, USAID overhauled the initiative, stripping out those concrete targets. Now, the contractor only has to perform “a written evaluation of Afghan inheritance laws,” assemble “summaries of input from women’s groups” and draft amendments to the country’s civil code.

The removal of specific women’s rights requirements, which also took place in a $600 million municipal government program awarded last year, reflects a shift in USAID’s approach in Afghanistan. Instead of setting ambitious goals to improve the status of Afghan women, the agency is tilting toward more attainable measures.

“If you’re targeting an issue, you need to target it in a way you can achieve those objectives,” said J. Alexander Thier, director of USAID’s Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs. “The women’s issue is one where we need hardheaded realism. There are things we can do, and do well. But if we become unrealistic and overfocused . . . we get ourselves in trouble.”

A senior U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said changes to the land program also stem from a desire at the top levels of the Obama administration to triage the war and focus on the overriding goal of ending the conflict.

Sounds like realpolitick to me. As opposed to those nasty neocons, you know, the ones that kept blathering on about protecting the rights of women and minorities in the region. That was so George W. Bush, so yesterday. Today we really don’t give a darn what happens to those poor saps. We have The One in the White House; we have extended the hand of His Oneness to the world, and look how much better things are!

Just remember this, please, Leftists:

“Gender issues are going to have to take a back seat to other priorities,” said the senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. “There’s no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project. All those pet rocks in our rucksack were taking us down.”

And don’t get too hung up on negativity, ok? Dump the pet rocks, relax, be cool.

- Aggie

Hope ‘n Change favors the Bernard Lewis/Samuel Huntington world view?

And the policy adjustments will be to encourage Americans to spend more time spent viewing Al Jazeera?

The Obama administration is preparing for the prospect that Islamist governments will take hold in North Africa and the Middle East, acknowledging that the popular revolutions there will bring a more religious cast to the region’s politics.

The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government. An internal assessment, ordered by the White House last month, identified large ideological differences between such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Qaeda that will guide the U.S. approach to the region.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of Islam in the politics of these countries,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal policy deliberations. “It’s the behavior of political parties and governments that we will judge them on, not their relationship with Islam.”

Islamist governments span a range of ideologies and ambitions, from the primitive brutality of the Taliban in Afghanistan to Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, a movement with Islamist roots that heads a largely secular political system.

None of the revolutions over the past several weeks has been overtly Islamist, but there are signs that the uprisings could give way to more religious forces. An influential Yemeni cleric called this week for the U.S.-backed administration of President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be replaced with Islamist rule, and in Egypt, an Islamist theoretician has a leading role in drafting constitutional changes after President Hosni Mubarak’s fall from power last month.

A number of other Islamist parties are deciding now how big a role to play in protests or post-revolution reforms.

Really? That’s not what we were told as the revolution was unfolding in Egypt, was it? I wonder where Hamas fits on the spectrum of nothing-to-worry-about Islamic regimes? After all, Hamas is an off-shoot of those boy scouts, The Muslim Brotherhood.

- Aggie

Because I am ever the optimist, I have tried to explain these facts to certain Leftist pals. They laugh.

It was a stunning moment of moral clarity. As the South Vietnamese refugees clambered onto rickety boats in the South China Sea to escape the victorious Communists, the American Left that orchestrated the US defeat through a sustained campaign of propaganda and fake calls for peace stood silent.

As Pol Pot, the “progressive” dictator tortured and murdered a third of his people in Cambodia, the leftists “peace” activists in the US and Europe who never saw a US military operation that was justified, turned a blind eye.

The silence of the likes of Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky and their fellow travelers came to mind last week when the Western media and intellectual elites averted their gaze as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the long exiled spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood spoke before a crowd of millions at Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Qaradawi, who had been living in exile in Qatar during Hosni Mubarak’s reign, became an international jihadist superstar thanks to Qatar’s unelected potentate Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani who gave him his jihad indoctrination show on Al Jazeera. From his internationally televised soapbox, Qaradawi regularly preaches international jihad and genocide of Jewry to millions of fans worldwide.

Two important things happened during Qaradawi’s appearance in Cairo. First, his handlers refused to allow Google’s Egyptian Internet revolutionary Wael Ghonim to join the cleric on the dais. For anyone willing to notice, Qaradawi’s message in spurning Ghonim was indisputable. As far as the jihadists are concerned, Ghonim and his fellow Internet activists are the present day equivalent of Lenin’s useful idiots.

They did their job of convincing credulous Western liberals that the overthrow of Mubarak was all about sweetness and light.

And now they are no longer needed.

The second message was Qaradawi’s call to destroy Israel. With millions of adoring fans crying out “Amen,” and “Allahu Akhbar,” Qaradawi called for a Muslim conquest of Jerusalem – that is, for the destruction of Israel. As a first step, he demanded that the Egyptian military open the Egyptian border with Gaza.

In the dismal tradition of its Vietnam-era teachers, today’s international Left had nothing to say about Qaradawi’s genocidal speech. In the New York Times’ write-up of Qaradawi’s triumphant return to Egypt for instance, the murder-inciting cleric was referred to as a champion of democracy and pluralism.

The last sentence leads to perhaps the central point of my adult life. As a young adult, I often asked the mature gentile adults in my life, men and women in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s, if during the holocaust they had known what was happening. They were young adults at the time. The overwhelming majority of gentiles cried: We didn’t know! We didn’t know!. But a few honest souls said: Everyone knew. The reports were published in the newspapers of Norfolk, Nebraska – everywhere. For the longest time, I assumed that if small towns and cities knew, everyone knew. Then I read Laurel Leff’s book: Buried By The Times. Ms. Leff, a journalism prof at Northeastern U. had access to the NY Times archives and discovered that, sure enough, they suppressed information about the holocaust. Still, if you read the NY Times – you knew, but could pretend not to know. They reported it, but they buried it. Furthermore, the Catholic and Protestant journals denied that it was happening, typically by denying the veracity of Jewish reports.

If you asked any American Jewish adult, they said: Of course we knew. As children, they lay awake in their beds at night, listening to whispered conversations of their parents, trembling. They heard Hitler’s broadcasts in their living rooms. As Yiddish speakers, most of them understood the gist of what he was saying. Meanwhile, the gentile world “didn’t know”.

I have a sense that I don’t want to live long enough to hear the next generation of mature adults – my generation – cry: But we didn’t know! We didn’t know. Once in a lifetime is enough. So I spend a lot of time documenting what we all know. I don’t want them to have the luxury of doing what Ms. Glick points out they are doing.

Simple as that.

- Aggie

Moderates, take note.

This is how the Left “thinks”. I give you Paul Krugman of the New York Times:

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

He goes on the blame Republicans for the inequality and repressive regime in Chile… (isn’t Chile doing well compared to the peaceful, egalitarian state of Venezuela?) Why, a quick purview of wikipedia teaches us that:

Chile is one of South America’s most stable and prosperous nations,[7] leading Latin American nations in human development, competitiveness, income per capita, globalization, economic freedom, and low perception of corruption.[10] However, it has a high economic inequality, as measured by the Gini index.[11] In May 2010 Chile became the first South American country to join the OECD.[12] In 2006, Chile became the country with the highest nominal GDP per capita in Latin America.[69]

On the other hand, Venezuela is run by a Left wing dictator who has taken on more and more power during his reign, and the nation as a whole features high levels of poverty and corruption. But Krugman probably likes that one. And, as usual, I’ve wondered off-topic.

The topic is Baghdad Wisconsin.

In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

He goes on to explain that the evil Republican Governor might be planning on selling state owned power facilities to the evil Koch brothers! He might be planning all sorts of evil deeds! But the good union folks are onto his tricks and have prevented it with their protests! And the good Democrat legislators have saved the day by running to Illinois!

I’m running out of exclamation points, so I’ll stop now.

- Aggie

It is always fascinating to see how members of the “profession of journalism” “think”. Caroline Glick does a fabulous job deconstructing it.

Column One: Lara Logan and media rules
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
02/18/2011 16:22

Identity politics are nothing more than socially acceptable bigotry.

Among the least analyzed aspects of the Egyptian revolution has been the significance of the widespread violence against the foreign media covering the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

The Western media have been unanimous in their sympathetic coverage of the demonstrators in Egypt. Why would the demonstrators want to brutalize them? And why have Western media outlets been so reticent in discussing the significance of their own reporters’ brutalization at the hands of the Egyptian demonstrators?

To date the most egregious attack on a foreign journalist in Cairo’s Tahrir Square took place last Friday, when CBS’s senior foreign correspondent Lara Logan was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten by a mob of Egyptian men. Her own network, CBS, took several days to even report the story, and when it did, it left out important information. The fact that Logan was brutalized for 20 to 30 minutes and that her attackers screamed out “Jew, Jew, Jew” as they ravaged her was absent from the CBS report and from most other follow-on reports in the US media.

The media’s treatment of Logan’s victimization specifically and its treatment of the widescale mob violence against foreign reporters in Cairo generally tells us a great deal about the nature of today’s media discourse.

But before we consider the significance of the coverage, a word must be said about Logan and her colleagues in Tahrir Square. For some time, the common wisdom about journalists has been that they are cowards. Multiple instances of journalistic malpractice led many to conclude that reporters are prisoners of their fears.

For instance, recall the story of the Palestinian lynching of IDF reservists Vadim Nozhitz and Yosef Avrahami at the Palestinian Authority police station in Ramallah on October 1, 2000.

There were dozens of reporters on the scene that day as the Palestinian police-led mob murdered and dismembered Nozhitz and Avrahami.

But only one camera crew – from Italy’s privately owned Mediaset television network – risked life and limb to film the event.

After Mediaset’s footage was published, Ricardo Cristiani, a reporter for RAI television, Mediaset’s state-owned competitor, published an apology in the PA’s official trumpet Al-Hayat al-Jadida.

Among other things, Cristiani wrote, “We [RAI] emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect… the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work.” [That, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime piece of "journalistic ethics". - Aggie]

Cristiani’s behavior, like that of his colleagues who failed to film the lynching, led many to believe that the international media are nothing but a bunch of cowards.

Then there was then-CNN news chief Eason Jordan’s remarkable op-ed in The New York Times in April 2003. In that article, Jordan informed the public that for more than a decade, CNN had systematically covered up the brutality and criminality of Saddam Hussein’s regime. CNN hid the information from the public because it thought it was more important to maintain access to senior Iraqi officials – who fed the network a diet of lies – than to lose that access by reporting the truth.

These stories and many like them are what caused many to believe that that journalists are cowards. But the behavior of the international media in Tahrir Square proves that reporters are by and large brave. Logan and her colleagues willingly went to Tahrir Square to cover the demonstrations in spite of the dangers.

While the reporters on the scene in Cairo serve as a rebuke to the notion of journalistic cowardice, the international media’s tepid and superficial coverage of their brutalization at the hands of the demonstrators shares important features with the negligence of CNN in Iraq and the reporters in Ramallah.

TO BEGIN to understand those common components, it is worth considering another story about sexual misconduct that hit the presses in the US around the time the story about Logan’s victimization was first reported.

This week, a group of female US soldiers filed a class action lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld. The plaintiffs allege that both men and the US defense establishment are responsible for the sexual assaults they suffered during their military service. They claim that the men who abused them were a product of US military culture.

The US media has provided blanket coverage of the story, which effectively places the entire US military on trial for rape.

What is interesting about the lawsuit story is that it highlights the alleged perpetrator. Coverage of the lawsuit has been heavy on details about the alleged misogyny of US military culture.

In stark contrast, coverage of Logan’s sexual assault makes almost no mention of the perpetrators.

Certainly the issue of Egypt’s societal misogyny has been ignored.

What makes the distinction between coverage of the two stores so remarkable is that there is there is no comparison between the alleged anti-female bias in the US military and the actual misogyny of Egyptian society.

According to a 1999 report from the World Health Organization, 97 percent of Egyptian women and girls have undergone the barbaric practice of genital mutilation. A 2005 report by the Cairo-based Association for Legal Rights of Women submitted to the UN explained that Egyptian women are constitutionally deprived of their basic rights, including their rights to control their bodies and property. Males who murder their female relatives are often unpunished.

When they are tried and convicted for premeditated murder, their sentences average from two to four years in prison.

So far the only culprit the US media have managed to find for the sexual assault perpetrated against Lara Logan by a mob of Egyptian men has been a radical leftist reporter named Nir Rosen.

On Tuesday, Rosen wrote defamatory attacks against Logan on his Twitter account. He mocked her suffering and bemoaned the fame the attack would win her.

Rosen’s statements on Twitter set off a feeding frenzy of reporters and commentators who raced to condemn him. New York University’s Center for Law and Security, where Rosen served as a fellow, hastened to demand his resignation.

The onslaught against Rosen for his anti-Logan statements is extremely revealing about the nature of the international media. Rosen’s writings reveal him as an anti-Semite and an anti- American. Rosen has written prolifically about his hope to see Israel destroyed. His war reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq unfailingly takes the side of America’s enemies. He was an embedded reporter with the Taliban and is an outspoken champion of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban.

Rosen’s hateful politics have brought him book contracts, prestigious fellowships, interviews on influential television shows and even a request to give testimony before the US Senate. His work has been published in elite magazines and newspapers.

No one batted a lash when he called for Israel to be destroyed or supported the Taliban – whose treatment of women and girls is among the most brutal in history. But for attacking Logan, he was excommunicated from polite society.

In the hopes of rehabilitating himself, Rosen gave a groveling interview to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night in which he called himself “a jerk.”

But it is too late. He broke the rules.

THE STORY of the media at Tahrir Square exposes those rules for all to see. The bravery of the journalists on the scene, the media’s determination to ignore Islamic misogyny, and their expulsion of Rosen from polite society all tell us that what drives the international media is not a quest for truth. It is a quest to advance the ideology of identity politics.

Identity politics revolve around the narrative of victimization. For adherents to identity politics, the victim is not a person, but a member of a privileged victim group. That is, the status of victimhood is not determined by facts, but by membership in an identity group. Stories about victims are not dictated by facts. Victim stories are tailored to fit the victim. Facts, values and individual responsibility are all irrelevant.

In light of this, a person’s membership in specific victim groups is far more important than his behavior. And there is a clear pecking order of victimhood in identity politics.

Anti-American Third World national, religious and ethnic groups are at the top of the victim food chain. They out-victim everyone else.

After them come the Western victims: Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, children and animals.

Israelis, Jews, Americans, white males and rich people are the predetermined perpetrators. No matter how badly they are victimized, brave reporters will go to heroic lengths to ignore, underplay or explain away their suffering.

In cases when victim groups are attacked by victim groups – for instance when Iraqis were attacked by Saddam, or Palestinians are attacked by the PA, the media tend to ignore the story.

When members of Western victim groups are attacked by Third World victims, the story can be reported, but with as little mention of the identity of the victim-perpetrators as possible. So it was with coverage of Logan and the rest of the foreign reporters assaulted in Egypt. They were attacked by invisible attackers with no identities, no barbaric values, no moral responsibility, and no criminal culpability. CBS went so far as to blur the faces of the men who surrounded Logan in the moments before she was attacked.

When we understand the rules of reportage as dictated by adherents to identity politics, we understand why Rosen was excommunicated when he mocked Logan and not when he called for Israel’s destruction, condemned the commemoration of the September 11 attacks, or sided with the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents killing Americans. In those cases, he followed the rules – preferring the cause of “victims” over the lives of “perpetrators.”

But when he mocked Logan, he crossed the line. He treated Logan as a perpetrator because he thought of her as an insufficiently anti-American reporter. He didn’t realize that when she was brutalized, she had slid into the victim category.

Identity politics are nothing more than socially acceptable bigotry. Those who practice it are racist bigots who have replaced liberal values that hold everyone to the same moral and criminal standards with illiberal values that judge people’s morality and criminality by the identity group with which they are most readily associated.

When we understand identity politics, we understand how it is that the wholesale assaults against foreign journalists have received so little analysis. Lara Logan and the other hundred reporters attacked in Tahrir Square are real victims, not because of who they are, but because of what happened to them. The Egyptians who attacked them are real criminals, not because of who they are, but because of what they did.

But until reporters are willing to admit this – that is, until they dump their ideological attachment to identity politics in favor of the truth – news consumers worldwide will continue to receive news reports that obfuscate more than they tell us about the world we live in.

I found that I just couldn’t cut this article. Glick is absolutely right and she constructs her argument beautifully. I hope you will read it all.

- Aggie

I just checked both the NY Times and the Boston Globe. The NY Times had hidden coverage in a blog. The Boston Globe had nothing.

The rape(s) and beating of Ms. Logan apparently isn’t newsworthy if it doesn’t conform to the paradigm.

What wimps and fools journalistic professionals are.

- Aggie