Following up on my post condemning the unbelievably naive Nicholas Lemann for being completely unsuited to teaching today’s young people (never mind young journalists), I turn now to condemning some of those young journalists and wannabes themselves.

Gawker got a tip from deep inside the J school on how things stand after the incident in which students purportedly cheated on their ethics exam. The tipster reports that the school is conducting a “witchhunt” and that there’s at least one “rat.” The student’s real concern, however—his/her own future career—is left for last [emphasis added]:

They know they have no proof so the academic affairs committee is trying to get a confession from innocent people by telling them that OTHER people have also given their names, even though we’ve all conferred and no such thing happened. Basically the school is lying to try to get people to confess to something they didn’t do. Columbia is fucking with peoples’ futures and I’m so angry with them, I’d love to see this come to light and embarass them.

Funny, but this student doesn’t seem to have learned anything about ethics.

That’s not nearly as troubling to me as the opinion of Greg Sargent, a young journalist who blogs at Tapped. He’s up in arms that Eason Jordan, formerly of CNN and now the sponsor of Iraqslogger—a one-stop site for all news from Iraq—has invited Michelle Malkin to go to Iraq and search for the oft-quoted-by-the-AP-but-otherwise-invisible Jamil Hussein:

Jordan is using the site to promote, of all people, Michelle Malkin, and is lavishing positive attention on the dishonest attack on the Associated Press that Malkin has been pursuing for weeks now along with a pack of other panting hounds from wingnut blog backcountry. He’s even offered to pay her airfare to Iraq to help her do it.

Eason, this is a very bad idea: It smacks of the worst kind of pandering to some of the ugliest elements in the blogosphere, all in search of a spike in traffic and some cheap publicity. …

The real beef that she and others on the right, such as Little Green Footballs and PowerlineBlog, have with the AP and other news orgs is that they’re bringing imagery and news back from Iraq that is badly eroding public support for their war and the beloved leader who launched it. They are trying to make it as hard as possible for these news orgs to do this through a despicable campaign of bullying and intimidation, and this current crusade is the latest example of this.

Funny, but I thought reporting was about trying to get to the root of a story, particularly a troubling story about reporting a war in which manipulation of the media by the enemy is of deep concern. And I also thought that worrying in advance about whose agenda might be served when the truth is discovered is something for political operatives, not reporters, to concern themselves with.

There are a lot of young journalists blogging at Tapped. If I were them, I’d be worried not about Michelle Malkin going to Iraq but about the attitude of their colleague, which reflects very badly on them.

…is spelled out by a Holocaust survivor in Israel, who addressed a symposium of foreign diplomats of 40 nations stationed in Israel:

“I have not been able to sleep for the past few days,” Holocaust survivor Rita Weiss told the crowd of diplomats.

“48 members of my family were murdered in Auschwitz during the first week of June 1944, including my mother, my father, and my brother. I am the only one who survived and managed to emerge alive, an orphan for my whole life. I cannot ever recover from this. I ask you, diplomatic representatives, did all my family just disappear? They were murdered. They have no graves, no one buried them; they became smoke and ashes,” she said.

“We didn’t believe Hitler when he said he would destroy the Jews, but he did it, he put it into practice. President Ahmadinejad has threatened and I believe him, I fear him.

She’s not the only one. Ahmadinejad has opened a Pandora’s box.

May he live just long enough to regret it.

Marc Lynch, of Abu Aardvark, who teaches at Williams College, mourns one of his former students, who graduated in 2003 and died this past weekend in Iraq, where he was serving with the Marines.

Here’s the notification he received from the college:

I am very sad to report that Nathan Krissoff ‘03 died this weekend while serving as a U.S. Marine in Iraq.

Many on campus will recall him as a political science major and a member of the water polo team and swim team, which he captained his senior year.

Lynch writes:

I recall Nate. I remember him in discussion sections in Introduction to World Politics …. Over three classes in four years, I watched Nate grow - developing a serious interest in international security issues, and gaining the self-confidence to ask uncomfortable questions. He loved to chat after class about international politics and the latest news from the war on terror. He was determinedly independent in his thinking, even a bit obstinate. … Barely a year after those classroom debates he was the counterintelligence officer for a battalion in Anbar province. And now he’s gone.

In concluding, Lynch remarks upon an otherwise un-remarked upon phenomenon—that the children of the elite are starting to enlist in the military after graduation.

More and more of my students go into the military after graduation, and every time they do I feel the same combination of admiration - for their courage and their spirit of dedication, self-sacrifice, and service - and a gut-wrenching fear for their safety. I know all too well the toll the Iraq war is taking on these young men and women. That men and women like Nate - graduates of an elite liberal arts college who could do anything or go anywhere - volunteer in full knowledge of what awaits them speaks endlessly of their character. I’m proud of Nate, and devastated for his family and friends.

This is devastating, and at the same time, if you’re me, stirring—particularly since I had a conversation about just this subject the other day. My interlocutor said that kids only go into the military because they have no other choice.

I disagreed. I said that in many parts of America, it’s still called “going into the service,” and that it has been considered an option by successive generations of Americans, and an honorable one at that. Certainly that’s true today in the corner of rural paradise (in Red America) where I go to unwind.

It’s not true only of rural America, though. In the last few years, six people in my New York City “circle” (sons of friends or acquaintances; a couple of my son’s friends) have gone into the armed services or into military-related/law enforcement service.

These would have been unthinkable career or life choices among the same people ten years ago. Indeed, in one of these cases, the father (a dyed-in-the-wool former anti-Vietnam War activist) went apeshit when his kid took a job with the government: that is the extremist wing of what I would describe as my “circle.” Definitely anti-military. I’m not particularly proud of this, but it’s true. That is my milieu. My chosen milieu—though of course it was chosen at a time when the idea that America would ever again be at war was itself unthinkable.< /p>

A common trope on “the left” is that 9/11 didn’t change anything. I beg to differ.

I copy and paste. You decide.

Exhibit A:

BLITZER: Well, let me interrupt for a moment…. As far as I know, the president of the United States, who is the commander in chief, is not Jewish. The vice president of the United States is not Jewish. The secretary of defense is not Jewish. The national security advisor to the president, not Jewish. The director of the CIA, not Jewish. Are these people simply tools of the Zionist conspiracy?

MR X: They’re not tools of a conspiracy, but they are definitely tools of the Zionist media and political power. Even the “Washington Post” said that 60 percent of the contributions for the Republican Party come from Jewish sources. Plus, if any politician in America dares to criticize Israel, millions will go to his opponents and he will be attacked in the media where Zionists have incredible power.

Exhibit B:

“There’s a tremendous intimidation in this country that has silenced our people [about Israel]. And it’s not just individuals, it’s not just folks who are running for office. It’s the news media as well,” he said.

Duke launched into an extraordinary personal attack on Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room yesterday. He gets extra points for bringing “Harvard” and  “Walt and Mearsheimer” into his tirade. You can read all about it and view a clip here.

Carter’s disgraceful “legacy,” as president and as has-been, gets the full treatment here.

Wherever U.S. interests have been imperiled and a temporary “peace” could be bought at the expense of long-term security, Carter has always been on board.  The late Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up when he said of Carter in 1980, “Unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has essentially adopted our enemies’ view of the world.”

The recent explosion of explicit and implicit public attacks by prominent Americans on American Jews should put thinking Americans of goodwill on notice: the latent anti-Semitism in this country—which for the last five years has been hidden behind the code word neocon—is now out in the open.