Entries Tagged 'language' ↓

On this side of the Atlantic, hyphens are a fussy holdover—or is that hold-over?— from days gone by. They’re a staple in British English, however. Or they were, until the most recent edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was published:

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you’ve got a problem, don’t be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for,” said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED…

A new day has dawned: the words "Muslim" and "terrorism" may not be uttered in the same breath by officialdom in Britain, where—thank goodness!—the War on Terror is no more.

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on ­terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.

Blair, for his part, was rather more pointed in his language on the eve of his departure from office last week (but hasn't been heard from since the new round of terrorist incidents in London and Glasgow, as far as I can determine):

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Not content to blast Islamist-inspired faux grievances, Blair also took aim at the biens-pensants of Britain:

 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.' 

And some of what is said by British officialdom is "loopy-loo" in its bland, bored generalizations about those "criminals" who commit terrorist acts, and its craven gratitude toward the "community leaders" who condemn those acts:

Let us be clear: terrorists are criminals whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religious backgrounds. Terrorists attack the values that are shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities and as individuals we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected. I very much welcome the strong messages of condemnation that we have heard throughout the weekend from community leaders across the country. It is through our unity that the terrorists will eventually be defeated.

As Gateway Pundit reports, the AP is equally straightforward in its reporting on the terrorists:

Diverse group allegedly in British plot
By DAVID RISING, Associated Press Writer

Young Muslim immigrant medical professionals in Britain—a very diverse group indeed!

Janet Maslin feasts on Newt Gingrich’s latest book:

Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

This is not a matter of isolated typographical errors. It is a serious case for the comma police, since the book’s war on punctuation is almost as heated as the air assaults it describes. “One would have to be dead, very stupid Fuchida thought,” the book says about the fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, “not to realize they were sallying forth to war.” Evidence notwithstanding, the authors do not mean to insult the fighter pilot’s intelligence — or, presumably, the reader’s.

Some of these glitches are brief, while some are windier. The long ones are particularly dangerous. Here is what happens when James Watson, an academic and a decoding expert who is one of the book’s cardboard Americans (as opposed to its cardboard British and Japanese figures), has lunch:

“James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.”

Never mind what’s going to happen to books during the digital explosion of all media.

What’s going to happen to my beloved English language?

(with a tip of the hat to Frank Luntz)

So: Kevin Drum is very annoyed, because no Democrat has stood up to make an effective rebuttal to an effective statement and speech by Giuliani:

Yesterday Rudy Giuliani said the country would be safer if it elects a Republican in 2008 — especially if that Republican is him:

“If any Republican is elected president — and I think obviously I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense….I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

He added: “The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.”

So I was curious: how would the Dem candidates respond?… Unbelievable. Neither [Obama nor Clinton] took the chance to do what Rudy did: explain in a few short sentences why the country would be safer with a Democrat in the Oval Office.

Later, Drum updated to a response to Giuiliani posted at Electioncentral at TPMCafe, from the DNC’s Karen Finney:

How can the man who failed to prepare NYC for a second attack after the first one, quit the 9/11 commission because he was too busy raking in money from sketchy business deals, can’t assess if the surge is working or if Iran and North Korea have nuclear weapons claim that he will keep America safe?” 

To which a commenter promptly responded with the only thing you can possibly say [e.a.]:

Karen Finney needs desperately to seek assistance in Strunk & White or the Chicago manual of Style. That sentence is a hot mess.

It sure is! But that’s not all that’s wrong with the anti-Giuliani and pro-Dem forces. This (Drum’s advice) is what’s wrong with them [e.a.]:

While it’s true that the liberal position on making America secure is a little more complicated than the schoolyard version of foreign affairs beloved of Bush-era Republicans, it’s not that complicated. …

Whining just reinforces the message that Democrats are wimps. The real way to be “hard hitting” is to explain why Giuliani is wrong and what Democrats would do instead — and why the average Joe and Jane would be safer and better off without guys like Giuliani bumbling recklessly around the globe leaving a stronger al-Qaeda and a weaker America in their wake.

Um, no. You don’t “explain” why your opponent is “wrong,” especially not in great detail. If you’re explaining, you’re merely repeating his talking points and allowing your opponent to frame the debate—and in this case, it means you’re framing it in a way that ensure you can’t win.

If you have a case—and Drum claims the Dems do, but I have yet to hear it—what you do is start an entirely new line of attack that frames the debate in your favor.

Father Bernays said: the most effective way to fight PR (that is, good PR for your opponent) is with more PR (that is, better PR for you). The Dems don’t have to answer Rudy—they have to top him.

(Good luck to the Dems! Rudy knows all the words that work. He knows how many to say, what order to put them in, and when and how to end a sentence and a thought. He knows how to talk circles around his opponents, too.)

Atten-hut!!

The word factoid was coined by Norman Mailer to mean: “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper.”

The word factoid has entered the dictionary. Its first—i.e., preferred— meaning is: an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print.

I’ll grant you that the second meaning of the word factoid is: “a briefly stated and usually trivial fact.”

I just cannot stand it that nobody knows the goddamn meaning of the word.

Politico editor John Harris frames his story about the power of the blue pencil as a cautionary tale—he confesses*** to having coined the devastating term “slow bleed” to describe John Murtha’s losing strategy for forcing Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq:

 With a mixture of pride and remorse, I have a confession: I am the author of the Democratic Party’s “slow-bleed strategy” for ending the war in Iraq.

I had nothing to do with the details of the plan that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) floated two weeks ago. … In retrospect, it probably has already occurred to Murtha and his supporters that from a public relations perspective, “slow-bleed” was not the most winning description. How could they have been so stupid?

That’s where I come in. “Slow bleed” is my phrase.

Read it and weep if you’re in favor of forcing President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq. On the other hand, nothing could be more illustrative of the ferocious viral power of le mot juste (or injuste) in the Feiler Faster world:

If you Google “slow bleed” and “Murtha,” you get nearly 200,000 hits. Nexis recorded more than a hundred stories in the days after Bresnahan’s article that used the phrase “slow bleed.”

“Slow bleed” was featured on CNN and on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. My former newspaper, The Washington Post, used the phrase the other day as if it were an established part of Washington lexicon, needing neither attribution nor explanation. “Slow bleed” also played a starring role in a parade of House floor speeches by Republicans denouncing Democrats, and in a fundraising letter from Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan. “Slow-bleed is exactly the right name for this incredibly irresponsible and dangerous strategy,” he wrote.

Harris, full of remorse about what he considers a faux pas, details exactly how the sausage was made [e.a.].

As happens all the time in journalism, this was a decision — made on the fly and under deadline — that I would have taken back in the morning. It is Murtha’s job to defend his own policies. But I’d prefer not to hand his opponents ammunition in the form of evocative but loaded language.

Yes, it’s Murtha’s job to sell and/or defend his policies.

And it’s a damn shame that the media and the Republicans ran with Harris’s phrase “slow bleed” as if it had been planted by the devil Frank Luntz himself (see Luntz’s new book, Words That Work—this example is the proof of his pudding, even if he didn’t whip up this particular concoction).

However: why apologize if you are Harris?

The Mea Culpa Mania(TM) sweeping the land is bad enough when it comes to political candidates and celebrities behaving badly. Are writers, editors, journalists, pundits, and bloggers all going to  have to watch and scrutinize and second-guess every word they use, too?

Self-censorship is only a shade different from censorship—and in a free country, it could be argued (and I will), it is even worse.

———

*** Tart thoughts about confessions—the dernier cri—here, from Eli Lake.

Jack Shafer seems to think that if only people were more aware of “unspeak”—the PR-fueled and poll-tested reductionist shorthand vocabulary that is introduced into our public discourse at an alarming rate; whose existence has been the source of contentious debate for at least twenty years (but who’s counting?); which has been used by political campaigns for at least as long; and that has picked up in global popularity as the Age of Political Correctness began— then we could simply stop the subliminial selling of political messages (i.e., propaganda) through the too-cunning-by-half use of language.

Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life,… Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”

Unspeak (also the title of a book, by Steven Poole), Shafer explains, is

an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.

This stuff is right up my alley, but something is weird about Shafer’s piece. Shafer writes about this subject as if his audience were a tabula rasa and yet he never mentions the contemporary dark prince of political language —longtime Republican consultant/pollster Frank Luntz (currently unaffiliated, I just read somewhere). Shafer cannot possibly be unaware of Luntz.

Nor can Shafer be unaware that this technique is increasingly used by the Democrats—and indeed the media—who now engage in the language wars with panache (and success: they turned Bush’s “surge” into an “escalation”; and NBC took great pride in being the first to call Bush’s “insurgency” in Iraq a “civil war”).

What gives?

Also: does this apply only to the hidden political messages that are aimed at good-hearted Americans by evil corporationa and politicians?

Or do words like “Koranic food“—seriously!—count?

…and All That, a book about Latin grammar, is #4 #14 on Amazon in England.

Whoa! Charlotte Higgins explains all in the Guardian:

A clue to a reason for the success of Amo, Amas, Amat is also provided by Amazon, which has nominated as the volume’s “perfect partner” Beyond Words, John Humphrys’ cross book about the use of English in today’s degenerate world. In other words, Amo, Amas, Amat is, broadly, part of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves phenomenon and thus falls into the category of books that are ostensibly cris de coeur for the correct use of the apostrophe, say, while really, deep down, betraying a sort of posh anxiety about standards in society generally.

I’ll buy that. The really sad thing about it is that this book’s predecessor in the status anxiety sweepstakes, Eats, Shoots and Leaves—a massive hit and runaway bestseller a few years ago—was a wretched piece of shit from a professional point of view, as Louis Menand wrote memorably in the New Yorker.

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes.

Ouch. Lynne Truss cried all the way to the bank.
But back to Amo, Amas, Amat. The Guardian piece is worth a read, even if just for this bit about the value of studying Latin.

Latin is about being thrown a passage you have never seen before and being asked to decode it - there’s still much more risk attached than there is with other subjects. Even the really clever [students] come up against something they just can’t do immediately, something that’s really tricky. And it’s good for them.”

Then there’s the literature. …[P]upils become mini-classicists. It’s got it all, really. It gives them a better English vocabulary, it helps them read English, especially English poetry, more analytically, because they are used to close study of passages, and then you are reading Virgil - really hardcore literature.”

I’ll vouch for that. I took four years of Latin. It was great, for all those reasons.

Veni, vidi, vinci. vici.

Finally I hear some people making sense about Jesse Jackson’s sad and stupid appropriation of the Michael Richards’s racist rant “crisis” for his own (well-intentioned) ends (racial harmony). Perhaps people were reacting to the means he suggested for attaining those ends—the first of which was his ban on the word “nigger.” Period. (What? you got free speech issues? Jackson claims the word is “unprotected.”)

As usual, though, he made it into a crusade and took things too far: Withholding his forgiveness of Richards last weekend even after the washed-up comedian had spent two hours “confessing” and repenting on Jackson’s radio show; urging a boycott of the new Seinfeld DVD, and accusing CNN (while on CNN’s air) of being “all day, all night, all white”—it was a massive overreaction.

The L.A. Times reports that some of Jackson’s detractors are prominent blacks (not that you’ll see them on television—they’re too rational, and the media would rather cover the hysteria, and the repeated confessions of Richards. Because it’s great television):

Joe Hicks, vice president of the civil rights organization Community Advocates Inc., called the move to ban the word “just silly and outrageous.” Outside the stray white bigot, the N-word is pervasive only in black communities and among hip-hop and rap artists, “not in the business world, not in the American court system, not in the government.”

Hicks, an African American and former director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, said Waters and others shouldn’t be trying to alter the course of contemporary urban culture and accused them of “racial opportunism.”

Hicks finds the essence of the problem:

“Here’s this guy [Richards], who’s been nearly out of work with virtually no career to speak of, who’s hand-grenaded his career in front of the whole world … and he’s supposed to be some sort of barometer for race relations? It’s the ultimate absurdity,” Hicks said.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law, who’s written about the use of the “n” word, is troubled by the brouhaha over this “crisis”—and specifically about the drive to ban its use—because it doesn’t actually address racism. It addresses only our behavior in the public square.

“There is something troublesome going on,” Kennedy said, “when this amount of energy is targeted toward people and a phenomenon that in the overall scheme of things is probably marginal.”

The call for the boycott of Seinfeld DVD hasn’t worked, either.

Ironically, the publicity over Richards’ tirade may help spur sales of “Seinfeld: Season 7″ on DVD, which Jackson encouraged holiday shoppers to refrain from buying.

After less than a week on the market, it had zoomed to the 11th most popular DVD selling on Amazon.com.

As culture war issues go, the use of the word “nigger” (among other slurs) is actually a really important one to consider and to discuss openly, as John Ridley wrote recently. I wrote about it here.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a new phenomenon to consider [see Hicks above]: “racial opportunism.”

Read this and tell me why I should consider ABC News a serious news organization.

George Stephanopoulos, as able a political journalist as any working on television today, got an audience with Bush and asked him an uncomfortable question point-blank:

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

“He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

“George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we’d leave,” Bush said. “And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here’s how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they’re trying to foment sectarian violence. They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause government to withdraw.”

ABC News decided that this outlandishly reductive headline was the way to describe the story:

Bush Accepts Iraq-Vietnam Comparison

The New York Times predicts that the term “Islamic fascists,” having proved oh-so-unpopular, will no longer emanate from Bush’s mouth.

By Labor Day, Islamic fascists and Islamo-fascism were the hot new conservative buzzwords.

And then, just as suddenly, they were gone — at least from the president’s lips.

“The debate that we wanted to launch was about an ideological struggle against an enemy that has very specific plans, ambitions and aspirations, much like movements of the past, like fascism and Nazism,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. Addressing the term Islamic fascists, Mr. Bartlett said, “I’m sure he’ll use it again.”

But it seems unlikely Mr. Bush will use it again, given the outcry it provoked.

Muslims, both here and in other countries, were deeply offended.

We’ll see about where Mr. Bush goes with the term “Islamic fascism,” which gets across the message that there’s an ideology behind the terrorists who are threatening our way of life (a notion that progressives would rather not engage, because it leaves them with no peaceful options for dealing with terrorism).

Meanwhile, our pop culture reliably takes on politics—sooner or later. In this case sooner: an ad agency has caused an uproar by creating a radio spot for a car dealership that is said to be declaring a “jihad on the auto market.”

A car dealership’s tongue-in-cheek radio advertisement declaring “a jihad on the auto market,” will not be changed, the company said.

The ad has drawn criticism that its content is offensive to Muslims.

Several stations rejected the spot from Dennis Mitsubishi, which boasts sales representatives wearing “burqas” — the head-to-toe traditional dress for some Islamic women — will sell vehicles that can “comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back.”

Jihad is a holy war waged by Muslims in defence of Islam.

“We firmly believe the ad does not in any way disrespect any religion or culture, but we feel, I guess, that maybe poking a little fun at radical extremists is fair game,” dealership president Keith Dennis said.

“It was our intention to craft something around some of the buzzwords of the day and give everyone a good chuckle and be a little bit of a tension reliever.”

Good luck with that!

Nasrallah is always boasting about how Hezbollah is the “resistance.” And, according to the Sandmonkey, he’s being hailed as a hero all over the Arab media.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, this was considered resistance:

It was in Denmark, however, that Germans found out how fully justified the Foreign Office’s apprehensions had been. The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe - whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about non-violent action in resistance to an opponent posssesssing vastly superior means of violence. To be sure, a few other countries in Europe lacked proper “understanding of the Jewish question”, and actually a majority of them were opposed to “radical” and “final” solutions. Like Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Bulgaria proved to be nearly immune to anti-Semitism, but of the three that were in the German sphere of influence, only the Danes dared speak out on the subject to their German masters. Italy and Bulgaria sabotaged German orders and indulged in a comlicated game of double-dealing and double-crossing, saving their Jews by a tour de force of sheer ingenuity, but they never contested the policy as such. ….When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, tehy were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measure of any sort would cause their immedite resignation. It was decisive in this whole matter that the Germans did not even succeed in introducing the vitally important distinction between Danes of Jewish origin…and the 1400 German Jewish refugees who found asylum in the country…This refusal must have surprised the Germans to no end…The Danes … explained …that because the stateless refugees were no longer German citizens, the Nazis could not claim them without Danish assent…Thus, none of the preparatory moves, so important for the bureaucracy of murder, could be carried out, and operations were postponed until the fall of 1943….riots broke out in Danish shipyards, where the dock workers refused to repair German ships and then went on strike.

An enraged Sir Harold Evans, not known for his warm-heartedness toward Israel’s policies, thunders against demonstrators carrying signs that say “We Are All Hezbollah”:

Are we the violent hijackers of the state of Lebanon who started this war without provocation and without reference to the elected government? Are we the “democrats” who hold hostages for years and murder political opponents?

Are we the suicide bombers, Hizbullah’s contribution to civilization, randomly murdering innocents in the thousands - Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, for this cause or that, it makes no difference?

Are we Hassan Nasrullah, the latest pin up boy of terrorism, who competes with Iran’s mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the most dedicated to kill Jews? He makes no secret of Hizbullah’s genocidal ambitions. “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel,” he says, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a world wide basis.” Big joke.
Are we the puppets of our paymasters in Iran?

Are we the cowards condemned as such by the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, for hiding our fighters and rocket launchers among women and children?

Evans has been a consistent principled voice against the new totalitarianism and the new post-9/11 anti-Semitism—the latter trend detailed in Ron Rosenbaum’s anthology Those Who Forget the Past, to which Evans contributed a piece.

Check it out. It’s even more timely now than when it was published two years ago.

Here’s an excerpt from the Evans selection, taken from a talk he gave in September 2002. In two short paragraphs, Evans—a newsman by trade and by instinct—explains the shortcomings of media coverage of the Middle East. It is highly relevant in light of “Reutersgate” (which, I note, is picking up steam. See Tim Rutten’s excellent piece in the L.A. Times). Here’s Evans four years ago (emphasis added):

…much Middle East reporting falls into the impartiality trap. It gives equal weight to information from corrupt police states and proven liars as to information from a self-critical democracy. The pious but fatuous posture is that this is somehow fair, as if truth existed in a moral vacuum, something to be measured by the yard like calico. Five million Jews in Israel are a vulnerable minority surrounded by 300 million Muslims, who for the most part are governed by authoritarian regimes, quasi-police states, that in more than fifty years have never ceased trying to wipe it out by war and terrorism. They muzzle dissent and critical reporting, they run vengeful penal systems, they have failed in almost every measure of social and political justice from the rights of women to fair trials and freedom of the press, they deflect the frustrations of their streets to the scapegoat of Zionism, and they breed and finance international terrorism.

Yet it is Israel that is regarded with skepticism and sometimes hostility. Take the battle of Jenin. The Guardian was moved to write the editorial opinion that Israel’s attacks on Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11. Every bit? Every bit as repellent? Did we miss something? Was there some American provocation of Osama comparable to the murder of nineteen Israelis at Passover? Was something going on in the World Trade Center as menacing as the making of bombs in Jenin, known to Palestinians as Suicide Capital?

(Those Who Forget the Past, pp. 45-46)

The protestations of executives from news organizations that they are beyond reproach—that they are shocked and stunned to have their professional credibility questioned—are ridiculous to those of us who have long been smelling the rotten corpse of American and British journalism in general and their coverage of the Middle East in particular.

The worst part is the implicit anti-Israeli prejudice of our journalists and their editors. Evans continues:

The presumption in the Jenin feeding frenzy in print and in hours and hours of television was that the Palestinian stories of 3,000 killed and buried in secret mass graves must be true, yet the main spokesman Saeb Erekat has been shown time and again to be a liar. Human Rights Watch now puts the death toll at a total of 54, and on their count 22 civilians—the Israelis say 3. Some Palestinian militants in fact claim Jenin as a victory in the killing of 23 Israeli soldiers.

Evans doesn’t mention Erekat running around screaming about the “massacre.” But I remember it well. So when the Qana “massacre” happened a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical.

Maybe this technique will run its course soon. A bored media audience quickly tires of the word “massacre” when it is applied to something less than an actual massacre. And of course there is also the danger than if a real massacre should occur, the word will have lost its meaning. We may already have reached that point. That’s what happens when you use language solely as a tool of propaganda—your audience becomes desensitized.

Gunter Grass—Germany’s foremost novelist, widely credited for restoring grace to the German language after the ravages visited upon it by the Nazi propaganda machine—admits to having served in the Waffen SS, in which he enlisted:

GERMANY has been rocked by the revelation that Gunter Grass, its greatest living author and a doyen of the left, was a member of Hitler’s elite Waffen-SS.

The Nobel laureate, who has been the country’s moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published yesterday that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

The 78-year-old said he was motivated by feelings of guilt to reveal the details of his “shameful” past in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, due to be published next month.

“It was weighing on my mind. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. I forced myself to do it,” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

Asked why he was breaking his silence after more than 60 years, Grass said: “It had to come out finally. It will stain me forever.”

Calling CNN’s Jonathan Klein!

Here’s someone you may want to consider hiring:

“There are times when I am forced to suppress a voice that rises within me, and which wants me to tell the Israeli interviewee: shut your mouth, you barefaced liar,” says Mai al-Sharabani, a newscaster on the Al-Arabiya network, in an interview with Ibrahim Totanji, a reporter for Al-Hayat, the Arabic-language newspaper published in London.

“The newscaster has to always be ready to make the Israeli interviewee uncomfortable, to pin him down in the narrow alleys of his lies,” declares al-Sharabani, who began her career at Egyptian television, from which she moved three years ago to the Al-Arabiya network. The problem is that you don’t have enough time to prepare for interviews with “the Israeli,” and events dictate both the pace and the length of the interviews, explains al-Sharabani.

Nevertheless, when they simply can’t restrain themselves any longer, the newscasters have at their disposal those precious final seconds of the interview, in which they can make a venomous remark that will not garner any response by the interviewee, for the simple reason that it is the end of the conversation.

That’s the view from Ha’aretz, and the whole article is worth reading.

Marc Lynch (aka Abu Aardvark), who monitors the Arab media, has a different take on things. He thinks the least the United States could do is send spokesmen to appear on Arab satellite TV:

I’ve always been an advocate of public diplomacy, but let’s be real: no public diplomacy in the world could overcome the fiasco which is America’s policy. But even now I think that an actual attempt to explain America’s position to the Arab media might have both made some slight difference in shaping Arab arguments and given American officials a stronger sense of how their rhetoric was playing in the Arab world. That feedback might have helped Rice avoid her steady string of disasters in the region, including her expressed surprise at the extent of destruction in Beirut and her spectacularly ill-considered formulation of the violence giving birth to a new Middle East (no single American remark thus far has earned more enraged scorn). But the Bush administration has completely punted on public diplomacy, demonstrating absolute contempt for Arab attitudes - it didn’t even send officials on to relatively friendly environments like al-Arabiya - and now it’s far too late.

Wait a minute. Al-Arabiya is a “relatively friendly environment”?

Here’s Ha’aretz again:

“Newscasters understand the magnitude of the responsibility placed on them in interviewing Israelis. Millions of Arabs watch them, waiting to see how we will embarrass them or crush them in an interview,” says Mohammed Abu Obeid, another al-Arabiya journalist, [emphasis added]

The media/cultural critic in me is delighted to see yet more evidence of my Infotainment Rules Theory.***

The rest of me is thinking that in light of the fact that fluent-Arabic-speaking Israeli interviewees are regularly crushed in “debates” on Arab TV, it may not be such a hot idea to send earnest Americans over there to discuss the fine points of, say, UN Resolution 1559.
—–

***I have yet to write this up. I will, I will. Meanwhile, in brief: people watch “the news” for its entertainment value, not to become better informed. That’s reality and we need to confront it rather than wring our hands about it or, worse, pretend that “the news” is the news. It isn’t. It’s a mess. If we want to maintain an educated and informed public (which serves our democracy), we need to attack the problem on two fronts: create better infotainment and maintain some preserve of public-interest journalism.

From under the imprimatur of BBC News, which, according to one of its editors, tries to avoid the “careless use of words which carry value judgements,” and straight from the horse’s ass mouth of one Nick Thorpe, reporting on BBC Radio:

Driving down Highway 60 - the spine of the superstructure Israel has built on the West Bank - one understands the resentment and the sense of oppression the Palestinians feel.

Smart, middle-class Israeli settlements have sprung up on virgin hillsides, watered by springs often diverted from Palestinian villages.

Tunnels and fences have been erected by the occupier to keep Palestinians away from Israeli roads, Israeli settlements and Israeli soldiers.

Increasingly confined by barriers and checkpoints into little reservations, it is little wonder that Palestinians applaud Sheikh Nasrallah, the spiritual head of the Hezbollah, when he calls for the release of some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. [emphasis added]

——

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 15 July, 2006 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4.

I note, in disgust, that the BBC editors compound their initial mistake (claiming that there is an editorial policy for the use of words such as “capture” as opposed to “kidnapping”) with weaselish whining on their blog. They were blasted in the comments section, and now they have a new excuse:

There are 8,500 journalists in the BBC producing thousands of hours of output each month – most of it for English speaking audiences here in the UK, some not. Some output is very formal, most is not. Some is scripted for BBC staff or stars to present, most is live and involves outside guests.

The idea that you could have a single stone tablet – like the Economist or FT has, setting out in detail the “house style”, words to be used and words not to be used – and that every BBC journalist and contributor be forced to follow it is nonsense.

Would anyone really expect every interviewee on every BBC programme to ingest the “house style” before appearing… or that BBC presenters should correct and reprimand them on every departure?

I am totally against any kind of policing of language—whether by reporters or citizens or government. I am totally for being thoughtful in the use of language, under all circumstances, because it is such a powerful tool and can have such a powerful effect.

Also: either the BBC has an editorial policy or it doesn’t. Make up your minds.

BBC editor Jon Williams, he who believes in the Fairy Tale of Two Competing Narratives ™, said last week that the Beeb is careful in choosing its words when reporting on the Middle East:

Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry value judgements. Our job is to remain objective. By doing so, I hope we allow our audiences on radio and television to make their own assessment of the story. So we try to stick to the facts - civilians are “kidnapped”, Cpl Shalit was “captured”; since troops don’t usually make “arrests”, the politicians were “detained”. Doubtless some will disagree. But that’s, in essence, the heart of the story - two competing narratives. [emphasis added]

An Israeli Arab Member of Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) certainly agrees with Williams. Reportedly, he went online last Thursday night and offered tactical and strategic advice to the Palestinian Authority. Interesting talking points:

the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit should not be called “kidnapped” but rather “imprisoned” or “captive.” Taha said, “Kidnapping is an act carried out by gangs, terrorists, and the like. But ‘captive’ means that [it is carried out by] an organized, legitimate group that makes decisions. Israel is trying to present our resistance as something less - as terrorism, murder, and kidnapping - in order that the diplomatic circle will be closed to it.” [emphasis added]

A quick and casual Google News scan indicates that the following outlets didn’t get the memo. All of them have used or continue to use the word “kidnapped” to describe the seizure of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from sovereign Israeli territory:

CNN, Al Jazeera, the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, People’s Daily Online, NBC, the Guardian (UK), CBS, ABC, Fox, Jerusalem Post, ABC Online (Australia), Zaman Online (Turkey), The Independent (UK), among others.

The notable exception is the BBC, although a Google News search indicates that the Beeb itself has used the word “kidnapped” to describe Shalit, most recently on July 1. Since then… only “captured.”

Once upon a time (on June 29) BBC editor Jon Williams explained the code behind the BBC’s sensitive use of language:

Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry value judgements. Our job is to remain objective. By doing so, I hope we allow our audiences on radio and television to make their own assessment of the story. So we try to stick to the facts - civilians are “kidnapped”, Cpl Shalit was “captured” [emphasis added]

Today, according to the Beeb, an Iraqi minister [a civilian] was:

“snatched”

“kidnapped”

“pulled from his car”

“captured”

“abducted”

and

“ambushed”

Then the minister was:

“freed”…by his bodyguards

The End

The Beeb started an editors’ blog and opened it up to comments…and now the floodgates have opened about the BBC’s Middle East coverage (which I discussed here).

The accusations of a deeply ingrained pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli bias from the network’s reporters far outnumber the supportive comments. And the latter are as revealing as the former. Both sides detect the bias. Some are happy to hear it, because they feel it gives the Palestinians a fair shake. Most—by a great majority—are not: because the network isn’t reporting the facts but rather its bias.
If this story starts to get more play, editor Jon Williams may end up regretting how he sets the scene—explaining that the BBC maintains a “permanent presence” in Gaza and so it suffers along with the Palestininans whenever they suffer:

Two nights ago, Israeli forces bombed the only power station in Gaza, knocking out power to thousands of homes and offices. Anyone who’s had a fuse blow knows the inconvenience when the lights go out. But factor in 35 degree temperatures, the need for air conditioning, and the loss of water pumping and communications networks, and you begin to have some idea of the difficulties facing everyone living and working in the Gaza strip.

The BBC is the only Western broadcaster to maintain a permanent presence in Gaza. It’s on days like this that the expertise of people like correspondent Alan Johnston comes into its own. He and his colleagues from the BBC’s Arabic Service live close to our bureau in Gaza City, enabling them to draw on the context - and contacts - gleaned from literally living the story.

Then he gets to the heart of the matter: the BBC’s sensitive use of language:

As ever in reporting the Middle East, language - and the choice of words - is incredibly important. Was the soldier kidnapped or captured, were the Hamas politicians arrested or detained?

Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry value judgements. Our job is to remain objective. By doing so, I hope we allow our audiences on radio and television to make their own assessment of the story. So we try to stick to the facts - civilians are “kidnapped”, Cpl Shalit was “captured”; since troops don’t usually make “arrests”, the politicians were “detained”. Doubtless some will disagree. But that’s, in essence, the heart of the story - two competing narratives.

Commenter after commenter pointed out the abject hypocrisy of this casual, offhand explanation by Williams. For example:

Civilians are “kidnapped”‘? According to who? Why not soldiers?

I would accept your explanation for the use of words were it not for this:

“Iraq general kidnapped in Baghdad”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4411335.stm

Why was the word OK in that instance and not this?

And this:

“Seized Israeli settler found dead”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5125256.stm

Why “seized” and not “kidnapped” there?

Read the entire exchange here. It’s well worth it.

Me, I agree with this guy:

Guys - nobody is asking you to get it 100% right 100% of the time. You can’t. The problem is that I, myself — a strong supporter of peace who believes that the Palestinians should have a state that includes the WB, who is no fan of settlers or settlements, who doesn’t buy PR from either side, but who finds value in both Israeli and Arab news sources — still find that BBC reports about Israel CONSISTENTLY warp reality, excusing terrorism and demonizing Israel. And it’s not your vocabulary. It is clearly plain and simple bias on the part of your reporters.

I find it irritating that I rarely if ever gain any new insights from you about the Israeli or Palestinian situation — just this tired, slanted stuff. Guys, I learn interesting things from Lebanon’s Daily Star, from Yedioth Aharonoth, from Haaretz, and from Asharq al-Awsat. But from the BBC, with its permanent Gaza bureau, I mostly hear propaganda.[emphasis added]

The world of serious, scholarly, and literary books lost one of its pillars yesterday with the death of Barbara Epstein, co-founder and co-editor of the New York Review of Books:

“Barbara was one of the most influential editors of our time,” the writer Janet Malcolm said. “But she had none of the qualities — aggressiveness, ruthlessness, egotism — that are commonly associated with powerful editors. Barbara’s uncommon modesty, gentleness and charm were the source of a certain mysteriousness. They were also, of course, entirely of a piece with the magazine she and Bob Silvers put out.”

(the New York Times)

I’m with Jack Shafer. I think New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera is great. I wish they could clone him. He has a gift for making the complicated way, way, way less complicated…without being reductive or condescending or didactic.

Nocera demystifies the world of business with original thinking, brainy reporting, and the ability to see around corners. Although opinionated, he’s not really a pundit who tells you what he thinks about executive pay or stock options or antitrust as much as what he’s learned from his reporting. Because it’s harder to show than to tell, Nocera’s pieces run between 1,400 and 2,000 words, epic length compared to the Times‘ other columnists. For that reason I like to think of him as a weekly feature writer and not a columnist.

“Good Luck With That Broken iPod” ($$), which Shafer cites, is my favorite column too.

At this particular moment, of course, Apple is special, and it can get away with being arrogant. It has a product that everyone wants, and for which there is no serious competition.

But it seems to me that Apple is on a dangerous course. Yes, it has strong incentives to minimize tech support, but to say “Not Our Problem” whenever an iPod dies is to run the serious risk of losing its customers’ loyalty.

“Our Love-Hate Relationship with Wal-Mart” ($$) is another really good one:

When A.& P. came to town, it usually meant that many mom-and-pop grocery stores went out of business. Food wholesalers were squeezed, and were sometimes cut out entirely, as A.& P. took ever greater control of the supply chain. And the company’s emphasis on keeping prices low for its customers meant that it was ruthless about keeping wages low for its workers.

Can you guess what happened? Sure you can. Unions agitated, sometimes violently, to organize A.& P.’s workers. Federal legislation was passed intended to prevent the big chains from getting price breaks from manufacturers that small stores couldn’t get. More than half the states enacted “chain taxes.” And anti-chain-store oratory flourished. “We can whip these chain stores,” one populist radio commentator used to proclaim. “We can drive them out in 30 days if you people will stay out of their stores.”

But that’s precisely the point: people didn’t stay out of the stores. Instead, they kept shopping at A.& P. even though it meant that some of their neighbors lost their businesses, and others worked for low pay. In time, the opposition to the big chains faded, and they became a part of a commercial landscape we now take for granted. The desire for low prices trumped all other considerations. In America, unlike, say, Europe, it always does.

I see that Jeff Jarvis and Mickey Kaus both wrote about the sensational flare-up between the New York Times and GM.***

For what it’s worth: it happened to me, too.

I had my first-ever letter published by the Times a while back. It was pretty cool to get the call—they really liked my letter—and to get it published.

They overcorrected my grammar and punctuation, which made me laugh. They also deleted two words. Hmmm. Okay…well…hmmm….well…whatever.

It bugged me, though, and it continued to bug me. Without those two words, my argument wasn’t complete.

So now you’re reading this blog.

*** I also wrote about this yesterday (and neglected to tip my hat to Romenesko, which I do now belatedly).

The cartoon jihad has pulled back the curtain on political tensions in Scandinavia. Agora has been doing a fine job of covering the depressing events in Denmark as the imams who stoked the controversy continue to behave like thugs and to intimidate the Muslim community, and all other Danes.

Now there’s confusion at the top in Norway as a government minister says that the Norwegian government will meet with Hamas…while the prime minister says it will not.

Things get really hot in Sweden, however, where an open letter to that country’s “Chancellor of Justice” indicates that he metes out a very special kind of justice indeed–the kind where it’s okay for Muslims to refer to Jews as “brothers of apes and pigs.”

Earlier this year you decided to discontinue your preliminary investigation against the mosque at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm. At the mosque, audio cassettes with highly inflammatory anti-Semitic content were being sold. After radio programme Dagens Eko’s reports on the contents of the cassettes on 26-27 November 2005, a charge of racial incitement was filed with the police against the Stockholm mosque.

In your decision to close the pre-trial investigation into this charge, you write that “the lecture under consideration featured statements that are highly degrading to Jews; among other things, they are consistently referred to as the brothers of apes and pigs”. Furthermore, a curse is pronounced on the Jews and the audience are encouraged to participate in Jihad (holy war) against the Jews, mentioning suicide bombers as an effective weapon and praising suicide bombers as martyrs.

You ask yourself whether these statements “should be judged differently – and be regarded as permissible – because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict”.

You state that owing to the Middle East conflict, “these expressions, despite their content, cannot be regarded as racial incitement according to Swedish law”.

Your conclusion was thus that the preliminary hearings should be discontinued since hatred of Jews can be linked to the conflict in the Middle East. This means, in other words, that according to your interpretation of the law, these statements did not constitute inflammatory incitement of an anti-Semitic nature despite the insults and the direct appeal to “kill the Jews”.

Nice.

Let us recall that in the meantime, the EU is busy drawing up a new lexicon in order to separate the word “Islam” from the word “terrorism,” because of the rising threat of Islamophobia. (See “Islamofascists, Islamofascists, motherfucking Islamofascists.“)

I really don’t want to believe all the “Europe is eating away at itself” stuff. I love Europe too much. But it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that they will be able to pull themselves out of this downward spiral.

You will rarely find me denigrating gossip–it is the ultimate communication tool of the powerless and the dispossessed, the wannabes and the have-nots. The “little guy.” It is democratic: it communicates, literally, for good or for ill, the will of the people who spread it (for good or for ill). It’s a public-opinion barometer on a small scale: no polling necessary.

It can also be a form of free speech in a system that is otherwise impervious to criticism. As such, it can have disastrous consequences.
Farceur-in-Chief Ahmadinejad of Iran, while reportedly a man of good cheer, has no sense of humor about himself and his B.O.:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamic nation’s firebrand leader, has taken umbrage at an unwelcome SMS received on his cellphone. According to whispered accounts in the Iranian capital, his ire was stirred when someone sent him a joke suggesting he didn’t wash regularly enough.

Although officials claim he possesses a lively sense of humour that belies his rather hairshirt image, on this occasion it suffered a serious failure. Realising the joke was doing the rounds of Iranian cellphones, the notoriously temperamental president lodged an official complaint with Iran’s judiciary department.

That in turn has acted as a pretext for an official purge of the SMS system in the country. Ahmadinejad has since told his staff to pay close attention to all jokes circulating about him by SMS.

An anti-regime website called Rooz Online claims that under the crackdown the head of the country’s cellphone company has been sacked and four people arrested and accused of colluding with the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad.

That emphasis-added bit at the end is just a little nod to the tried-and-true totalitarian method–now the favored Islamofascist method–of smearing someone who has fallen out of favor as an enemy of the state.

Things seem to be spiraling out of control over at Arianna’s place.

Last week, while Ms. Huffington was taking the high road and imploring her readers (and perhaps some of her bloggers) to curtail their calls for ideological purity (they have declined, defiantly), elsewhere at the HuffPost, Jane Smiley and Eric Alterman were flaying Time columnist Joe Klein.

It’s all very complicated, and dramatic. Apparently, Joe Klein, a liberal pundit who has been critical of the Democrats and of the hard-left elements in the party that have been allowed to set policy and agendas and the terms of debate on certain issues, engaged in some name-calling at a private event (that was attended by many press types). Alterman reports:

after someone brought up the question of the whether the Democrats will be able to present an effective alternative to Bush in the next election, Joe Klein shouted out, “Well they won’t if their message is that they hate America–which is what has been the message of the liberal wing of the party for the past twenty years.”

Klein explains his point:

Alterman had me castigating the “liberal wing” of the party, which I was careful not to do. There is a crucial difference between liberals and leftists, especially on foreign policy–even though Republicans (and leftist-wingers) have successfully conflated the two over the past few decades. The default position of leftists like, say, Michael Moore and many writers at The Nation, is that America is essentially a malignant, imperialistic force in the world and the use of American military power is almost always wrong. Liberals have a more benign, and correct, view of America’s role in the world and tend to favor the use of military force if it is exercised judiciously, as a last resort, and in a multilateral contect–with U.N. approval or through NATO. The first Gulf War, the overthrow of the Taliban and the Kosovo intervention met these criteria; Bush’s Iraq invasion clearly did not. That was the point I was trying to make at breakfast.

Jane Smiley titles her post “Let’s Pile On Joe.” She invokes Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, James Cagney, and Martin Luther King. And her all-American grandpa. I have written about Smiley’s poisonous partisanship here and here and here. And about left sectarianism here and here.

The Euston Manifesto describes this phenomenon. Read it.

Matt Welch, who’s leaving Reason’s Hit and Run for the L.A. Times, waxes nostalgic about those early post-9/11 days when the blogosphere was bonded in a communal attempt to expand our geopolitical knowledge–to catch up to what we’d been ignoring, to make up for lost time, to educate ourselves and one another.

Well, Welch doesn’t say all that–rather, it’s what it felt like for me to have the Internet and the warbloggers to turn to for news and links and insights and the names of other bloggers, with even more interesting insights, etc. Now he’s leaving, and he mourns the days when those of you who were blogging and those of us who were reading your blogs all seemed to be on the same side: the side of seeking the truth.

I had launched my blog (or shall I say “warblog,” which is what I named it, apparently coining a term I’ve come to loathe) five days after the September 11 massacre and almost immediately found myself swept up in an exhilarating whirlwind of grassroots media creation. As a consumer, it was exponentially more edifying to me than the post-9/11 fumblings of the mainstream media’s binary, Crossfire-style opinion slinging.

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

It has all broken down, Welch says. And it’s true that the blogosphere is a totally different place, with a totally different feel. But what Ann Althouse says is also very true:

People blog for lots of different reasons, and blogging is still burgeoning and developing. Don’t cave into nostalgia for a Golden Age, especially one that got its golden glow from the horror that was 9/11. Things were bound to change and shake around, and some bloggers that you liked then may put you off now. But there are always a million new bloggers, and blogging is a beautifully fruitful format. The great power of blogging is the way it releases the creativity of the individual mind. That sense of not being able to predict your own opinions and observations — that feeling of writing to discover your own ideas and interests — is the great intrinsic value of blogging. There will always be millions of individuals blogging for the sheer joy of self-expression. Find them.

Hear, hear from a neophyte.

Fascinating series of posts about whether liberals should or shouldn’t want to be considered patriots over at TPM Cafe. It’s introduced by Todd Gitlin, who has written a new book, I see. Here’s a snippet from the comments:

Arthur Dent said:

The traditional concept of “the left” has always been both internationalist and patriotic (in the positive sense in which Todd is using that word, rather than narrow nationalism).

It was the cosmopolitan “liberal internationalist ” right that claimed the Vietnam solidarity movement in the 1960s was “unpatriotic”.

While I agree that the term “patriotic” should be reclaimed, I am more concerned about the term “left” itself.

The world outlook of people who are currently considered “the left” is in fact negative, cynical, pessimistic, bitter, humourless, authoritaian and above all hostile to progress. In short they are reactionaries in the classical sense of the word.

I think the focus should be on the fact that they are reactionaries opposed to progress.That is the key dividing line.

The term “pseudo-left” should be used for people whose world outlook is reactionary but who use “leftist” rhetoric. Calling them “unpatriotic” addresses only one aspect of the phoniness of their “leftism” and leads to confusion about their ” internationalist ” rhetoric (which is just rhetoric, like the rest of their “progressive” cant).

The phenomena Todd is describing is clearly global in scope. I’m an Australian and it simply doesn’t make sense here to describe pseudo-left anti-Anericanism as “unpatriotic”. Nor does it make sense to apply that description in Europe. Yet the similarities between the pseudo-left in America and other countries is obvious.

Yesterday, I mentioned I would like to create a list of intellectually honest culture-war debaters. Add Gitlin to that thus far nonexistent list.