« Seth Freedman never met a massacre he didn’t like
Enabling Israel’s degeneration »

Moronic Hack of the Week

06Jun10

Just when Seth Freedman looked to have it in the bag, a late contender enters the race. Craig Murray states the case for the newcomer:

“Of all the defences of Israel killing unarmed Turkish protestors – the majority of them shot in the back, four in the back of the head execution style – Nick Cohen’s ramble must be the least coherent by a very highly paid hack.

As far as I can make any sense at all of his nine pint muddle, it relies chiefly on his usual contention that anti-semitism and anti-zionism are the same thing, plus the idea that anybody who opposes Israeli brutality, supports Islamic extremism”.”

Personally, I’d still go with Freedman on the grounds that at least Cohen can string half a sentence together, but reasonable people can disagree. Meanwhile, rumours have it that Jeffrey Goldberg, Paul Berman and Petra Marquardt-Bigman are all preparing last-minute bids for the highly coveted award – you can pick up a free wall-chart in today’s Observer to keep track of them all.

Advertisement

Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian, Media   |  7 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

7 Responses to “Moronic Hack of the Week”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address
  1. 1 VM on June 6, 2010 said:

    I think we need to give some hack points to Freedman for actually mentioning the flotilla; NC took the easy way out and doesn’t mention it, as if the very discussion is a mere symptom of antisemitism and therefore beneath him.

    He mentions North Korea more times than he mentions the flotilla.

    It’s much easier to defend the indefensible by implication through simply ignoring it and talking about Ba’athist conspiracy theories or the Burmese.

  2. 2 JamieSW on June 6, 2010 said:

    Good point, but on the other hand, Cohen had the balls to straight-up accuse opponents of the attack of antisemitism, whereas Freedman just strongly implied it. It’s a close one.

  3. 3 boxthejack on June 6, 2010 said:

    What about Marty Peretz? His article writes the whole thing off as non-story because Israel didn’t kill nearly as many people as (wait for it) suicide bombers in Iraq!

  4. 4 JamieSW on June 6, 2010 said:

    True, but Marty Peretz can’t win it every week. Plus he gets minus points for being so predictably loony that nobody outside Pam Geller’s readership takes him seriously. The point about Freedman and Cohen is that they have liberal (even left!) pretensions, which they then shamelessly exploit to legitimise Israeli crimes.

  5. 5 gingerrevolutionary on June 7, 2010 said:

    A couple of crackers here from Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100041748/the-world-demonises-israel-once-again/
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100041916/israel%e2%80%99s-war-is-the-west%e2%80%99s-too/

    I don’t think it quite reaches Seth’s standards though. For a start it’s pretty inane, and doesn’t even attempt to engage with the relevant debates. i.e. “The blockade of Gaza is there for a good reason – to prevent terrorist attacks against Israel by a vicious and barbaric terrorist group armed and funded by Iran.” Wow thanks for solving that moral dilemma.

    However it does have it’s highlights, notably; “Both the United Nations and European Union have engaged in a frenzy of denunciation, even before all the facts have been established.” He then follows this thunderous criticism with a spot of, um, making judgments before the facts have been established.

  6. 6 JamieSW on June 7, 2010 said:

    Well, he gets points for extending the absurd “lynch mob” accusation from just the activists themselves to “the UN, EU and Arab League”, i.e. the entire planet. Also, like Freedman, he manages to briefly show awareness that the violence happened on the activists’ boat, before moving on as if that had no bearing on the rest of his piece.

    Bonus pseudo-Orientalist points for reference to “the Great Satan”, intended to give the impression that the author knows something about about the movements and doctrines he is declaring war on from his bedroom. Also, extra-credit is surely due for this conclusion:

    “There is no middle ground in this war – political leaders in the West must decide whose side they are on – the defenders of freedom in the Middle East or the forces of terrorism and tyranny that threaten them.”

    It’s great because up to that point, your average sane reader will have read through the piece, anger and indignant outrage increasing paragraph by paragraph, until by the end they’re straining at the bit to write a response explaining to the poor man and his readers where’s exactly he’s gone wrong. But then that final paragraph hits, and you realise that there’s just no way to respond to something like that – this man’s a write-off, too far gone for rational argument to have any effect.

    Still, like you say, not quite on Freedman’s level – the lack of invective and smears levelled against the murdered activists themselves in particular let him down.

  7. 7 Netanyahu Fuck on June 12, 2010 said:

    World become Peace without ISRAEL!!!!! Israel Is fucking country with A big terorist BITCH>>>!!!!!!!


« Seth Freedman never met a massacre he didn’t like
Enabling Israel’s degeneration »

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.