[antimedia] antimedia: Yesterday Mark Steyn published....

[Email subscription to blog articles]

Posted by antimedia:
Yesterday Mark Steyn published....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1157400206.shtml


   ....[1]an article in the Chicago Sun-Times arguing that because the
   western media have no values held dear enough to sacrifice their lives
   for they have ceded their coverage of the war to the Islamofacists. He
   uses, as his example, the reaction of the media to the forced
   conversion of Fox News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig.
   Steyn points out that the reaction of the media was to pooh pooh the
   incident as though it was trivial and inconsequential.

     The moment the men were released, the Western media and their
     colleagues wrote off the scene as a stunt, a cunning ruse, of no
     more consequence than yelling "Behind you! He's got a gun!" and
     then kicking your distracted kidnapper in the teeth. Indeed, a few
     Web sites seemed to see the Islamic conversion routine as a useful
     get-out-of-jail-free card.

   Steyn's assertion is that if you have no principles worth dying for,
   you will always choose degradation over death, slavery over sacrifice,
   reporting terrorist propaganda over reporting the facts, especially
   when doing so risks your life.
   Thus we have CNN admitting that their Baghdad bureau deliberately
   withheld damning information about Saddam's regime in order to
   maintain a presence in Iraq and "reporters" in Lebanon publishing
   faked and staged photographs and Hezbollah propaganda as news because
   to report otherwise would put them at risk.
   Steyn's point is [2]completely lost on the consistently obtuse Glen
   Greenwald who, in his usual style, mischaracterizes Steyn's argument
   in order to create a strawman that he can then burn to the ground with
   what he imagines to be irrefutable dialectic.
   Greenwald launches a tirade against what he imagines to be Steyn's
   feigned bravery, which he envisions as true cowardice, asserting that
   Steyn wouldn't be nearly so brave were he faced with the
   life-threatening situation that Centanni and Wiig were confronted
   with. Greenwald's thinly veiled attack against "chickenhawks" is an
   over-used canard of the left. It seeks to stifle debate with the
   bizarre argument that those who have never seen combat have no right
   to discuss the topic of war. (Were Greenwald actually correct as well
   as principled, he would immediately silence himself and never be heard
   from again. Since self-aggrandizing bluster is his stock in trade the
   prospects of that are nil.)
   Greenwald claims that the so-called false bravery he is supposedly
   unmasking conceals a visceral fear of terrorists. He then claims that
   this fear, which he has constructed out of whole cloth, is what drives
   "the right" and "neo-cons" to abrogate constitutional rights in a
   blind, terrified frenzy to find a way to protect themselves from the
   beasts.

     The ironies of this disturbed war dance are virtually infinite, the
     most obvious one being that the Steyn Warriors can never point to
     any sacrifices they make or risks they incur. But the most striking
     irony is this. So much of the neoconservative warrior cries are
     built on an ethos of deep fear, of exactly the desperate desire to
     be protected and saved which Steyn and company claim is the
     hallmark of the girlish, soul-less West. As they strike the warrior
     pose, they are desperately willing, even eager, to fundamentally
     change the character and principles of our republic and to
     sacrifice the core liberties which define it because they are
     scared and want, more than anything else, to be protected.

   Greenwald's argument is so hilarious it wouldn't merit consideration
   were it not for the legions of mind-numbed liberals who swallow his
   swill without question.
   If fear truly were what drives the right, deliberate blindness is what
   drives the left. Their desire for "freedom" is so complete that they
   refuse to even admit that terrorism is a problem to be dealt with in
   any other way than a labyrinthine court system completely incapable of
   dealing with such behavior. Greenwald labels it "irrational fear" of
   "The Terrorist", as if to say such an entity only exists in the minds
   of those imprisoned by their fears.
   To make such claims Greenwald must ignore the thousands of us who have
   served our country and faced much more danger than Cetanni and Wiig
   and focus on the few who, while not serving, understand the nature of
   the Islamofacist threat. Furthermore, he must ignore the fact that the
   overwhelming majority of the volunteers of our modern military, who
   are serving in far-flung war zones from Djbouti to the Philippines as
   well as Iraq and Afghanistan, are the very people he claims are
   quivering in abject terror at the prospect of terrorist attacks.
   One wonders how rational it is to ignore repeated attacks around the
   world and [3]bold and blatant threats in a twisted effort to claim
   some mythical high ground of imagined "core principles" that are being
   attacked by those supposedly enslaved by groundless fears.
   In the military we have a term for those who claim to have no fear -
   false bravado. It often gets them killed, but what's worse is that it
   often gets others killed as well. Greenwald, like liberals everywhere,
   seems perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands on his altar of
   imagined "core principles", so long as none of those sacrificed are
   him.

References

   1. http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn03.html
   2. http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/will-real-cowards-please-stand-up.html
   3. http://counterterrorismblog.org/2006/09/the_azzam_threat_a_prelude_to_1.php