1. Torture is justified, or can be called something other than torture. Read Mark Danner’s essential NYT op-ed.
2. Antisemitism is “understandable.” So says British moviemaker Ken Loach. Does he believe that going out and harassing Muslims after a terror attack is “understandable”? I very much doubt it.
3. One-party dictatorships have rights; civilians who raise grievances against them do not. That is the implicit view of Charles Freeman, who has withdrawn his name as nominee to head Obama’s National Intelligence Council.
The contretemps over Freeman centered around his statements on Israel, which I won’t go into, except to say that denunciations of the Israel lobby ring a bit hollow from a paid representative of the Saudi lobby. No, far more chilling are Freeman’s statements on China. Freeman’s defenders maintain that people who raise the China issue do so opportunistically, having never protested Chinese human rights abuses before. For the record, Lerterland has denounced Chinese autocracy here, here and here, for starters.
The Peking Duck attempts to put the most favorable gloss on Freeman’s Tiananmen Square comments but can do so only by validating some highly dubious assumptions.
In Freeman’s words, China should have known better than to “tolerate escalating self-expression by exuberantly rebellious kids.” Escalating self-expression, my goodness. Cock those the machine guns. Freeman again: “No government, including our own, is or should be asked to be prepared to tolerate efforts to overthrow it and the constitutional order it administers.” So it’s as I said above: for Freeman, the Chinese one-party state has the right to preserve itself in power; the Chinese people have the right to shut up or be jailed and/or shot.
“I like the way [Freeman] challenges the dominant paradigm and his willingness to question sacred cows,” writes The Peking Duck. But Freeman’s thinking on China unfortunately is the dominant paradigm. And the sacred cow in question is nothing less than democracy itself, something Freeman openly mocks.
Yet who linked with a thumbs-up to the Peking Duck post? Andrew Sullivan, one of Freeman’s most ardent defenders, yet also the blogosphere’s go-to voice for opposing torture, a person who valiantly led the charge for accountability in government during the high Bush era and the recent election. Freeman’s contempt for human rights should set off alarms for Sullivan, yet he describes Freeman’s pronouncements ever so politely, as “a little too brutal for my taste.”
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