Marc Cooper‘s Oct. 7 post (“Dead Serious”) is a must-read.
It’s all too easy to laugh off the NYC subway terror threat as convenient right-wing hysteria, Cooper argues. I’m a subway-riding New Yorker (often four times a day) and I couldn’t agree more, though I always counsel against the illusion that any sort of warning will precede terror’s return to NYC, or that any amount of vigilance can guarantee safety.
Back to Cooper, who proceeds to rip to shreds the far left’s facile pronouncements about U.S. foreign policy causing terrorism. His first target is Cindy Sheehan, who spoke with Joshua Frank of Counterpunch (which has become a veritable sewage-pipe of left anti-Semitism—more of that in a moment). Sheehan told Frank:
I think that US foreign policy is totally responsible for 9/11, as well as the recent bombings in London.
Got that? “Totally” responsible. Cooper retorts:
Belief in an extremist religious world view is what produced 9/11. And the London bombings were the work of similar, cold-blooded fanatics — and not the handiwork of Bush and Blair (however much you might rightfully dislike them).
The last point is crucial: Unlike the American right wing, Cooper and those of us who passionately share his view are not defending Bush. Nor are we bashing Sheehan simply for opposing the war, or “harming the troops,” or anything of the sort. We are taking her to task for her party-line, utterly predictable far-left moonbattery.
Cooper also links to this absolutely necessary piece of analysis from Sasha Abramsky at openDemocracy.net. Abramsky bloodies the noses of George Galloway, John Pilger and the rest of the crew that Sheehan dutifully parrots:
They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation.
…
Simply blaming the never quite defined, yet implicitly all-powerful “west” for the ills of the world doesn’t explain why al-Qaida slaughtered thousands of Americans eighteen months before Saddam was overthrown. Nor does it explain the psychopathic joy this death cult takes in mass killings and in ritualistic, snuff-movie-style beheadings.
The arguments of the anti-apologist left are spreading, with ever increasing clarity and force. It is thrilling to see.
Oh, yes, about Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn’s disreputable little rag. Visit the homepage and you’ll see an ad for Michael Neumann’s new book, The Case Against Israel. This is the same Michael Neumann who was mercilessly exposed, by David Hirsh of Engage, as a fellow traveler of the virulently anti-Semitic Jewish Tribal Review (Google it yourself; I will not link to it). In an unctuous e-mail exchange with the racist slime merchants, Neumann wrote: “I know you’re [sic] site and it’s brilliantly done.” It gets much, much better from there. Read Hirsh’s piece; you’ll be glad you did.
How nice to see that Counterpunch is publishing Neumann’s reflections in book form. Cockburn also likes to circulate the rants of Gilad Atzmon, the London-based jazz saxophonist and tireless Jew-hater, another of Hirsh’s targets and the subject of my guest column in Jazz Times magazine, Oct. ’05. Go here to download a pdf.
We’ve come up against this question before: Is Cindy Sheehan anti-Semitic? She’s certainly been accused of it; I’ve always been skeptical. But that isn’t really the point. In all likelihood she’s unaware of the bilge that Counterpunch has been publishing of late. But that’s where her wrongheaded remarks are appearing. It’s distressing that a woman so hugely popular within the antiwar movement, even among mainstream war critics, is lending legitimacy to Cockburn’s despicable project.
**Update: Welcome, Engage readers! And thanks for the link.
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