After critiquing Nir Rosen’s shoddy excuse-making for terrorism in January 2009, I paid only slight attention to his work. But on the occasions when I stumbled onto his Twitter feed, I actually had to stop and wonder whether someone had hacked his account. The opinions were so extreme, so loutish, so flagrantly unprofessional, so obviously unbecoming of a Fellow at the NYU Center for Law and Security (no longer), a writer with bylines in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Salon and other highly respected outlets.
But yes, that was Rosen. Now he’s telling us, in the wake of his appalling comments about CBS News correspondent and sexual assault victim Lara Logan, that he’s really not like this. Well, yes, he is like this, as anyone who’s looked at that Twitter feed in the last year would know.
I can only wonder, as others have, why Rosen was able to hold onto his NYU position after linking to Taliban propaganda on the anniversary of 9/11 — and declaring that he agreed with it. Or calling for a punitive bombing of Tel Aviv as far back as April 2002. And it’s Lara Logan, he tells us, who’s the “major war monger.”
Of course, Rosen is not alone in attacking Logan: right-wing nut Debbie Schlussel made an absolutely chilling and deplorable statement as well.
So we’re back to the question I’ve often been asked: Why am I, a person of the left, focusing my anger on Rosen rather than on Schlussel? Because we know what Schlussel is: a hate-spewing figure of the gutter. She stands for for unashamed racism. Yes, she is a menace, and she has not apologized (to my knowledge). Rosen, on the other hand, considers himself “someone who’s devoted his career to defending victims and supporting justice,” as he wrote in one of his many lame apologies. A lot of people believe him.
But Rosen hasn’t done any such thing. He’s devoted his career to offering apologetics for the Taliban, Hezbollah and other so-called “armed resistance” movements. He’s betrayed the victims of those groups, and thus supported injustice, even as he proclaims the opposite. It’s an Orwellian lie, it’s the height of hypocrisy, and it ought to raise the ire of far more people on the left.
Lawrence O’Donnell, Keith Olbermann’s replacement on MSNBC and host of “The Last Word,” devoted a segment to the Logan fallout the other night and focused entirely on Schlussel. He said nothing about Rosen. Look, it’s the left that prides itself on facing uncomfortable facts and confronting the whole truth. O’Donnell failed. He gave his viewers a partial account and did the public a disservice.
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