Alexander Cockburn has responded to charges that he picked up and reprinted a fraudulent interview with Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. He refers to the original source, Evrensel, as “a serious newspaper.” [Insert laugh track.] He also cites a philosophy professor, Idris Samawi Hamid of Colorado State University, who argues:
Instead of shouting “fake!” we should be encouraging the kind of broad anti-imperialist front that this interview encapsulates.
Fact-checking be damned! The political utility of a document trumps its veracity — a cardinal rule of the Rove White House, one could say. Professor Hamid also contends: “There is no prima facie reason to suppose this interview is fake.” No? How about this, as the blogger “Angry Arab” points out:
There is a Central Information Unit in Hizbullah which distributes the transcript (in Arabic) of ALL interviews with Hasan Nasrallah … to the Lebanese and Arab media. And any interview with him would be considered front-page story. And Nasrallah gave only ONE interview since the war started–to Ghassan Bin Jiddu of AlJazeera.
But why bother with such details? The important thing is to further the project of far-left solidarity with Islamist fanaticism. In the mid-90s Cockburn declared himself an ally of the right-wing militia movement in the U.S., so what else is new.
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