In my inbox is a notice from World Village-Harmonia Mundi: Saxophonist Gilad Atzmon “makes a rare appearance in New York City beginning May 5th and is available for interviews.” Oddly I see no gig schedule listed.
My point, and one I’ve made many times before, is that Gilad Atzmon is a Jew-hater — and far from the only one in the UK and elsewhere who’s found it helpful to drape himself in the Palestinian cause, or the fashionable rhetoric of anti-imperialism.
But of course there’s something different about Atzmon: He’s a musician, and a strong one at that. He insists that his music is intrinsically political. And this is therefore something that every New York music journalist planning to cover Atzmon needs to weigh carefully:
How does a man of such views claim the mantle of “cultural resistance” that is so bound up with the history of jazz? How can an apologist for the Iranian regime — an apologist for Nazi Germany — claim to be “fighting oppression of every kind”?
He gets away with it only if compliant journalists allow him.
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.
Via Jack Shafer’s Twitter feed, this AP story on Fidel Castro’s decision to fill three of the eight scant pages in the party-controlled newspaper Granma with nonsense from 9/11 Truther and Bilderberg conspiracy theorist Daniel Estulin. AP writer Will Weissert does a nice job detailing how Estulin’s work actually draws on the thinking (rather, “thinking”) of the extremist right.
I’m glad to see that the Obama administration is moving to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. And yet I’m still amazed that there are those on the left who continue to admire Castro, this pitiful crackpot, who has long outlawed the very existence of a journalistic culture on the island, preferring to force-feed the Cuban people his own ravings, along with the ravings of fellow loons.
I know, journalism in the U.S. is anything but perfect, but the quick dissemination of news and debate fostered by the Net — and the enormous flux in media and information cultures detailed in this very interesting pair of pieces in Wired (hat tip John Murph) — couldn’t stand in starker contrast to the utterly shriveled, hideous excuse for a media outlet that is Granma. And every other official organ like it elsewhere on the planet.
Read Chris Anderson’s thoughts on iPads and RSS feeds and Pandora and the like. And then recall that the Cuban government took the enormous step of legalizing cell phones in 2008. We thought it was right-wing anticommunists, per William F. Buckley, who “stood astride history, yelling ‘Stop!’” Turns out it’s actually the communists. (Of course, America’s Castro apologists benefit from cutting-edge online communication to get their organizing done.)
By the way, Castro’s not the only one spouting laughable conspiracist rot. Hugo Chávez, we learn in this valuable piece by Christopher Hitchens, believes the moon landing may not have actually happened. But the most amusing part of Hitchens’s account is how deeply, how desperately, Sean Penn wants to believe in Chávez’s political sanity, all evidence to the contrary.
Today the Jazz Journalists Association launched JJA News, its new official web publication, which takes the place of the quarterly Jazz Notes. I’m excited to be staying on as editor, so check out my introductory statement, and sign up at the column on the right to follow JJA News via Twitter, RSS and so forth.
Conventional wisdom remains that our president is a wimp, spineless, etc., which flies in the face of jujitsu moments like this (hat tip Marc Cooper):
And that’s not to deny that Obama, in his way, makes use of political theater, which is what that health care summit was. But taking the opportunity to call out Republicans on their nonsense for six hours on national TV — is that a meaningless exercise or a cave-in? I don’t think so. Give the man a bit of credit already.
David Rohde’s extended account of his hellish seven-month-plus captivity in Afghanistan and Taliban-held Pakistan is running this week in the NYT. Part one is here. It’s about as gripping a narrative as you can possibly imagine, and a testament to the man’s extraordinary bravery and sacrifice.
Rohde took a risk in interviewing a Taliban commander because he felt duty-bound as a journalist to get their side of the story. Needless to say he got a lot more than he bargained for. If any good can come of it, it’s his ability to offer us a stunning, probably unprecedented level of detail and insight into this horrific gang of murderers.
For one thing, we’re often told that in contrast to the Karzai government and its various warlord allies, the Taliban and other Islamist insurgents are somehow incorruptible. Nicholas Kristof advanced this idea in a September 5 column, arguing that many Afghans are impressed by “the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.” Rohde, however, writes the following:
As the months dragged on, I grew to detest our captors. I saw the Haqqanis as a criminal gang masquerading as a pious religious movement. They described themselves as the true followers of Islam but displayed an astounding capacity for dishonesty and greed.
That’s just one example of Rohde overturning conventional wisdom with some firsthand, all-too-personal experience. Read on.
I’m glad to be surfing the last wave of old media at the Inquirer (will have a Christian McBride feature there soon). But it’s good to see the next entrepreneurial wave taking hold — we’re going to need it. The Jazz Journalists Association is planning its own conference on new media, tentatively January 7-10 in New York. More details to come.
“Do successful artists get a pass for their moral failings or crimes?” asks the NYT Room for Debate blog in regard to the Roman Polanski affair. Gee, ya think?
Not only do they get a pass for their moral failings — they’re often celebrated for their moral failings, which are too easily mistaken for virtues. At the most recent Oscars, Robert De Niro hailed Sean Penn for his supposed human rights advocacy, and yet Penn is a stenographer for two of Latin America’s most antidemocratic leaders. Other examples are plentiful (although I do admire other Hollywood figures like George Clooney and Angelina Jolie for some of the stances they take).
In regard to Polanski, shame on Debra Winger for denouncing his arrest as “philistine collusion,” as if the refusal to forgive a clear instance of rape shows a lack of proper aesthetic appreciation. “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece,” says Winger. See above: He gets not just a pass, but a rhetorical wet kiss.
While I’m on the subject of Sean Penn and Hugo Chavez…
I’ve been getting lots of emails from The Nation imploring me to “oppose militant ignorance,” which I admit is an excellent description of the current rightist campaign to derail health care reform (with help from pliable “moderate” Democrats, but that’s another story). Sadly, The Nation continues to serve as a platform for ignorance of the hard-left variety — not only with the publication of Sean Penn’s “interview,” but now also NYU professor Greg Grandin’s “interview” of the Venezuelan strongman as well.
Marc Cooper gets it right: This is beyond nauseating from a publication that claims to champion democracy. A couple of semi-critical questions from Grandin toward the end, but it’s all couched in obsequious, robotic language: “What you have achieved inspires many.” This is indistinguishable from FOX’s Neil Cavuto interviewing George W. Bush.
Not a word about Chavez’s overt alliances with Putin, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad, Lukashenko and other irredeemable thugs. Not a word about his summary expulsion of two Human Rights Watch representatives in September 2008, after which he declared: “Any foreigner who comes to criticize our country will be immediately expelled.” Nation editors: Are these the political values you wish to support?
Marc Cooper on the continuing nosedive of “alternative media” bastion Pacifica Radio, and what this disaster says about the “media reform” movement. “If it can’t bring itself to scrutinize the squandering and trashing of the $500 million Pacifica network (the market value of its licenses), then why should we trust this movement to offer serious analysis of the rest of the media?” Indeed.
Marc also highlights the unsavory role of Amy Goodman, one of the true charlatans of today’s radical left. After helping foment the takeover of Pacifica by a faction of extremist wackos in the late ’90s:
[Goodman] struck a sweetheart deal with the new mgmt made up of her pals. Democracy Now! which was created by the network was privatized and handed to Amy as her own personal enterprise with a guarantee of well over a 1/2 million dollars a year in no-bid contracts from the network. Since then, Democracy Now! has raked in millions, literally, in foundation grants and other donations and is sitting on a pile of cash as the network from which it was born, and which it helped boycott while it was still part of, is now quickly evaporating into the ether. But, you know, Amy is a saint.
I should add that as a board member of Jews for Racial Economic Justice (JFREJ) in the mid-’90s, I appeared twice on WBAI, the NYC Pacifica affiliate, co-hosting installments of Beyond the Pale, JFREJ’s sister radio program. Beyond the Pale’s hosts have now taken to welling up with tears (I kid you not) over such piffle as Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children. The Beyond the Pale website also urges us to “Support the Free Gaza Movement.” Every time I see that my former comrades are now voluntarily allying with an organization dominated by antisemitic nutjobs such as Cynthia McKinney, I have to do a double-take. The downward plunge continues.
