Three Cheers for Incinerating Civilians / Anti-Journalism

After reading this New York Times story about a Lebanese family shattered by Israeli’s bombardment of civilian areas, I wondered what the militarist blogosphere might be saying about it. Do the people who affect to be so outraged by Hezbollah’s bombing of Israeli civilians get equally upset about Israel doing the same thing on a grander scale to the Lebanese?

I decided to check Michelle Malkin’s blog to see what she might have to say about it. I didn’t immediately see any comment on Hassan Fattah’s story, but my eyes were drawn to this post comparing a rush-delivery of U.S. arms to the Israelis to a rush-delivery of a nuclear holocaust to Japan. The reader making the comparison was only doing so in order to claim that leaking information about the U.S. munitions sale to Israel was tantamount to revealing U.S. military operations. But he inadvertently illustrates two other points: first, the utter callousness of Malkinites toward noncombatant populations — evidently, Malkin and her correspondent think that what the U.S. did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is just fine, and what Israel is doing now is admirable and ought to be facilitated by our tax dollars. Second, the post illustrates that not only is Malkin (along with other war-propagandists) not a journalist, she is best described as an “anti-journalist.” Where a journalist tries to report news that the public ought to know and that criminals and governments would prefer they remain ignorant of, an anti-journalist tries to conceal information from the public. Encouraging public ignorance, in order to encourage support for the government, is what they’re in business to do.

Explore posts in the same categories: media, Social criticism, War, Websites