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Fitzgerald: New Duranty dhimmitude

Mar 13, 2006 11:34 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald surveys the New York Times’ (a.k.a. the New Duranty Times) “coverage” of the global jihad:

Read the absurd justifications by various editors at The New Duranty Times for their failure to exhibit the courage displayed by all sorts of European newspapers and print the Muhammad cartoons. The Duranty editors don’t even have the courage of many smaller American papers and campus newspapers. Make those editors of those papers the future editors of The Bandar Beacon (a.k.a. The Washington Post) and The New Duranty Times (a.k.a. The New York Times). And columnists at the NDT dutifully followed suit in this lack of courage. One example that sticks in mind and craw was Michael Kimmelman’s indignation about the supposed offensiveness of those Danish cartoons, followed by some faint praise for the principle of free speech.

There is Tom Friedman, who if he knew anything was supposed to know about the Middle East, and who made his name as a reporter. Yes, he was a mere reporter. He had and has no understanding of the men and events he reported on, because he was reporting without any reference to, or understanding of, what Islam does. He had and has no idea of how it affects everything, from the slight differences in position of Maronites and Greek Orthodox in Lebanon, to the behavior, often otherwise inexplicable, of the Alawite military caste that controls Syria and must simultaneously be alert to challenges from local Sunni Muslims, and yet at the same time is willing to promote the Muslim agenda with unusual ferocity. This is as if to prove that Alawites are, despite their worship of Miriam, plus islamiste que les islamistes. So he didn’t understand Lebanon, and he didn’t understand Syria. But he wrote a book, and won a prize for a book, on the war in Lebanon. And that is the book, and the prize, that won him his column, and his ability to pontificate on the entire world (about which he knows even less than he knows about Lebanon), and to play the officious fool at all sorts of settings, from Davos to the $45,000-per-lecture audiences of the innocent, who come to hear the world simplified and made plain to them, by simple-minded Tom Friedman, a monstrous product of The New Duranty Times.

And there is another columnist, Nicholas Kristof, who has described the mass murders in Darfur by Arab Muslims of non-Arab (black African) Muslims, but who appears to be constitutionally unable to understand why what is happening in Darfur is simply the expression of Arab supremacism that is part of Islam, for which Islam is a vehicle. He doesn’t get it, or doesn’t want to. He cannot relate the Arab looting, raping, and killing of black Africans, and their status in Arab Muslim eyes as inferior Muslims, not-conceivably-complete Muslims, because they are not Arabs, to the attitude of Arabs in Iraq toward the Kurds — and the complete indifference of the Arab League to the Al-Anfal campaign of Saddam Hussein’s Arabs carried out against the Kurds. Nor does Kristof manage to relate what is happening in Darfur to another example of Arab supremacism: the cultural and linguistic imperialism on display in Algeria against the Kabyles, or Berbers. Over the past decade or two they have been rioting in Tizi-Ouzou and elsewhere, demanding that the Berber language, Tamazight, be permitted in public places. Nor can Kristof relate any of this to the ruling Arab generals who run a stratokleptocracy (rule by thieving military) in Algeria, not unlike that of Mubarak, but with a greater infusion of French-trained technocrats and dipomats than the stolid Egyptian can call on.

Unless and until Kristof begins to connect the Arab supremacism for which Islam is the vehicle, to what is happening in Darfur, he should not be taken seriously. And just why, his readers have a right to ask (and to be given his answer), do Egypt and Libya so strongly oppose any introduction of effective, i.e. Western, troops, who might actually put paid to the Janjaweed? For the Janjaweed is now apparently conducting their freewheeling murders over the border in Chad. But what are borders to the umma al-islamiyya? What are the borders for doing what one believes is God’s work, which is to spread Islam, preferably by taking the loot of Infidels? If you have a lot of oil money flowing, then you don’t have to resort to that — but in the Sudan they are impatient, and can’t wait for the oil revenues to flow. Full-fledged attacks on Infidels in southern Sudan have been temporarily halted because of Western pressure and interest and publicity. Jihadists have therefore sought a substitute, and the substitute at hand are those quasi-Muslims, those Muslims who, not being Arabs but mere blacks, cannot possibly rank as high, or be as good Muslims as any Arab on a camel can, shooting his rifle, smashing that baby’s skull with the butt.

No, none of that has appeared in Nicholas Kristof’s many anguished reports from Darfur. He cannot connect the Arab mistreatment of Darfur blacks to Arab mistreatment of Berbers, or Kurds, or any other non-Arab Muslims. He cannot make the connection, just as Tom Friedman cannot explain the absurdity of the “two-state solution” and other things about which he, Friedman, has been so excitably enthusiastic. That is Friedman: excitable, an enthusiast above all for whatever little title-shtick he comes up with — “the world is flat” or “the lexus and the olive-tree” or… well, I have a good one for Friedman, but as he comes to this site to be horrified at what is said about him, I won’t bother helping him out.

The New Duranty Times, The New Duranty Times.

Jock Whitney’s Herald-Tribune, the Boston Evening Transcript that the son of the St. Louis furrier used as the title of a poem, and for that matter hundreds and hundreds of other newspapers have lived and then have died. So also magazines have lived and died: the North American Review, Judge, Hound and Horn, and thousands of others. Even Punch, the famous Punch that seemed as if it could not possibly sink, finally did — glug, glug.

Ubi sunt? They ask that of men, and also of newspapers. And it will be asked, sooner than people realize, of The New Duranty Times.

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