Newsweek: the bottom of the barrel

Robert Spencer goes paragraph by paragraph though Newsweek’s beyond contemptible, propagandistic article, by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, about Geert Wilders’s trip to the U.S.

But really, why get upset? This sort of thing is standard operating procedure for a leftist rag that has not been worth reading for 30 years. I remember that when The Bell Curve was published in 1994, Newsweek put it down as an “angry” diatribe. Now, one could describe the Harvardish, genially pedantic co-authors of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein with a variety of terms, but “angry”? Multiply that absurd smear by a factor of five or ten, and you have Newsweek’s treatment of Wilders.

And talking about hoary liberal putdowns of anyone outside the liberal plantation, the high-minded team of Hosenball and Isikoff call Wilders, among other epithets, a “publicity hound.” Now, that line goes way back. In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, newspapers attack architect Howard Roark, the embodiment of integrity, a man who would sooner break rocks in a quarry than be a success on anything but his own terms, “a publicity hound.” So here is Geert Wilders, living under guard for the last four and a half years, his life at constant risk from Muslims, for seeking to rescue his country from Islamization. And what is he really about, according to Newsweek? He’s a publicity hound.

Which triggers a Dylan paraphrase:

I said, “You know, they called Jesus a publicity hound too.”
He said, “You’re not him.”

[“Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 23, 2009 08:05 PM | Send