Reply to Randall Parker

(Note: The truth is worse than indicated in this entry. As I’ve just learned (March 8, 2009), at the same time as the July 2007 thread at Parapundit that is quoted below, in another thread at Parapundit another commenter called for me to be murdered. Randall Parker did not object to the comment, nor did he delete it.)

For a couple of years I had a regular correspondence with Randall Parker at Parapundit. We respected each other, and I frequently quoted him at my site, and he frequently quoted me at his. What I particularly liked about him, and what made him virtually unique in my experience, was that he was a paleocon critic of the Iraq war who was not hate-filled about it, but rational. I occasionally posted comments at his blog. Then an incident occurred at Parapundit in July 2007 that led me to stop posting there, and basically led to the end of my correspondence with Parker as well. Other than the actual exchange at the Parapundit thread, I never said anything publicly about the incident, until Parker himself brought it up, gratuitously and dishonestly, about a week ago at Secular Right, requiring a reply from me to straighten the record.

Here is the comment I posted at Secular Right:

February 26th, 2009 at 08:30 | #19

Lawrence Auster

Randall Parker writes:

“I also found Larry Auster’s deleted comment about marriage and Heather Mac Donald (who I greatly admire) pretty mild stuff. Though he stopped commenting on my blog because I didn’t delete commenters who weren’t polite to him. So go figure.”

As Randall Parker well knows, and as I stated clearly at the time in the extended exchange at his blog (here), the reason I stopped commenting at his blog was that every time I commented there I became the object of personal attacks. The last time was an anti-Semitic attack. After I said that the case against Lewis Libby was an outrage and that he should be pardoned, a commenter wrote:

“Auster is a jew [sic], of course he thinks Libby is innocent. Bush, on the other hand, is just doing what his masters tell him to.”

Mr. Parker then politely explained to the commenter why his reasoning was faulty, but Parker did not object to the commenter’s anti-Semitism. He didn’t say that he wouldn’t allow commenters to refer to other commenters at his site as “jews.” To refer to a person a “jew,” lower case, is to dehumanize that person. Parker had no problem with that.

I never called on Parker to delete commenters. I objected to the fact that he didn’t tell the anti-Semitic commenter that anti-Semitic statements, particularly about other commenters at Parker’s own blog, were not welcome.

But how does Parker describe the situation? That “Auster stopped commenting on my blog because I didn’t delete commenters who weren’t polite to him.”

I’m sickened that Randall Parker, who used to respect me and frequently quoted me, would so misrepresent what happened, and in a way that amounts to a smear, portraying me as a tyrant who demands that commenters should be excluded and their comments deleted merely for not being “polite” to me.

But sadly, this is standard behavior in the paleocon world. Paleocons [my reference here is to Taki] equate Israel with Nazis and side with those seeking to destroy Israel, and they say that this is just “criticism” of Israel. A commenter made a disgusting anti-Semitic remark about me, and Parker characterizes this as a commenter not being “polite” to me.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 03, 2009 08:03 AM | Send