Addendum to Yesterday

In yesterday’s post (here) I pointed out that an article in the NY Times was ignoring a lot that’s going on Norway among the immigrants, specifically rapes and other nasty things. Let me expand on that a little bit.

If the Times insists that this kind of thing is not going on, then why not say so? Recall this post from last year when I compared an essay in the Times by Martha Nussbaum to a passage in a book by Paul Berman, and showed that it’s very likely that Nussbaum doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Notice that both of these people are liberals. With respect to Norway, we have someone left-of-center, Bruce Bawer, who has been reporting from there for years. If Berman and Bawer are wrong, then why not say so? Since they do not say so, that leads me to believe that they know perfectly well that those two are right.

Since they know this, then why hide the truth? Here I am speculating, but I presume the idea is that they want to protect their friends, the Muslims, and if they were to tell the truth, racists in the West would get the wrong idea and start bashing them. (They used similar reasoning to prevent their readers from knowing about starvation in Ukraine in the early 1930s.) But if this is their reasoning, there are many reasons for thinking it is horribly mistaken.

First, the Times is no longer a fairly efficient gatekeeper that prevents news of this sort from getting to the racists. Racists can easily use the Internet to find out discreditable information about any group they want to.

Second, while doing nothing to prevent racists from getting a hold of this information, they are preventing their huge liberal and leftist base from getting it. Many of these people get their news from the Times and just a few other sources that withhold the same sorts of information, and so we see what we saw in the Duke lacrosse team story: anyone who went to conservative sources knew what was going on while those who relied on the Times were in the dark.

Third, it means failing to help people one would like to help, specifically Muslim women and the occasional non-Muslim women who have been victimized by Muslim men.

Fourth, it means using spin rather than simply telling the unvarnished truth, and using spin is just a bad policy. Once you start using that, your enemies will use it against you.

Fifth, it means sticking with a policy that perhaps needs to be changed, or at least questioned. If the people you are trying to protect are that vicious, why are you trying to protect them? Maybe it’s time to stop protecting them.

Sixth, once people figure out what’s going on, they will wonder why you didn’t tell them. This lessens your credibility.

Now let me turn to a piece in the Guardian yesterday by one of the many Swedish writers of detective stories, Henning Mankell. (See here.) Here is what he has to say about Breivik:

[Breivik] cannot be dismissed simply as a "madman", he is something more. He regards himself as a soldier and he thinks that he has something important to say.

The question is, what?

Perhaps we can find the answer in a book that the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote during the trial in Israel in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann.

I know that this is perhaps a radical idea for Guardian readers, but is it asking too much of Mankell to simply look at what Breivik has to say for himself instead of turning to a dead philosopher? Breivik does have a manifesto on the Internet, and while it is long, the beginning of it gives us a pretty good idea of what he's interested in. Breivik, after all, isn’t a postmodernist writing hopelessly scrambled prose; he’s pretty clear (especially given that he wrote in English, which isn’t even his native tongue). So why not give the guy a break and look at his actual words?

Even a mass murderer deserves to have his own words examined and not someone else's.