 "Humanising Nasrallah is normalising terrorism: Why ‘liberals’ just can’t stop pandering to Islamists")
The New York Times does it, again!
As one thought its “revenge attack” comment to describe violence against Bangladeshi Hindus was a genuine mistake, here comes an NYT obituary for Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, highlighting how “gifted” an orator he was, sincerely desiring “equality” for all religions in Lebanon.
While the NYT report wants us to believe that Nasrallah sought “equality for Muslims, Jews, and Christians”, the truth is that under his watch in Lebanon, Beirut lost its cosmopolitan character. He would also openly vouch for the destruction of the Jewish state as his Iran-backed outfit, Hezbollah, carried out dastardly attacks on Jews around the world. Nasrallah saw the Jews as the “source of all corruption and deception” and even accused them of faking the Holocaust. Such was his abhorrence for them that he was on record saying, “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
So much for his liberalism and pluralism!
However, if one thought this was a typical NYT problem, then think again. Not very long ago, the Washington Post, an arch-rival as a spokesperson of liberal doublespeak, came up with an obituary of ISIS chief Abu Bakr-al Baghdadi, calling him an “austere religious scholar”. Interestingly, the first version of the Washington Post’s headline called Baghdadi “terrorist-in-chief”, before it was changed to “austere religious scholar at the helm of Islamic State”. So, it wasn’t an honest mistake but a deliberate, deceptive afterthought!
This ‘liberal’ propensity to discover, if not invent, ‘goodness’ among the worst of dictators, fundamentalists, and even terrorists opens an altogether new ‘liberal’ parameter to look at the world. Everything just became so good, so positive, so uplifting. It’s a brave new world of journalistic writing where a terrorist is a human rights activist, and a dictator is a democrat/humanist par excellence.
Maybe the NYT and the Washington Post can come up with a model obit write-ups for future writers and editors to take cue from. Here are two case studies that the opinion editors of the Western newspapers and magazines can look into:
Impact Shorts
More ShortsCase 1
Adolf Hitler, an artist, book lover and animal rights activist, dies at 56
The body of Adolf Hitler was found in a bunker with his beloved wife. Hitler was an avid book lover who had more than 16,000 books in his private libraries. He was also the bestselling author of ‘Mein Kampf’, which in later years would help former Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in preparing for “practical politics”. Hitler was a hard-core vegetarian. Such was his faith in vegetarianism that towards the later stages of his life, he took only clear soup and mashed potatoes.
Last but not least, Hitler was a promising painter. As a young man, he would paint and sell postcards showcasing serene and tranquil scenes from Austria’s city life. Had he not been rejected twice by Austria’s Academy of Fine Arts for one of its courses, he would have never left Austria for good, and he might have become a fine artist. The world, in that case, wouldn’t have faced the trauma of World War II.
Case 2
Saddam Hussein: An Iraqi leader with sad childhood who wrote Quran with his own blood
Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging after being convicted of “crimes against humanity”. But looked closely, Saddam himself was a victim of circumstances, especially during his childhood. Troubles for him began even when he was not yet born. His father left Saddam’s mother about six months before his birth. Anguished and angry, she would try committing suicide on a couple of occasions. She would also regularly smack her stomach in the hope of aborting the yet-to-be-born Saddam. After his birth, his mother remarried, but to a man who would physically and psychologically torment Saddam for years to come. Things became so unbearable that he ran away from home when he was just 10. Maybe it was his difficult childhood that in later years brought him closer to religion, a manifestation of which was his decision to commission a ‘Quran’ to be written using 27 litres of his own blood. Saddam also wrote romance novels under the pen name S Hussein.
One can similarly come up with alternative obituaries. In the case of Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, for instance, one can bring out the ‘reformer’ in him by highlighting his love for ‘Les Miserables’, which he called “a divine book”. Similarly, Idi Amin can be humanised by focussing on his wretched childhood and how he compensated for it by obsessively watching Tom & Jerry in his adult life!
Ironically, this Left-‘liberal’ love is largely confined to dictators, terrorists, and religious fundamentalists and rarely gets reflected on democracy and democratically elected leaderships. Here, one needs to recall the great NYT advertisement in 2021, seeking resumes for the job of a South Asia business correspondent based in New Delhi. One of the requirements sought for the position even startled the staunchest of NYT supporters. The American newspaper, quite categorically, sought the candidate to be critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his “muscular nationalism”.
Explaining its stand, the newspaper wrote matter-of-factly, “India’s future now stands at a crossroads. Mr (Narendra) Modi is advocating a self-sufficient, muscular nationalism centred on the country’s Hindu majority. That vision puts him at odds with the interfaith, multicultural goals of modern India’s founders.”
Interestingly, the NYT has never put such preconditions for postings in Hong Kong or in mainland China. It has never asked the applicants to prove their pro-democratic credentials while applying for a position in Hong Kong or to publicly criticise ‘Emperor’ Xi Jinping for a job in Beijing.
With democratic India, this wasn’t a one-off incident in the Western media. In fact, there was a barrage of news reports and articles at a time when Prime Minister Modi was about to go to the US on a state visit, demonising India and the Indian leadership. The singular agenda was to say it loud and clear: That India was not a US ally, and it could far less be a reliable partner!
In fact, when one reads Ashley Rindsberg’s The Gray Lady Winked, it becomes obvious that the Western media’s, especially the NYT’s, love for dictators, terrorists was not a new phenomenon: The NYT was “unabashedly pro-Hitler in the Thirties, serving as a sturdy fount of Dr Goebbels’s propaganda”. The newspaper that, “for 20 years, has made Vladimir Putin out to be a second Stalin was unabashedly pro-Stalin in its coverage of the famine in Ukraine”. And the paper that “persistently envisions an imaginary Holocaust in Syria blacked out the real one at the time, having carefully downplayed the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews from 1933”. There was such a method in the NYT’s madness reporting that the Holocaust stories rarely featured on the front page of the American newspaper.
So, today, as one sees the NYT going out of the way to humanise Nasrallah as a “great orator” and a humanist, one is reminded of the great Leftist rush in France to both legitimise and humanise Khomeini, who had then taken refuge in Paris in the 1960s and ’70s after being kicked out of Tehran. Author Kim Ghattas writes in her book, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Rivalry That Unravelled the Middle East, how France’s Leftist intellectuals, being hugely influential in shaping public opinion, were “anti-establishment, anti-power, and anti-imperial”. “They saw in the Iranian revolutionaries the embodiment of the values they had fought for themselves in the revolution of May 1968 on the streets of Paris. They wanted to believe in Khomeini, the sage under the apple tree. Sartre had once declared: ‘I have no religion, but if I had to pick one it would be Shariati.’”
The great Leftist wet dream of unleashing revolutions around the world is not over yet. Failing to do so on their own, these Left-‘liberals’ pander to the Islamists to do that. The problem is the moment a revolution reaches its critical tipping point, the Left-‘liberals’ become the first casualties. The Iranian revolution of 1979 is a case in study. Still, as one sees in the Nasrallah episode, the Leftist disenchantment with Islamism is not over yet.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views
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