I don't know about you, but when I see the words "death threat" in my daily newspaper, I expect to read about an actual threat of death to someone somewhere. [Wikipedia agrees: "death threat is a threat (often made anonymously) against a person to kill him or her." Here.] I got a threat once from an angry reader on the phone and I called the police and that was not even regarding my impending "death"; just a broken leg or two.
For reasons I cannot fully explain, I became briefly obsessed on Friday afternoon with the Boston Globe's report of "death threats" against The New Republic's Jason Zengerle by members of the Kos community who did not like his reporting on Jerome Armstrong and Moulitsas Zúniga. The article, which was written by Globe intern, Michael M. Grynbaum, here, struck me as playing to all the clichés the mainstream media offers about the liberal blogosphere, but nowhere more than in the reporting of alleged "death threats" against Zengerle, which when I read it, I knew simply could not be true. (Why the article made no mention of what struck me as a central fact of the drama--Zengerle's employment of an accusatory e-mail that turned out to be a forgery--also piqued my curiosity/annoyance, but remains another story.)
Anyway, on Friday afternoon, I made a few calls and reached both Globe Washington bureau chief Peter Canellos and Jason Zengerle. (I could not reach the article's author, Grynbaum, who was not in the office, and does not have voicemail on the system.) I spoke to Zengerle first and asked him to describe the threat. He read to me the contents of an e-mail that, in rather graphic, sick and disgusting terms--relating to concentration camps--explained to him that the writer wished he would one day die a similar death. It was clearly the product of a sick mind and no doubt disturbing to receive, but nothing in it could conceivably be labeled a "threat" of any kind. When I told Zengerle that while I found the letter to be "both insane and obscene," I couldn't find anything threatening in its contents, he found my conclusions disturbing. First he sent me an e-mail in which he said, "If you write about this, I expect you will print the attached e-mail in its entirety (with edits for the two instances of profanity in the last paragraph, if necessary) so that you can then explain to your readers how this note --which I received because Moulitsas put my personal e-mail address on his website at the end of a long screed attacking me and the magazine I work for-- is not, in your definition of the term, a death threat."
When I told him that I would characterize the note as best as I could but that for reasons of taste and space I could not imagine that my editors at MSNBC.com would want to print it, he sent me a second e-mail in which he insisted, "The fact that we're even discussing whether it constitutes a "death threat" is insane and obscene." He then went on to explain the fact that he had received hundreds of e-mails as a result of the fact that "Moulitsas printed my personal e-mail address on his website, and "a handful wishing me death and/or some sort of bodily harm. I deleted virtually all of them, but I did hang on to the one I forwarded to you, because I found it particularly unsettling. I assumed you would feel the same way. Look, if a note from an anonymous e-mailer wishing for me, a Jew, to be put in a concentration camp and then tortured by Nazi guards until I choke on human feces is not, in your mind, a death threat, well, that's your opinion. But that's not an opinion I share. It's not as if this e-mailer was hoping that people defecate in my mouth as part of a fraternity prank. He was hoping for this to happen to me in Auschwitz! Do you think the Nazi guards, in the e-mailer's scenario, ultimately perform the Heimlich on the choking Kapo and save his life? I don't. If you want to have a debate about all this--in which you basically soft-pedal or in some sense defend this e-mail--then we can have it. But I'd really rather not. Therefore, I'd really rather you not write about this on your blog. To try to turn this difference of opinion into a "gotcha" item strikes me as unfair and unworthy of you."
Now I've never spoken to Zengerle before and know nothing about him. And I've not waded too deeply into the waters of TNR's fight with Kos and company. So I'm staying clear of those issues. But this is not a matter of "gotcha" journalism, nor for God's sake an attempt by me to "soft-pedal or in some sense defend this e-mail" which after all, I characterized to Zengerle as "both insane and obscene." It's a matter of the meaning of words. I once heard Susan Sontag and Nadine Gordimer describe the purpose of intellectuals is to defend the language. I agree. There was no "death threat" here; just the kind of e-mails that are the price of putting strong opinions on the Internet--something that happens with unhappy frequency here at Altercation, and the main reason I pay somebody to screen them for me.
The real question here is not why Zengerle allowed his judgment to be clouded by his reaction to the upsetting e-mails, but why the Boston Globe employed his mistaken characterization; one that, by coincidence, happens to play into the current cliché about what dangerous lunatics liberal bloggers are; wanting to defeat poor ol' Joe Lieberman one day, threatening death to TNR writers the next. Yes, the article was written by an intern, but it edited by real editors. When I spoke to Peter Canellos, he was quite friendly and forthcoming, but took issue with the above reading of the article. He described it as merely an attempt to show that the rough and tumble of real politics had now spread to the liberal blogosphere and here we had a kind of political coming-of-age story. Perhaps many people read it that way. I didn't. I still don't. Zengerle's e-mailer may have been crazy but he was not threatening. And if words are to have any meaning at all, somebody needs to point that out. Whether that's "unworthy" of me, I'll let others be the judge.
Here we go again. Once again we read in the Times here: "In the view of many French Jews, anti-Semitism is again on the rise here."
Is there a single piece of evidence --or even a man in the street-- to support this assertion anywhere in the article? Not a one. In fact, the only quote in the piece that pretends to support its thesis actually contradicts it: "Mr. Lévy then offered a more disturbing reason for opposing a move. 'I fear it could awaken anti-Semitism.'" Well if it needs to be awakened, then it's not a very big deal is it, bub?
A lot of Jewish organizations get their funding --and a lot of Jews their personal identities-- from hyping anti-Semitism in Europe in general and France in particular. Some crazy people, like Andrew Sullivan, have even insisted that the period today is as bad as it was just before the Holocaust. This is nonsense on stilts, even by Little Roy's considerable standards. As far as I can tell, any increase in anti-Semitism in Western Europe is attributable to the influx of young Arabs and they have reasons --whether you or I like or not-- to hate Jews that have nothing whatever to do with traditional European anti-Semitism. In my last two trips to Europe in May and June, I found anti-Semitism to be at historic lows among non-Arabs. That doesn't make it true, of course, but just for once I'd like to see some evidence in this never-ending hurricane of hysteria. And while we're on the topic, I'd like to see some attention paid to the exploitation of right-wing American anti-Semitism that underlies the Bush campaign against The New York Times and the rest of what Republican Rep. Peter King called its "arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda." As Jon Carrol observed, "The New York Times contains the word 'New York.' Many members of the president's base consider 'New York' to be a nifty code word for 'Jewish.'" This anti-Times campaign reminds me of the conservative campaign to slander George Soros, which was also a sometimes explicit, usually implicit exploitation of traditional Jewish stereotypes. Remember Tony Blankley calling Soros a "robber baron" and "pirate capitalist," and "a man who, when he was plundering the world's currencies, in England in '92, he caused the Southeast Asian financial crisis in '97. He said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions.... He is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust." (Blankley later wrote me that his comments were "both incomplete and pregnant with a malicious implication I did not intend." It's all here.) Anyway, there it is.
Was nobody home at the New York Times yesterday? First, I didn't get a paper delivered on Saturday or Sunday despite four --count 'em, four-- calls. Then there's this article whose premise makes no sense. Dude, the Supreme Court is an explicitly anti-Democratic institution. It rules on the constitutionality of issues, not their popularity. Every single adult in New York State could believe that gays ought to be allowed to marry but it would still not change a court's ruling. For that you'd need a new constitution --or at least a few different laws. What's more, it was a state ruling, not a city ruling. Nobody's arguing that the state is so famously liberal, just the city. And even that refers only to Manhattan and the hipper parts of Brooklyn. And dude, Manhattan voted over ninety percent for Kerry, even though nobody really liked him. We're as liberal as we ever were, and proud of it, dammit.
Let's hear it for Oliver Willis, Like Kryptonite to stupid.
Paul Nelson, RIP.