“Difficult issues”
I haven’t posted all week because I was busy with difficult issues. I would define those as things that require more than a couple minutes’ thought, and they’re — at least nominally — part of my job.
The first difficult issue was anti-Semitism. Some local hack (quite a well-known “journalist” overall though) wrote a column for a small Islamic youth magazine that “quoted” (without quotation marks or direct quotes) “experts” (all notorious Holocaust deniers) claiming that it was scientifically proven that six million Jews could not have been killed by the Germans. Just in case this wasn’t clear enough — after all, he was just quoting, no? — he added that at most 300,000 died, most of them of disease.
Not surprisingly, the piece caused an uproar. The country’s best-known human rights activist (a man for whom I have much respect) suggested to the media that every time a Jewish cemetery is desecrated, this columnist guy be locked up.
Maybe this is a cultural thing, but I always thought human rights activists were the ones trying to get journalists out of prison, not into it.
In any case, the columnist backtracked when he was put in front of a TV camera with the head of the Jewish community here, a rather formidable character who was both in style and substance a few sizes too big for the hack.
The more important question was, even if this dude is totally marginal (and I’ve been following his stuff — personally, I think he’s nuts), is this a society where anti-Semitism is on the rise — a society that’s all too happy to blame all its woes on outsiders or supposed outsiders? (Jews have been here since they were invited by the Sultan after they were kicked out by us enlightened Western Christians.) Yes to the latter, but I’m not so sure about the former.
You can see why it’d be difficult for someone who has the phrase “I’m not sure” in his vocabulary to draft an editorial that has the necessary self-assured gravitas (but I did it anyway).
