Currently viewing the tag: “Marty”
UNION THUGS CRASH TEA PARTY RALLY – ASSAULT CONSERVATIVE PROTESTERS-
Far left thugs get out and get a little bloody…
Former Massachusetts Republican Congressional candidate Marty Lamb was assaulted and knocked to the ground by a union thug yesterday at a tea party rally.
VA Right reported:
DaTech Guy has more on this rally and latest assault by a leftist thug. He says the union members were signing in (so they could get paid?).
So what are the odds that our corrupt far left media will ignore this latest violent assault on a tea party protester?
State Rep. Martin Kiar, D-Davie, is seeking a promotion. He’s running for the Senate seat currently held by state Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston.
He’s a tireless campaigner. In 2006, when he unseated an incumbent legislator, then state Rep. Susan Goldstein, R-Weston, he did so in large party through months of door-to-door campaigning.
He fended off a 2008 challenger the same way. And with Rich not seeking re-election, Kiar started his door-knocking on Thursday.
Kiar, 33, already has a slew of endorsements from popular Broward Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, Property Appraiser Lori Parrish, state Rep. Franklin Sands, D-Weston, and state Rep. Evan Jenne, D-Dania Beach.
And he was just endorsed for the Senate seat by the Broward County Council of Professional Firefighters.
Via Claire Berlinski, a heartening development in Egypt:
… a widespread call by Muslim intellectuals and activists upon Egyptian Muslims at large to flock to Coptic churches across the country to attend Coptic Christmas Eve mass, to show solidarity with the nation's Coptic minority, but also to serve as "human shields" against possible attacks by Islamist militants.
Her conclusion:
It is impossible for anyone who is closely watching what's going on in Egypt right now to conclude that there are no significant forces for tolerance and civilization at work in the contemporary Muslim world.
What happened at Harvard yesterday.
Harvard University – Marty Peretz – New Republic – Protocols – HTTP
Today, my old boss and friend has just been honored at Harvard and $ 650,000 fellowship fund endosed by supporters in his honor. Fallows concludes his coverage:
I was among those on Peretz's back for the bigotry of his comments, so let me explain why I think this outcome is OK.
Harvard University – Harvard – Marty Peretz – New Republic – United States
Matthew Duss calls out Goldblog, Shafer, and myself:
It’s interesting that none of Helen Thomas’s own path-breaking accomplishments were allowed to distract from her defenestration. What explains the difference between the two cases is, precisely as Kurtz suggested, the double standard that exists with regard to Jews and Israel on one hand, and Palestinians on the other. Statements that would never be tolerated against Jews or Israel are regularly made and tolerated against Palestinians.
Jews – Palestinian people – Middle East – Warfare and Conflict – Israel-Palestine
Over the past weeks, Marty Peretz, the editor in chief of The New Republic, has been criticized for a number of offensive statements about Muslims, including a claim that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” I penned an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe comparing the Peretz affair to the way reporter Helen Thomas was treated after making an offensive remark about Jews and Israel. Noting that Peretz has engaged in this sort of language against Muslims and Arabs for decades, I point out that Peretz “continues to receive a special dispensation for these libels, while Thomas received public condemnation and a pink slip for her single denial of Jewish national claims”:
Condemning Thomas’s remarks, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that they were “rooted in the same grotesque motivation’’ as Holocaust denial: “To deny to Jews the truth of their own history.’’
This is, of course, precisely what Peretz attempted to do to the Palestinians for years, yet Goldberg has, to date, issued no similar condemnation.
By upholding a double standard for these slanders, or simply ignoring them, too many journalists have effectively abetted them.
Read it here.
Ta-Nehisi dissents:
On close reading, neither Andrew nor Jack are offering a defense so much as they are changing the subject. The question at hand is something along the lines of, "Does Martin Peretz exhibit a pattern of bigotry?" Andrew and Jack, instead, are addressing a question along the lines of "Is Martin Peretz a great journalist?" With respect for both Andrew and Jack, this is obfuscation. Ty Cobb was both a great baseball player and a bigot. The notion that we must choose between the two, that one mitigates the other, that good people don't do deplorable things, that deplorable people don't great things, emanates from our own inability to understand that bigotry is not strictly the preserve of orcs… If Peretz is not a bigot, then the word has no meaning.
He proceeds to pick through TNR's writing on race during Marty's tenure.
New Republic – Martin Peretz – Baseball – Harvard University – Marty Peretz
Fallows has an update of developments and commentary. This reader letter is not far off my own evolution in the past decade:
My father was one of the last British officials of the Raj. After partition, he worked for ten years as a district official for the new Pakistan government and I spent my early years in a tolerant Baluchistan, safe and happy. Decades passed and I found myself a US citizen and living in Florida on 9/11. Then, despite a generally liberal constitution, I spent several years loathing the name of Islam and the fact that moderate Muslims had seemingly failed to prevent the tragedy.
Now comes a further turn in my life: the latest upsurge in Islamophobia has brought me back to my philosophical roots. While not fully able to account for the phenomenon, I am appalled by its manifestation. My inclination is to blame a combination of a bad economy and demagoguery from the likes of Glenn Beck. When we so desperately need them, where are the moderate Republicans of stature to put a stop to this foul nonsense?
Pakistan – Islam – Glenn Beck – Government – Florida
Many readers have taken me to task for allegedly allowing my personal feelings and gratitude toward Marty Peretz overwhelm the Dish's usual impatience with rank expressions of bigotry. We posted two examples of such dissents here. I try valiantly not to allow this to happen – and I confess to a deep conflict here. For a more dispassionate – and, on reflection, definitive – treatment of the issue, check out Jim Fallows' post here. It's one of the more elegantly concise arguments against such crude generalizations as "Muslim life is cheap" as one could read. And it helps connect this newly ascendant truism to the bigotries of the past in a way that is truly helpful. I'd like to reassure Jim that "hate the sin, love the sinner" is indeed my sentiment.
Former TNR acting editor, Bob Wright, also elaborates, as he did in his brilliant book, The Evolution of God, (my review here) how the Scriptures of Jews, Christians and Muslims all contain ugly as well as life-saving passages, and how missing their complexity does justice to none of them. The violence done in the name of Jesus over the centuries is certainly comparable to the violence done by Muslims.
None of this affects any individual judgment of an individual's motives. But then we have this from the Daily Beast:
"Reached by phone, Peretz offered the following response to [critical] comments before hanging up: 'The notion that after teaching 45 years at Harvard and people giving money in my honor that I have to defend myself – please.' "
In a word: unacceptable. Sorry, Marty, you do have to defend yourself. Addressing the serious and reasoned critiques of Fallows and Wright would be a start.
Marty Peretz – Jews – Muslim – Harvard University – Martin Peretz
A reader writes:
In the spirit of vigilantly pointing out what is right under your nose I offer the following critique of this post defending Marty Peretz.
With all these things said about Peretz, the fact remains that if anybody used the exact same language with any other group of people, they would be trashed unambiguously. I think that we may be too quick and harsh to judge in most circumstances, but if the part of the formulation that he didn't apologize for had been made with "Jews" or "blacks," then the person who said it would be persona non grata amongst the intelligentsia and forced into disrespectable retirement.
It wouldn't matter how many other good characteristics they had. Nobody like Jack Shafer would offer any sort of defense whatsoever and you wouldn't write a blog post on how torn you are over it. The condemnation would be clear and simple.
I know you know this and have pretty much said so but still the answer to Jack is "yes WHY are we just worrying about this now? Why has this vileness not been taken head on before? Why are we holding back on this when we wouldn't in other similar circumstances?"
Some forms of bigotry are respectable and anti-Muslim bigotry is the top one. It won't even be a blip in his career while others have gone down for far less. Why should he have a better fate here than any of those people?
Something is very wrong and that matters much more here than noting his otherwise good character and your long friendship with him.
Another writes:
I read your whole post
on Marty Peretz three times and was really blown away by the cognitive
dissonance of it. Your assertion that Peretz is committed to openly
airing debates is terribly unconvincing given his derision of rights
that are designed to foster such debates.In the span of one week, Peretz wrote two blog posts demonstrating
his open contempt for the First Amendment. He started out by saying,
"I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that [Muslims]
are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my
gut the sense that they will abuse." Abuse? It does not appear to
occur to him, in this post or his apology, that there is no such thing as an "abuse" of the First Amendment. An act is either constitutionally protected or it isn't.Then, as if to balance out his hostility to one group's rights with hostility to another's, he suggested that the government get an injunction to stop the Qur'an burning at the Dove World Training Center. Read this part:
But it is disgusting. And it is disgusting no matter how many
people believe the act would be and should be protected by the First
Amendment.In fact, it is uncivilized. I believe that the Obama administration
should go to the Supreme Court or maybe tactically to the most sensible
and civilized appellate court and seek an injunction against
this atrocity that 1. will encourage Muslim madmen to respond in kind
and 2. will also encourage primitive Christians to extend and expand the
auto da fé. (Italics in the original, if you can believe it.)Yes, burning the Qur'an, burning any book, is disgusting, but
disgusting and "uncivilized" speech is still protected. Could you
imagine the Supreme Court just dismissing standards like incitement of
"immediate breach of the peace" or "imminent lawless action" and saying,
"But it's uncivilized"?
Marty Peretz – First Amendment to the United States Constitution – United States – First Amendment – Muslim
Jack Shafer defends my old boss here. The sharpest point:
Say what you will about him, he has remained committed to ideas and intellectual life.
Two and three quarter cheers to that. When I was editor, I cannot imagine anyone else allowing me to air the kind of debates I did back then, against the teeth of many little orthodoxies, and throwing the dice on young talent like me or Kinsley or now Frank Foer. Time after time, when I went to bat for a magazine that would truly be open to debate, he backed me … until the five-year cyclical Wieseltier coup against whichever editor he had come to envy. (The exception to open debate and intellectual honesty was and is anything to do with Israel, a subject where the debate at The New Republic is profoundly intellectually rigged, a fact that successive editors have simply had to accept or not take the job at all.) Take gay rights, where Marty owned a magazine that pioneered the military and marriage debate that transformed a civil rights movement or race, where his insistence on airing the really tough issues helped shift the debate for the better.
Shafer argues that Marty's loathing of all things Arab and Muslim goes back a very long way. So why the fuss now? I suspect it is because it came at a moment of very ugly, populist anti-Muslim hatred, where it is a moral responsibility of decent people to stand up against the mob rather than to egg it on. Marty decided to join the mob, not restrain it. To his credit, Marty belatedly apologized. The oddness of his apology – its almost Freudian formulation – is simply a confession that he sometimes cannot help himself. The combination of a blog and Marty was always going to be an explosive mix.
Marty is a man of deep passion and such passion, especially on a subject like the Middle East, sometimes leads to irrationality. He is not immune to this, but neither am I at times. Who is? We are all human. And as someone who knows this human being extremely well, I'd like simply to say that in his deepest heart, I believe Marty is a good man who has done good things. He has a real conscience and a history of great kindness, compassion and generosity. I am not the only person whose life would never have spread its wings so soon without him – even as I have come to differ with him as times have changed. And I, for one, hope this latest spark of hate in a very dry tinder box will not distract from the true content of his character, and the endurance of his legacy of intellectual vigor.
He writes the following about a paragraph I first noted here and that Nick Kristof subsequently noted here:
The embarrassing sentence is: "I wonder whether I need honor these
people and pretend they are worthy of the privileges of the First
Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse." I
wrote that, but I do not believe that. I do not think that any group or
class of persons in the United States should be denied the protections
of the First Amendment, not now, not ever… So I apologize for my sentence, not least because it misrepresents me.
Jim Fallows originally pulled back from writing anything about what Marty wrote, and now regrets it. He's also mystified by the apology. I very rarely criticize Marty because of the great friendship I feel for him, and gratitude for the opportunities he gave me, but this was too much even for me. Kristof accepts the apology but insists he does not share Marty's broad views of Muslims as a whole. John Cole says the hatred of Arabs and Muslims in general is not new in the writing of Marty and wonders why only now is an apology in order. I have to say that the sentence "I wrote that, but do not believe that" requires elaboration, or we should assume that everything Marty writes may not be what he believes. The question is: if he did not believe that, why did he write it?
Or would the answer to that question raise still more?
