Apology to Norway

We hope that the Norwegian government and people will accept the 'Post’s apology and forgive us for any offense or hurt caused at this sensitive time.

"A Jerusalem Post editorial published July 25 on the massacre in Norway three days earlier triggered an avalanche of critical talkbacks and letters to the editor.

Anders Behring Breivik confessed to detonating a car bomb outside Oslo’s government headquarters that claimed eight victims and then shooting dead 69 people, many of them teenagers, at a summer camp on nearby Utoeya Island exactly two weeks ago.

The editorial squarely condemned the attack, saying that “as Israelis, a people that is sadly all too familiar with the horrors of indiscriminate, murderous terrorism, our hearts go out with empathy to the Norwegian people.”

However, it also, inappropriately, raised issues that were not directly pertinent, such as the dangers of multiculturalism, European immigration policies and even the Oslo peace process.

“Your editorial, while insistently condemning the violence in Norway, shockingly and shamelessly attempts to offer justification for his extremist violent act of terror,” wrote Esam Omeish in one of many letters to the editor, several of which were published in the paper."

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=232535

Cleaning house at JPost maybe?

Perhaps it is trying to position itself to become one of Israel's leading newspapers.

Over and over I see people confuse causation with justification. This comes up in this forum in particular when someone comments on the causes of some attack, say a terrorist attack or some IDF killings, and notes that it was in response to some other event or to the pernicious situation that the perps live under. The Breivik atrocity in Norway has been a perfect example. If someone makes observations about possible contributing factors to Breivik's actions, like his intellectual influences, or his political theories, that is not justifying what he did, it is talking about why he did it. If someone make comments on why someone blew himself up in a pizza parlor, or why the IAF bombed the shit out of someplace in Gaza, they are not justifying the action as such, they are saying it's connected to what went before, and it is always the case that what went before is relevant; with a different past, people do different things, people are very much creatures of their environment and upbringing. Whatever chance we have to produce positive change depends on understanding cause and effect relations, why people do things, so you have to be able to talk about that. You can dispute whether some bomber blew himself up because of his hopeless circumstances or because of his islamic fundy politics, but in neither case are you justifying what was done, as such, you are examining the question what might be done to prevent future occurrences.

Now the Breivik thing, the JPost editorials and apologies and responses to apologies are a perfect example. You have on the one hand people (Rubin, Glick) who want to condemn what Breivik did while also saying his intellectual tendencies are irrelevant or not so bad, because they happen to share some of those tendencies. Now they are incorrectly, at least in a narrow sense, accused of justifying what he did, when in fact they are justifying their own political views from being discredited by Breivik's writings and actions. It is true the Glick steps over the line a bit, but the thinking of people like Glick and Rubin is so confused that I am reluctant to construe the use of propaganda memes like "terrorist training camp" as approving of Breivik's actions, it seems more like a bad rhetorical habit stemming from thinking of anyone who supports Palestinians as supporting terrorism etc. It's hard to think sloppy in precise areas of thought, sloppiness bleeds into other things.

The same thing happens when some Palestinian commits some atrocity, and some Palestinian supporter points out (correctly) that with a different living situation he might well not have committed the atrocity in question, and is then attacked for "justifying terrorism". Now that is NOT justifying terrorism, it is saying terrorism does not occur in a vacuum, it occurs in particular times and places with particular sorts of perps and particular sorts of victims, and it must be studied with an eye to what might easily be done differently so as to avoid repeats.

If you can't discuss why things happen, candidly, you are stuck with the status quo or with what the future imposes.

You have on the one hand people (Rubin, Glick) who want to condemn what Breivik did while also saying his intellectual tendencies are irrelevant or not so bad, because they happen to share some of those tendencies. Now they are incorrectly, at least in a narrow sense, accused of justifying what he did, when in fact they are justifying their own political views from being discredited by Breivik's writings and actions. It is true the Glick steps over the line a bit, but the thinking of people like Glick and Rubin is so confused that I am reluctant to construe the use of propaganda memes like "terrorist training camp" as approving of Breivik's actions, it seems more like a bad rhetorical habit stemming from thinking of anyone who supports Palestinians as supporting terrorism etc. It's hard to think sloppy in precise areas of thought, sloppiness bleeds into other things.

True. I doubt there's all but a few sick individuals who'd actually try to justify what Breivik did. What Rubin in particular does, probably unintentionally, is try to lessen the sympathy towards the victims (I mean, after all they were kids at a pro-terrorist training program according to him), and that in itself shows a serious lack of sensitivity and judgement on his part. He's so busy flailing around trying to blame Norway for bringing this on itself by not being tough on terrorism that he doesn't realise or doesn't care how it comes across...

"What Rubin in particular does, probably unintentionally, is try to lessen the sympathy towards the victims (I mean, after all they were kids at a pro-terrorist training program according to him), and that in itself shows a serious lack of sensitivity and judgement on his part. He's so busy flailing around trying to blame Norway for bringing this on itself by not being tough on terrorism that he doesn't realise or doesn't care how it comes across..."

I think he doesn't realize. If he realized he would adjust his narrative. Norway's problem, in Rubin's view, is that it doesn't want to BDS Hamas, it wants to BDS Israel, and that overrides any real empathy with Norway or the dead or injured, and that fact tells. All he and Ms Glick etc. really had to do is maintain a decent silence, and they would have been fine.

I was a bit reluctant to clarify this issue because it is such fun to watch him thrash around, and he might stop. But he is going to stop eventually anyway.

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As an aside, have you noted that we STILL don't get much commentary these days from old Tom Friedman, inventor of the Friedman Unit? Isn't it great? Propagandists don't always just go on forever.

the time immediately after September 11, when several leftists (Noam Chomsky among them) immediately launched into a wooden recitation of every dirty imperialist enterprise that the US had ever took part in, as a way of trying to understand or contextualise the event.

Those remarks were poorly timed and considered by many to be in bad taste. However, in fairness to Chomsky, he did not insinuate that the victims themselves were complicit, which Rubin did when he said that the youth leaders were taking part in a "pro-terrorist program".

I think the primary motivation of Rubin's piece, as well as Geller's piece and numerous others, was to try and prevent the Oslo massacre from becoming a kind of counter-narrative to 9-11 and the various other examples of Islamic terrorism.

I like a good deal of Mr Chomsky's earlier work, but like Dershowitz, he's not as sharp as he once was. Both of them seem to write emotional drivel these days. To be fair to Chomsky, he was a genius, and the Dersh was not.

After 9/11, my first take was to be impressed with the scale of what they pulled off, a real smack in the chops. You would think it would alert our "leaders" to the need for reforms, but the propaganda campaign the Bushites commenced right after was very much about avoiding any accountability and keeping the political narrative in the old ruts, i.e. preventing any reforms, changes of leadership, or political adjustments to that massive failure. And that is where we still are, bleeding out in the Middle East.

Edit: I mean in Japan, for example, Bush and all his minions would have been toast on 9/12/2001, here he got 7.5 more years, and at least two more failed wars, which are still not quite done, and just about everything else he ever asked for. Here, we fail up.

in terms of Osama bin Laden's agenda for the Arab states, he was a complete failure. He did not inspire a single broad-based popular movement in any of the Arab states. When the Arab uprising did occur it was not religiously inspired but instead avowedly secular.

In terms of Osama's objectives against the United States, he was wildly successful. He was able to bog down America in two wars, which have added in excess of $4 trillion dollars to US public debt in direct and consequential costs. More than any other single person, he has contributed to the end of the American empire.

we agree.....

infact I really didnt even bother reading Glicks or Rubin or anybody elses response to the attack since i assumed (rightly) that any explanation on anybodys part will be deemed a justification for it.....

along those lines, i also don't like the idea of apologies...if actual facts are wrong, then a correction is reasonable to expect, if one is not allowed to interpret things differently from others, then we've entered in to the arena of PC opinions and editorials and that infringes upon free speech and in my eyes not acceptable.

Lot's of people agree with me at one time or another, it means nothing.

you know the light, when you understand that i'm always right.......