Funny how far Charles has come
I recently had a very intense discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and during it I realized that my views were dramatically different than they were before the 9/11 attacks. In this respect I think I'm much like Charles Johnson, the proprietor of Little Green Footballs. I recently found this interesting
post from an impossibly distant time (9/1/2001) that seems to capture just how far Charles and I have moved politically on the topic of Israel. In Charles' words:
I don't like to write about the Middle East. I don't even like to think about it. It's a dismaying quagmire of blind religious hatred and irrational Dark Ages thinking on all sides , impervious to logic or reason, perhaps the greatest imponderable stupidity in humankind's history. I give a slight moral advantage to the Israelis because at least they aren't exporting terrorism and the slaughter of innocents, as many of the Islamic countries in the area routinely do. They'll probably all kill themselves one day in a nuclear confrontation. (How's that for optimism?) I just hope they don't take the rest of the world down with them. This article in the New York Times is the latest example of the terminal sickness that afflicts the whole region: Palestinians Give U.N. Racism Talks a Mixed Message.
For any regular
LGF reader, this quote is simply amazing. All of Charles' posts concern the Middle East nowadays - whether he "likes" writing about it or not, his focus is indisputable. Unlike the 2001 August Charles, the 2002 September Charles certainly wouldn't say that "irrational Dark Ages thinking" existed on all sides (at least to the same extent), as that would falsely imply that civilized, democratic Israel was in anyway comparable to the Saudi, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, or Palestinian thugocracies. Finally, he wouldn't be able to hear talk of Israel's "slight" moral advantage without choking on his salad.
It's kind of funny and sad at the same time when I think back to my pre 9/11 days. I, like Charles, gave a "slight" advantage to the Israelis, mainly because the idiotic section of the campus left was for the Palestinians. But for the most part I didn't know or care much about the conflict. All that changed around March or April, when the Intifada heated up. Had it not been for blogs, I might not have seen through the blatant anti-Israel bias of the New York Times or Reuters. When I realized the extent of the misrepresentation that Israel was subject to, and the ridiculous double standard by which Israel is condemned for self defense but Hussein or Assad or Arafat can get away with executing innocent civilians...well, let's just say my position started to shift rightwards. And I think the same happened for Charles.