On the importance of keeping investors out of the newsroom, and not treating your readers like fools

...The remainder of Greenwald’s rebuttal is his usual mix of bluster and self-contradiction. Having said he has no opinion of his boss’ co-investments with the US government, he then spends hundreds of words defending them…

“Wasn’t it just 72 hours ago that the widespread, mainstream view in the west (not one that I shared) was that there was a profound moral obligation to stand up and support the brave and noble Ukrainian opposition forces as they fight to be liberated from the brutal and repressive regime imposed on them by Vladimir Putin’s puppet? When did it suddenly become shameful in those same circles to support those very same opposition forces?

Of course, at no point in his piece did Ames argue that Omidyar should not be allowed to invest in foreign opposition groups, nor did the piece say Omidyar should he feel ashamed for supporting the Ukrainian revolution. They’re his billions and he may do with them as he pleases...

The point of the piece — aside from to convey facts to our readers — is that Omidyar and First Look have made statement after statement about how they aim to be a thorn in the side of the US government, and yet in several cases Omidyar has co-invested with that same US government in order to shape foreign policy to suit his own worldview. (A wag might point out that it’s far easier to put a thorn in someone’s side if you’re sitting next to him at an investment meeting.)


Read it all at Pando.com  

Related : Glenn Greenwald is an ass

Glenn Greenwald’s Partner Detained By British Security; Was Transporting Top Secret Documents

Early Sunday morning, Glenn Greenwald learned that his Brazilian partner, David Miranda, was detained and interrogated for nine hours by security officials at London’s Heathrow airport. The officials also seized Miranda’s electronic devices: his phone, laptop and so forth. At first glance, if he was indeed held because of his association with Greenwald, this was a horribly tone-deaf and heavy-handed move by British officials, especially knowing that Miranda was apparently detained under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act of 2000, Schedule 7.

But then, as the day wore on, more details came to light indicating that Miranda wasn’t detained simply because of a “despotic” worse-than-the-Mafia attack on an innocent spouse.

h/t Terry Glavin

The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald inadvertently argues that every Muslim in the west should be interred or deported

Basically making the banal and morally vapid argument that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,' The Guardian's columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote on Thursday that the horrific beheading of an off-duty soldier on the streets of London was not an act of terrorism.

Greenwald's reasoning boils down to his question: "Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism?"

The ramifications of the position taken in Greenwald's column are staggering if indeed he and more significantly, if Muslims living in the west genuinely believe it.

Employing a puerile moral equivalency, Greenwald maintains that "it's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade."

But there's a matter of major significance that Greenwald's thinking postulates. The terrorists who murdered Lee Rigby as he was innocently walking in the London suburb of Woolwich were converts to Islam of Nigerian origin. If they are not terrorists, if they are behaving the same way he says western nations do in Islamic countries, then on whose behalf were they acting? The west hasn't attacked Nigeria, nor were the Woolwich terrorists wearing Nigerian or any military uniforms.

Speaking of terrorism, Greenwald wrote, "the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states."

By that logic, when US or UK soldiers launch attacks against the Taliban, or al Qaida, or during the wars against Iraq, if a Muslim is killed, then it is an attack against all Muslims.

Greenwald's position only makes sense if one holds the view that the west is in a war against all Muslims and more to the point, that the reverse is also true.

And if that's the case, if Glenn Greenwald is correct, then every single Muslim in the west is an enemy soldier walking among us, which gives western countries the right to deport or inter them in prison camps until the war is over.

Of course Greenwald is wrong. Like most moral relativists, he hasn't the capacity to think through the implications of the rhetorical contortions he distorted himself into while acting as an apologist for terrorism.

All Muslims are not at war with the west. The vast majority find the Woolwich terrorists as repugnant as anyone else.

Nor is the west at war with all Muslims. Neither western civilians nor military personnel living in Islamic states  go around randomly killing Muslim soldiers or civilians for the sake of their being Muslim, nor is anyone in their right mind claiming they have such a right. If a Catholic is murdered by a Muslim terrorist, as often happens, the Pope does not give dispensations that allow the killing of any available Muslim in retaliation.

But this recent horror in Woolwich does highlight another aspect of the dilemma the west faces in dealing with its growing Muslim population.

Sunder Katwala wrote in The Globe and Mail:

The hearts of the vast majority of Britain’s three million Muslim citizens will have sunk on hearing the news of the Woolwich killing. The condemnations came quickly, yet many were also scratching their heads wondering how Britain’s Muslim majority could ever get their voices heard more powerfully than the dramatically newsworthy preachers of hate.

The "preachers of hate" to whom Katwala refers are embedded in many of England's and the west's mosques. Just as in the movie Trainspotting, his friends warily accepted the sociopathic villain Begbie, similarly many Muslims may find the Jihadist "preachers of hate' scary and deplorable, but tolerate them nonetheless because to their co-religionists, they are "one of us."

Until all western Muslims and the rest of us shun and ostracize the preachers of hate, be they in the mosques or on the editorial pages of The Guardian,  then we will remain a long way from seeing the end of terrorism in our streets.



UPDATE: This post originally identified the Woolwich terrorists as Nigerian Muslims who had immigrated to England. Thanks to information from readers that has been corrected to "converts to Islam of Nigerian origin." Thank you to the readers of this blog and your comments are always welcome.

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian's vile terror apologist, is at it again

This time,  The Guardian's sanctimonious nitwit, who is so egregious a terror-apologist that even Bill Maher has called him out for it, was making excuses for the savages who beheaded an off-duty soldier on the streets of London yesterday:

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term "terrorism", it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be "terrorism", many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That's the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the "terrorists": sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don't deliberately target them the way the "terrorists" do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan's attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

h/t Sam Schulman

Here you go, Glenn - if they did it to you, I'm sure it wouldn't be terrorism..

check out the last 2 minutes of this video:

UPDATE: Murdered terror victim, Drummer Lee Rigby, father of a 2 year-old