Why Not Just Call the Holocaust Museum Shooter a "White Supremacist" and "Anti-Semite"?

Ben Smith fairly notes that it's difficult to call a Bush-hating Neocon-obssessing Truther a member of the "far right."

But note the assumption contained therein -- if we hadn't found out about this guy's political views, it would have been fine and dandy to so brand him.

The trouble with this is that the media never calls anti-globalism thugs and rioters members of the "far left." Nor do they deem animal rights extremists so. Nor gun-toting Black Panthers and black supremacists.

Nor, of course, the murderer of William Long.

Note that in all these cases where the malefactors would be categorized as somewhere on the left if we attempted to categorize them in a conventional system of politics at all.

But we don't so categorize them, or rather the media doesn't so categorize them.

Who burns car lots to the ground to protest industrialization and energy use? Members of the "far left" or "environmental extremists"? The latter, of course who, in the media's telling, are entirely unrelated to the conventional spectrum of politics.

Who throws stones through businesses' windows and attack cops whenever the G8 or G20 is in town? Members of the "far left" or "anti-globalism protesters"? Again, the latter, standing wholly apart from mainstream political movements.

And Al Qaeda...? Well, look: It's a third-world "empowerment" movement that hates "zionism" and US hegemony. And further, the far left has supported or made excuses for a lot of such terrorist movements. (They still do, of course. Even with Al Qaeda.)

If I'm going to categorize Al Qaeda on the spectrum of mainstream American politics, well, sure, the religious devotion puts them more on the right, but everything else? Left, baby, left.

And yet the media rushes to call white supremacists members of "the far right." The implication being the right believes what they believe... we're just a bit less extreme about it.

This is transparent and obvious bias and I'm sick of fit. Reporters are liberal, and so don't like to think of black-bandanaed anarchist rioters as merely more extreme version of themselves. And so they don't.

How about these liberal reporters extend to the right the same caution and sensitivity they extend to their own preferred politics and stop branding racists and other nutters the "far right," as if the rest of us are 75% on their side, just minus the shooting.

BTW: The whole antisemitism thing? The left really cannot get away with pinning this on the right any longer. Their savior sat in the pews of an anti-semitic hate-monger for 20 years and only "distanced himself" when asked about it, late into the presidential campaign.

Exit question:

20 years spent in the pews of Trinity and who knows how many private conversations had with Wright, and yet not once did Obama ever encounter this sort of rhetoric from the good reverend, huh? Who, mind you, can’t even suppress it when speaking to reporters on the record. Remarkable.

posted by Ace at 03:50 PM

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