Observations on what happened in Hebron

Each person has his own style, and this was illustrated today in the coverage or otherwise of the pogrom by Jewish fanatics against Arab residents in Hebron, described in detail in this Haaretz piece.

Helena Cobban focuses on the fact that the New York Times doesn't mention the pogrom at all, only the legal evictions that preceded it, creating the impression that the only people affected by these events were Jewish settlers.

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Angry Arab, for his part, tells in an expanded way what is implicit in the NYT coverage, and adds some pictures and the famous line of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish: "All that you have done to our people/ is registered in notebooks."

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Naturally there is a public diplomacy angle here, and public-diplomacy scholar Professor Lynch notes today that the US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, James Glassman, has given a speech called "Public Diplomacy 2.0", sponsored by an organization called DIP. The speech is full of the kind of idiotic remarks you would expect at an event like this. Lynch notes with evident pride that Glassman mentioned his (Lynch's) name in the talk, with a "nice mention of a recent Abu Aardvark post".

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My own inclination in these cases, for what it's worth, is to try and point out that the collective cowardice of the American elite in facing up to the AIPAC crowd is really nothing but the result of many individual acts of cowardice. Each person ultimately tries to blame the collective political drift, forgetting that this is nothing but the result of his own self-interested cowardice and that of a thousand others like him. Something like Wall Street in that respect, if that makes it any clearer.