Left Wing Media Breaking Ranks
In the past the accusation has certainly been made that the centre-left media has a tendency to always sing from the same song sheet, that they simply don’t represent the plurality of opinions and free comment that they claim to be so commendably in favor of. For the most part I’ve tended to agree that the evidence laid out for all to see on the pages of the editorials of the major left leaning newspapers would support this claim. Yet every so often an opinion piece will appear that breaks the mold and this week two such article caught my attention.
The first was in the comment section of the Guardian, usually notorious for just how extreme the views expressed there can be. The piece in question was by Sohrab Ahmari and simply titled Beware those who sneer at 'human rights imperialism'. Ahmari mounts an admirable attack against the morally redundant arguments of his fellow Guardian journalist Stephen Kinzer who has claimed that Human Rights groups are embarking on a kind of western imperialism of moral values. As Ahmari rightly argues the radically relativist mentality of those like Kinzer essentially holds that since there are no universally applicable values and since developing nations can’t be expected to uphold high liberal standards so in effect they are arguing that some peoples are entitled to more freedoms than others.
With appropriately dark humor Ahmari points out that under the mentality of the far-left gay rights activists in oppressive regimes are transformed into western imperialists while international bodies that speak out against Iran stoning women and torture in Egyptian jails are being culturally insensitive. As Ahmari admits rights groups should indeed be held to account, but for their tendency to exact a greater level of scrutiny against free societies rather than those with endemic systems of repression. Perhaps most damningly of all he contends:
Today – with a century of catastrophic lapses in judgment in hindsight – too many western progressives are still trapped by the same "systematic relativism."
Still reeling from the shock of having read such frankly honest words in the comment section of The Guardian an acquaintance drew my attention to an equally uncharacteristic piece in the New Statesman. Contributing Editor Sholto Byrne had penned an article astoundingly titled In praise of Israel: critics should admit their double standard. That the New Statesman should carry such an article was only made more bizarre by the fact that the edition for that same week had a cover story by the hardline critic of Israel Amira Hass and an accompanying article by political editor Medhi Hassan tellingly titled ‘No end to the Strangulation of Gaza’. And yet quite remarkably there was Byrne’s piece in which a Contributing Editor was stating clearly that he believes Israel is being held to different standards to other States specifically because it is a liberal democracy and that it should thus be applauded and admired for being such.
Articles such as these are startling because of the way in which much of the Left is still trapped in a shameful mentality best conveyed by Ahmari when he recounts how:
At the height of the crackdown against the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Albert Camus warned French leftists not to allow political "expediency any precedence over regard for truth". The western left that ignored or, worse, justified the suffocation of Budapest, Camus thundered, "is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable of merely stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws".
Camus' words still ring as true today as they did over a half century ago.
