America has the highest protection of free speech, the First Amendment. Will your protection from Hamas stop? The Fourth Estate exercised a supervisory role over the leaders. The Washington Post played a role in the downfall of President Nixon due to the Watergate scandal. Is the Post now withdrawing when it comes to criticism of Islamic terrorism?
The doubts arise from the cartoon that the newspaper – owned by Jeff Bezos (Amazon) – did not want to publish, in which a Hamas terrorist tied women and children to their bodies as human shields. We can discuss the quality of the drawing and the characteristics of the jihadist. But this discussion never took place.
The Post’s editorial staff, especially the young people, rose up, and the leaders backed down out of fear of internal revolt. The Post is a progressive newspaper, it fought against Trump. In the Middle East he seeks a delicate balance: he defends Israel’s right to exist; condemns anti-Semitism; It gives maximum visibility to civilian victims among Palestinians and supports their right to a state. All of this is not enough for some editorial teams.
When Trump was president, Post began “resistance journalism”: abandoning nuance. Now some American journalists are abandoning the old principles of ethics and want the media to take a stand and portray a world divided between good and evil. Israel and the West are the evil empire; the others are victims. The story of the cartoon is set in this context; the editorial offices are subject to the dictates of the militant party. It’s a parallel to what’s happening in universities.
Self-censorship of crimes committed in the name of Islam (which also extends to culture and entertainment) is the result of a change that has been noticeable for some time. Some “light” anecdotes for reconstruction. For many years, Broadway sold out the musical “The Book of Mormon,” a mocking satire of Mormons who agreed to become a laughing stock. No one has ever dared to stage a satire of Islamic fundamentalism on Broadway. The First Amendment does not apply there.
During his last campaign, Barack Obama uttered contemptuous words toward right-wing voters at a fundraising dinner with some San Francisco billionaires: “These white people cling to their beer, their guns, their Bibles with bitterness and resentment.” He didn’t censor himself, by mocking white Christians. He would never have dared to utter similar words about those who “cling to the Koran.” This climate has prevailed for years; the young editors of the Post grew up in this ideological America.
What has made the defense of Muslims so obsessive is the connection between African-American extremists and pro-Palestinians. For the ultra-Black Lives Matter movement, blacks and Palestinians are victims of the same oppression as white people. America is reliving the sixties, which were characterized by the hegemony of extremism in the world of youth. However, newspaper editors at the time represented the moderate-conservative establishment, albeit enlightened and protest-oriented.
Half a century later, things have come full circle: the establishment of digital billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page (Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (meta-Facebook) supports political correctness; The academy is in the hands of a teaching staff that is very biased or afraid of student pressure. There were purges of moderates in the editorial offices. Censoring a cartoon is too normal to cause a scandal.