Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [82]
“Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos is, what the rules are, how we are supposed to behave,” Schanberg added:That is not always good, obviously, because this is the consensus of the establishment. But papers, probably more in the earlier years than now, print texts of things people will never see elsewhere. It tells them what you have to do to cast a vote. It covers things like the swearing in of immigrants. They are a positive force. I don’t think the New York Times was ever a fully committed accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’t know who coined the phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanism means you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it in your own backyard. The Washington Post does not cover Washington. It covers official Washington. The Times ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of the establishment.
“Newspapers do not erase bad things,” Schanberg went on:Newspapers keep the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We discover the civil-rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We go at it hell-bent because now it is kosher to write about those who have been neglected and treated like half-citizens. And then when things calm down it becomes easy not to do that anymore.
South African justice Richard Goldstone was another high-profile apostate from the liberal class. On the international stage, he engendered a clash with the liberal elite much like that which Michael Moore kindled in Hollywood and Schanberg did at the New York Times.
The United Nations Human Rights Council created a fact-finding mission in 2009 to investigate violations of humanitarian and human-rights law in the war in Gaza. Goldstone, who is Jewish, headed the mission, and his name was associated with the report for the United Nations that resulted. The Israeli government refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s mission. Its findings were not what Israeli liberal orthodoxy found acceptable. The report detailed human-rights violations carried out by the Palestinians, but it blamed most of the heavy loss of life on the government of Israel. The Goldstone report investigated Israel’s twenty-two-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009. The report found that Israel used disproportionate military force against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip while failing to take adequate precautions to protect the civilian population against the military assault. The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than six thousand homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth. Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the assault killed no Israelis.
But the report did not limit itself to the twenty-two-day attack: it went on to indict the occupation itself. It examined the beginning of the occupation and condemned Israel for the border closures, the blockade, and for the wall, or security barrier, in the West Bank. It had two references to the right of return—the right of displaced Palestinians and their descendants to return and settle in Israel—and investigated Israeli torture. It criticized the willful destruction of the Palestinian economy. Goldstone, like Moore, immediately felt the wrath of the liberal class. His name was vilified and because of threats and an effort by a Zionist group to bar him, he decided in April 2010 not to risk attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah in South Africa. An arrangement was finally struck that allowed him to attend, after great controversy, both in South Africa and Israel.
Goldstone is the quintessential