Matt Duss provides some useful background information on Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, whose death over the weekend, and subsequent tweet regarding his passing from 20 year CNN veteran Octavia Nasr, has created something of a controversey:
On Sunday, the influential Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah passed away in Lebanon. A source of religious guidance for thousands of Shiites, including many members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Da’wa Party (which he helped found), Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights, and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings.
Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam.
Here is the tweet in question:
Those words created a firestrom in neoconservative media outlets, and CNN reacted quickly to that criticism by sacking Nasr – despite her long tenure with the network and admirable work during that period. Here is her explanation of her tweet:
I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam. [...]
Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret.
Regardless of her apology, this should not have been a fireable offense. Not by a longshot. Andrew Sullivan detects a pattern:
Froomkin was fired for opposing torture a little too passionately; Weigel was forced out because his private emails revealed he was not acceptable to the partisan right; Frum is cut off from conservative blogads funding; Moulitsas is barred from MSNBC for criticizing Joe Scarborough; and Octavia Nasr is fired for offending the pro-Israel lobby over a tweet expressing sadness at the death of a Hezbollah leader.
Glenn Greenwald adds:
What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right….Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall.
While some might be tempted to argue that Nasr’s praise for a leader that endorsed the use of terrorism in certain circumstances is a bridge too far for a media personality, there is a glaring double standard. Consider this recent episode:
…[I]n an interview with Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the New York Times’ Deborah Solomon demonstrates the flagrant double standard that exists in the American media in regard to pro-Israel versus anti-Israel terrorism:
SOLOMON: Your parents were among the country’s founders.
LIVNI: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.
SOLOMON: It was a more romantic era. Is your mom still alive?
What’s amazing here is not only does Solomon neglect to challenge Livni’s characterization of her parents’ membership in a terrorist group as “freedom fight[ing],” Solomon herself volunteers further assistance in the whitewash. Even if this is a clumsy attempt at sarcasm, can you imagine any mainstream American journalist performing this service in regard to Hamas terrorism? I doubt it.
While Livni may prefer to think that the Irgun weren’t terrorists, and Solomon would like to help, it’s worth noting that both the New York Times and the World Zionist Congress saw things very differently at the time. On December 24, 1946, the Times reported “the World Zionist Congress in its final session here strongly condemned by a vote early today terrorist activities in Palestine and “the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare” by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang.
I very much doubt that the civilians who were murdered by the Irgun at the King David Hotel, nor those massacred and ethnically cleansed at Deir Yassin and Jaffa, nor the hundreds killed in various other Irgun attacks look upon that era as particularly romantic. Their memories deserve far better.
One wonders where the outcry demanding Solomon’s resignation is. Actually, one doesn’t wonder at all.
But in some ways, this farce gets even worse when one puts Fadallah’s life, death and religious influence in context. Back to Matt Duss for that:
The punchline here is that Sayyed Fadlallah was the religious guide, or marja’ al-taqlid, to numerous members of Iraq’s ruling Da’wa Party, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This means that they looked to Fadlallah as a source of religious authority on matters relating to correct Islamic life and practice, and committed to following his edicts on those matters. It also meant that, in October 2008, when Fadlallah (along with several other ayatollahs) condemned the U.S.-Iraq security agreement in its then-current form and decreed that any agreement should call for an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, the agreement had to be re-negotiated.
As I wrote at the time, the power of these ayatollahs to effectively scuttle an agreement of significant import to the security of the United States throws into stark relief what the Bush administration created in Iraq: a government dominated by Shia religious parties who take their guidance – and derive much of their legitimacy – from the opinions and edicts of a small handful of senior Shia clerics.
That aside, here’s the neocon logic, as best I can explain: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was – that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over four thousand of its own troops and over a hundred thousand Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same "terrorist" avowed acolytes – that’s victory.
The fact that neconservatives ever wielded such influence over US foreign policy would be comedic in its era of error if the results were not so heartbreakingly tragic. The fact that they still dictate foreign policy in the GOP is terrifying. That they are able to cow our establishment media into adopting an incoherent and unjust double standard is nothing short of shameful.
But make no mistake, if and when this country elects another Republican President, the neocons will be back at the helm of this nation’s foreign policy. One wonders if we can survive another such bout.
(some link assistance via K-Drum)
Related posts:
recent comments