Yahoos

A few months ago I had an exchange of views in Prospect magazine with Noam Chomsky. One of my principal criticisms of him is his analogy between the US and Nazi Germany; this motif is a recurring feature of his political writings. Of this, I said:

However coarse you consider US popular culture, and however great the injustices and evils of US society and foreign policy - which at the time Chomsky wrote included a long history of racial segregation, the incarceration only 30 years previously of its Japanese-American population, and a brutal war fought in Vietnam - the notion that America is a society comparable to Nazi Germany was, and is, pernicious and frivolous.

I had thought the example I gave of a gross injustice by the US within living memory was an uncontentious point among all shades of opinion. I hadn't counted, however, on a crude polemicist - a Michael Moore of the Right - called Michelle Malkin. She is the author of a work calling for racial profiling in the domestic campaign against terrorism, and she bases her view on a defence of the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII. The historical scholarship of her book is nugatory.

She has in the past week got one thing right, however. Harry's Place takes up the story:

I don't suppose many Harry's Place readers are regular visitors to Michelle Malkin's website, so you may have missed her recent post in which she revealed that the Times had run a story about the alleged massacre of civilians by US Marines in Haditha, and illustrated this with a photograph of dead bodies which was captioned "Victims in al-Haditha. The US is carrying out two inquiries (AP)". Except it turned out that the photograph was actually taken in April 2005, 7 months before what Malkin calls "the incident in Haditha", and the bodies shown are those of 19 Shiite fisherman who'd been shot by Sunni insurgents. Malkin then urged her readers to "make sure the America-bashers and troop-smearers in Europe hear your voice", giving the email address of the Times letters page, and of its US Editor, Gerard Baker, who responded, saying:

Thank you for pointing out the dreadful error on our website involving the wrong picture and capture of murdered Iraqis. I have asked that it be removed immediately and an apology issued. I'm sorry you have jumped to the conclusion that this was a deliberate misrepresentation and the result of slanted journalism and sorrier that you have shared that view with your readers without any attempt to verify it...Our editorial line has been to support the war and we continue to do so, though not without some reservations, of course. We have eschewed completely the sort of vile anti-Americanism so common in much of the British press and our correspondents have done their level best to paint a fair picture of conditions in Iraq today...Please be apprised that this was a genuine and very unfortunate error.

Well that's cleared that up, you might think, and you'd be wrong of course.

Of course you would. Read the rest of the story and you'll see that Ms Malkin has taken an acknowledged and serious mistake as an opportunity to attack The Times (for which - full disclosure, in case I'm added to the list of Malkin's Miscreants - I also write) for a "blatant smear" and launch what has turned out to be, from her readers, a highly unpleasant email campaign against Gerard Baker.

It is extraordinary, especially considering that The Times, while having a much broader spread of opinion on the Iraq War than any other UK newspaper, has also taken a consistently supportive line. I have known Gerard Baker for a long time, and if he were in league with America's enemies I would have noticed by now. I've also had a little experience of yahoos similar to the ones he is now hearing from. When I did an interview with a US conservative site, David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, I found that I was accused by the site's readers of an unwillingness to say a bad word against my fellow-leftist Noam Chompsky [sic].

But the most obvious parallel is raised by a post I wrote only a couple of days ago. Ms Malkin's campaign is the same model as the Media Lens campaign in the UK. Media Lens is, in the words of John Sweeney of the BBC, "a fancy name for two moonlighting clerks from the White Fish Authority or some such aquatic quango". It's ill-informed, but owing to the power of the Internet it does have the ability to encourage abusive email campaigns against journalists. The Media Lens editors themselves naturally protest that they encourage only rational and compassionate dialogue, but this is cant. The Media Lens web site as a matter of course publishes private emails that its supporters receive from columnists and journalists, thereby encouraging a round of further aggressive emailing. Ms Malkin clearly operates by identical standards; the notion that it might be improper to publish Gerard Baker's email and inflame further abuse from her readers presumably never occurred to her. The know-nothing wings of politics have a mutual loathing but a remarkable affinity, and they deserve each other.