To illustrate its Person of the Year
cover story, Time magazine posted a
gallery of portraits on its website. On Page 11 of the gallery
is a portrait of Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, who
was “arrested and assaulted by police in Cairo.” Beside her is the
portrait of Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia police officer
arrested at… Occupy Wall Street. Just two peas in a photographic
pod.
Page 13 of the gallery features “Jack,” an Occupy Oakland
protester “wounded by a projectile fired by police.” Note the
similarity in phrasing between the lines describing Jack’s
experience and Mona Eltahawy’s. Just two innocent victims of a
runaway police state.
After two more pages of Syrian and Egyptian protesters
(one of the Syrians said he was “tortured for three days”), and we
get to a portrait of young Molly Katchpole. Molly endured the
unspeakable brutality of anticipating the arrival of Bank of
America’s $5-a-month debit-card fee. Bravely, she started an online
petition asking the bank not to impose the fee. It didn’t. She was
saved. Time pictures beside her a cut-to-pieces Bank of
America debit card in the same way it pictured beside the Syrian
protesters two pages earlier a broken iPhone that had belonged to
one of them. A never-enacted $5 bank fee = arrest and
torture.
Throughout the gallery of mostly Egyptian, Spanish, Greek,
Syrian, Tunisian protesters are six Occupy Oakland protesters,
three Occupy Wall Street protesters, one pair of Occupy The Hood
protesters, and a woman who wore a manifesto on her back that
denounced Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. There are two Tea Partiers
thrown in apparently for balance.
Missing was a photo of a single London “protester.” But of
course, they weren’t protesters so much as rioters, you say. Ah,
but they were listed, along with all the others, in the cover
story.
It would be preposterous to link all of these protests
together, as if they were part of one, great, worldwide movement,
or to equate them, as though their various protagonists were agents
in causes of equivalent moral validity. But Time
does:
It’s remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere
they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated.
Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs,
without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing
political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the
protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries’ political
systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham
democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent
significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats.
Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism,
they believe they’re experiencing the failure of hell-bent
megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new
social contract.
The students and professionals standing up to the military
in Tahrir Square were protesting “crony hypercapitalism”? The
hooligans who burned London were justified in their looting and
arson? This is not reporting; this is unadulterated socialistic
propaganda.
If that were not clear enough, Time asserts this
of the London rioters — who, by the way, killed three innocent men
who tried to defend their property from the roving
hordes:
In early August, after police in London shot and killed a young
black man they were arresting, riots broke out all over England.
Naturally, the rioters’ instantly resorting to violence attracted
little sympathy. Yet a new, three-month study by the
Guardian and the London School of Economics concluded that
these rioters were also protesters, motivated by anger about
poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as overaggressive
policing.
Murder? Not mentioned. Arson? Not mentioned. Robbing a
schoolboy in broad daylight? Not mentioned. Must’ve been among the
numerous acts inspired by “anger about poverty, unemployment,”
etc.
Shootings, rapes, assaults at Occupy Wall Street protests?
Not mentioned. It’s all one, glorious, global uprising for justice.
Never mind the blood.
Later, in conclusion, cover story writer Kurt Andersen
worries that the pure, “liberal” movement will exchange “the moral
high ground” that it occupies for a share of actual political
power. When I tweeted objections to Time’s “Person of the
Year” yesterday, some people responded that Time was not
granting its designation as an “honor” but merely a recognition of
influence. One does not grant “the moral high ground” without
granting approval as well.
Undeniably, Time is passing a moral judgment,
declaring that these movements share the same basic — and socially
positive — motivations and goals. In so praising these varied
movements, it legitimizes and elevates them. And by praising their
spirit, goals, and broad actions without denouncing (or often even
mentioning) the violence and destruction perpetrated on behalf of
some of them, it legitimizes the violence and
destruction.
Failing to mention the closed Milk Street Café near
Zuccotti Park or the London mattress store burned to cinders or the
businesses smashed and torched in Vancouver (sports hooligans are
protesters, too) silences the victims of the Western protests. They
become collateral damage in what Time views as a justified
leftist crusade against “hypercapitalism.” (The only Tea Party
mention in the entire story was to dismiss the movement as “the
tail wagging the Republican Party dog.”) It is a justified crusade
even if it is undertaken by some for the sole purpose of escaping
the bad decision of incurring tens of thousands of dollars in
student loan debts for worthless liberal arts degrees.
The icing on the cake is Andersen’s glossing over serious
concerns about Islamist parties rising in Egypt and Tunisia. He
compares them — favorably — to “Republican hardliners” in the
USA, saying they care more about building consensus than the GOP
does. I guess he missed this, from Egyptian Salafi preacher Mohamed
Zoghbi earlier this year (as
reported in the Los Angeles Times):
“Our goal is to achieve an Islamic caliphate with Islamic
sharia rules. If Egypt becomes a caliphate, then the
Middle East and Arab countries will follow our path. All Muslim
youth should strive and die to build this caliphate even over their
own bodies.”
Yeah, just like the Republican Party. Egyptian Christians
are fleeing the country in fear for their lives, and Andersen
depicts Republicans as less tolerant than the Islamists who want to
turn Egypt into the home base for global jihad.
This is illustrative of the moral corruption of the whole
essay, which is a corruption on par with the American left’s
deliberate misrepresentation of Soviet communism in the 20th
century. It is the willful attempt to replace reality with a
fiction that the reader will then believe, causing him to act
contrary to his own interests and the interests of others. And it
is all done in the name of the people. So remember, the next time a
protester shuts down your favorite café, loots your store, or joins
with his buddies to halt trade and cost workers millions of dollars
in lost wages, he’s just raising his fist in solidarity with the
freedom fighters risking their lives for the right to
self-determination halfway around the globe. He is they, and they
are him. Or something.
