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There is currently a rumor going around that CNN reporter, Octavia Nasr was fired for a uncritical eulogy she tweeted for recently departed Sheikh Fadlallah. Don’t get me wrong, Nasr clearly showed a bias that is all too prevalent in the MSM. It is mindset that romaticizes terrorists and finds the West (and Israel) a constant source of misery in the world.

In 1972, one of the first major terror attacks on Israel was carried out by Black September, a branch of the PLO, killing 11 Israeli Olympic ahletes at the Olympic games in Munich. Martin Peretz has, on more than one occasion, recalled how Peter Jennings portrayed the attack. Here is one presented at Honest Reporting.

“I first saw Jennings on ABC when, as a young TV journalist, he reported from the Munich Olympics. And I was filled with disgust that his subsequent career has only deepened. At Munich — I still remember it, 30 years later — Jennings tried to explain away the abductions and massacre of the young Israeli athletes. His theme: The Palestinians were helpless and desperate. Ipso facto, they were driven to murder. That’s life…”

Ten years later Israel was fighting the PLO in Operation Peace for the Galillee and the Washington Post’s correspondent, Edward Cody, wrote a front page eulogy for a PLO terrorist (Soldier or Terrorist; July 7, 1982):

The Army communique was matter-of-fact: Israeli troops on patrol in southern Lebanon had discovered the hiding place of two “terrorists” in a house near Sidon and killed them both. There were no Israeli casualties.

One of the “terrorists,” the communique added, was the Tyre region commander for Fatah, the leading Palestinian guerrilla group, and had participated in training and preparations for a number of operations against Israel including the coastal road assault of 1978 in which more than 30 Israelis were killed.

He was identified as Azmeh Seghaiyer, whom I had known since 1975 in the early days of the Lebanese civil war. In repeated contacts with Azmeh during the past seven years–in those Dodge City days and most recently in Tyre a few weeks before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon–I always thought of him as an honorable military officer in the closest thing the Palestinians had to an army.

(emphasis mine)

Since the Oslo Accords, the process of showing deference, if not respect to Fatah has only intesified. And in recent years, the respect accorded to Hamas and Hezbollah has similarly increased.

Five and a half years ago in the runup to municipal elections in the Palestinian territories, I blogged about a Washington Post article that painted an oh so reverential portrait of the Hamas candidates running for office.

Ahmad Ayyad, candidate No. 3 on the Islamic bloc’s slate, ran down a list of what he considered to be Abu Dis’s most pressing needs: new roads, services for women, public parks, a central slaughterhouse that would abide by health codes.

His full beard signaled his affiliation with a radical Islamic movement that rejects the existence of Israel, but Ayyad also sounded like a garden-variety grass-roots policy wonk who said he wanted to “bridge the gap between the citizens and the local authorities.”

Notice how “rejects the existence of Israel” is just an unobjectionable part of the “policy wonk” persona that the reporter wished to promote.

A year later (the no longer updated blog) Mediacrity observed:

So instead of calling Hamas and Hezbollah what they plainly are — terrorists — the Times waters that down by making that oft-proven fact an “opinion” of third parties. Note also this bogus claim of “complexity” being used as a fig leaf to whitewash Hamas’ true nature. What’s so “complicated” about groups that murder civilians?

Oh, and I might add that Bronner specifically released the above for public consumption. A day or so after receiving this note from Bronner, my reader — a conscientious chap — specifically asked if he could disseminate it. Bronner’s response: Yes.

Now, think about all this for just a moment. By that same “logic,” Al Capone would not be a racketeer and murderer in Times articles but simply “considered a racketeer and murderer by the U.S. Justice Department” because he ran soup kitchens for the poor during the Depression.

By the same token, Al Qaeda would fall out of the Times terrorist rankings if it set up a nice hot-lunch program for the kids in Baluchistan.

Some people might call the Times’s thinking on this point “morally equivocal.” I prefer the term “stupid.” I actually have another description in mind as well, but this is a family blog.

Similarly, I blogged at the time that the editors of the Washington Post were promoting the election of Hamas, ignoring the obvious problems with giving more power to Hamas.

The Washington Post and New York Times have, in recent years, opened their op-ed pages to leaders of Hamas. Officials of these newspapers defend these decisions, lest their opinion pages be too onesided or that it’s impossible to report fairly about the Middle East without being criticized by pro-Israel activists.

I suppose that worst example of this admiration for a terrorist is the fawning bestowed upon Samir Kuntar. Before his release, Edward Cody (again!) wrote a pathos inspiring article from the viewpoint of Kuntar’s family, glossing over the heinous nature of his crimes – those were “Israeli accounts” :

Al-Qantar has written thousands of letters home. He was allowed to make five-minute telephone calls in 2003 and again last year. But the family — Bassam, his 86-year-old mother, a brother and three sisters — has little else to remember him by. He had already fought against Israelis when they invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. But when he left on the raid the next year, he was still a youth, not yet out of high school.

(emphasis mine)

At the time of his release, Kuntar’s crime was described as having “gone horribly wrong” by the New York Times, as if the intentional murders of girl and her father were accidents and not the premeditated acts of cruelty they were.

And after he was released, the execrable Dion Nissenbaum sat down to have a friendly chat with this monster.

Offensive as it was, did Ms. Nasr’s treatment of Fadlallah seem more outrageous than the sympathy that news stories in major newspapers showed for the remorseless Samir Kuntar?

Furthermore as I pointed out before, The Washington Post, in a news story, portrayed Fadlallah in much the same as Nasr did and the Post also included him in their “On Faith” web section. In both cases the reasoning was that Fadlallah reached across religious divisions.

Octavia Nasr’s tweet was problematic, but I suspect that she wasn’t fired for it. The problem wasn’t the tweet itself, but that her expression of admiration for Fadlallah is so prevalent among members of the media. The unwelcome attention probably hastened an action that was already in the making.

Michael Young recently wrote in Out of the box or out of their minds:

But let’s be more specific. Hizbullah, at least its leadership and security cadre, is an extension of Iran. The party is there primarily to defend and advance Iranian regional interests, even if Tehran has anchored Hizbullah, or allowed it to anchor itself, in the Lebanese Shiite condition. That means that Hizbullah will never defy Iranian directives when it comes to matters as fundamental as the United States or Israel. As for Hamas, its ultimate ambition is to seize control of the Palestinian national movement, supplant Fatah, and redefine the conflict with Israel in terms the movement prefers. Both groups believe in what they’re doing and regard “resistance” as an ideal, one lying at the heart of a worldview defined largely by their religion. Where they have been pragmatic – for example by participating in national elections – they have been so for tactical gain, in order to enhance their authority and rework the political environment in their favor.

When these groups see Americans, not least American soldiers, contorting themselves to justify flexibility toward militant Islamists, they assume, rightly, that their political strategy is working. And if a strategy is working, why do anything to overhaul it?

This belief that being more open minded towards extremists not only doesn’t have the supposed effect of moderating them, it has the effect of encouraging their militancy. This is the perverse legacy of the enlightened open-mindedness of our champions of the first amendment.

UPDATE: I’d like to thank Barry Rubin for his encouragement, for his suggestions to improve the clarity of this article and for his reminding me about Barbara Plett, whose outrageous behavior I’d forgotten.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.