Glenn Greenwald: Daily Beast ‘Intellectually Bankrupt’ for Smearing People for What They Don’t Write

After reviewing the writings of Sam Charles Hamad, author of a Daily Beast article accusing the global left of being silent on abuses by Russia, the editors of The Intercept have found him to be hypocritically “completely silent, shockingly and appallingly so” on a “wide array of severe global injustices.”

Among these injustices (Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald lists 15) are mass violations of human rights by the Indonesian government, the “still unsolved, deeply suspicious disappearance of 43 students in Mexico” in 2014, and the arrest of Muslims throughout Europe for their political views.

But “the highly selective moral outrage expressed by Sam Charles Hamad is not the point here,” Greenwald writes.

The point is the incredibly deceitful, miserably common, intellectually bankrupt tactic that The Daily Beast just aired: smearing people not for what they write, but for what they don’t write. It’s something I encounter literally every day, almost always as an expression of the classic “whataboutism” fallacy — ironically depicted in the West as having been pioneered by Soviet Communists — designed to distract attention from one’s own crimes (OK, fine, we just bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, are constantly droning innocent people to death, and are arming the Saudi slaughter of Yemeni citizens, but look way over there: Why don’t you talk more about Russia????).

And that’s to say nothing of the ignoble history of this tactic in the U.S. — dating back to the height of McCarthyism — of declaring people suspect or morally unhealthy due to a failure to condemn Russia with sufficient vigor and frequency. For decades in the U.S., one could be accused of being a “Kremlin sympathizer” without ever having uttered a syllable of support for Russia, and that’s still just as true today, if not more so. That’s accomplished by a constant measuring of how much one devotes oneself to the supreme loyalty test of publicly denouncing the Ruskies.

This tawdry, self-serving, self-exonerating tactic rests on multiple levels of deceit. “Hypocrisy” always meant “contradicting with words or actions one’s claimed principles and beliefs” (e.g., lecturing the world on freedom and human rights while arming and funding the world’s worst tyrannies). It is now being re-defined to mean: “one who denounces some terrible acts but not all.” If that’s the new standard, it should be applied to everyone, beginning with those who most vocally propound it. As a result, from now on, I’ll be asking the endless number of people who invoke this standard to show me their record of denunciation and activism with regard to the above list of abuses.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.