The token Il Duce fan at the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby, warns us on Feb. 4th 2007 that:
“It is tougher to keep a sustained focus on human beings who share certain beliefs, a form of surveillance from which most Americans instinctively recoil. Ideological and religious profiling goes against our civil-liberties grain. Infiltrating Islamic groups, keeping tabs on mosques, applying heightened scrutiny to Muslims in order to track the extremists among them — we find such activities highly distasteful, awkward, even un-American.
But … you knew he couldn’t stop there …
But if we intend to win the war the jihadists have declared against us, they are unavoidable. The chaos in Boston last week was absurd and expensive and truly much ado about nothing. But it was also a warning: Societies at war cannot wait for bombs to be phoned in to 911. We must stop the Islamists before they strike. That in turn means knowing who they are, what they say, and where they are. Even if we would rather not.”
To understand Mr. Jacoby’s ill-logic, we must conclude that the real “lesson” of a non-event — the lite brite invasion of Boston — is that we must even further ratchet up our suspicion of all Muslim people and give up any expectation of privacy and personal liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.
In contrast, Boston Globe reader and letter writer C.L. Casella of Needham, Mass. states of the hoax that was not a hoax:
I can think of a far more costly hoax : the false claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was trying to procure yellowcake from Niger. This involved outing a CIA agent whose team was working to prevent terrorists from obtaining WMDs and misleading the public into believing that Iraq had ties with Al Qaeda. These con artists conjured up images of mushroom clouds and preyed upon a public that had endured Sept. 11. Where is the demand to prosecute the perpetrators of a publicity stunt that has cost the lives of countless Iraqi citizens and more than 3,000 US troops, the limbs of tens of thousands of our troops, and billions of our tax dollars?
And reader David Ortega of Somerville, Mass. slices through the bloviations of the Globe’s robot-like army of undead news and editorial staff, writing of the two young guys who put up the lite brites and then refused to play along with the media hysteria:
Stevens and Berdovsky were savvy enough to one-up the media on its own turf at a press conference, and this left reporters pouty because they all had to rewrite their sound bites. Brian McGrory (“Bad hair day in Boston,” City & Region, Feb. 2) suggests making “idiocy a crime” and having them do 1,000 hours of community service for staging the performance. If idiocy were really a crime in this whole incident, the local media would be locked up. The authorities overreacted and the media sensationalized, and now the city is shifting all the blame for the debacle to Turner, and the media will cover it that way because they played a large role in blowing it out of proportion. We live in a culture of fear that is fueled by media that is as quick to make assumptions as law enforcement and other officials. It seems that if reporters were angry following the press conference, it was because they had to deviate from their own performances.
Once again, Globe readers offer more trenchant and insightful commentary than the paper’s entire staff. And they wonder why circulation is dropping like a rock off the Tobin Bridge.
