Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank just got caught publishing a tissue of lies to smear some folks whose views he dislikes. Worse, his defenders’ main argument seems to be: Hey, those views and those people really are awful, so it’s OK.
The liberal belief in honest debate is obviously weaker than anyone had imagined.
Let’s start with Milbank’s smears. He wrote up an exchange at a Heritage Foundation panel, selectively quoting and mis-reporting to make it seem like everyone, panelists and audience, had verbally abused one questioner, law student Saba Ahmed.
Ahmed asked whether a war fought with weapons could ever beat ideology, clearly meaning radical Islamism. She also noted that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, like herself, and she didn’t feel like they were represented by the panel.
Milbank wrote that one panelist “pounced” on Ahmed, demanding to know if she was an American — and the crowd joined in, he claimed: “ ‘Yeah,’ audience members taunted, ‘yeah.’ ”
But none of that happened. The proof? Heritage released the complete three-hour video of the event as well as the nine-minute clip of the key exchange.
You won’t see or hear any “yeah” taunts. But you can see panelists Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel politely responding to Ahmed, thanking her for her question and saying they’re so happy she’s there.
Both go out of their way to say that they don’t hate Muslims or Islam and understand that it’s a small fraction of the Muslim population that’s violent.
Gabriel notes that peaceful majorities have been largely irrelevant throughout history. She points to Germany, Russia, China and Japan, which all produced mass murder while having peaceful majorities.
The moderator, radio host Chris Plante, asks Ahmed if she can tell him who the leader of the Muslim peace movement is. She laughs and says right now it’s her — and the audience cheers. At the clip’s end, a smiling Ahmed takes a seat.
Who are you going to believe? Dana Milbank or your lying eyes and ears?
Yet the most troubling thing isn’t that a columnist at a major newspaper made up whole-cloth an incident that didn’t happen. It’s that the defense of Milbank goes like this: Sure, he pretty much invented his whole account of what happened at the forum.
But Heritage puts on panels we don’t like, some of the panelists have said other things we believe to be inappropriate. The implicit point: It’s fine to lie about Heritage because people there say things with we disagree with.
Really. Here are some of Milbank’s defenders:
The Daily Beast’s Ali Gharib tweeted “So-called misrepresentations aside, you really gotta bend over backwards to not mention these folks’ records.”
Brian Beutler at The New Republic had a whole piece on what it feels like to attend Heritage panels.
He called the Heritage environment a “cocoon” and “awkward” writing, “I think the video format in general does a disservice to how uncomfortable lopsided encounters in that strange environment really are. It’s really jarring, and difficult to dislodge.”
Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith tweeted, “The botched WaPo column has kind of elided the question of what Heritage was doing inviting these people.”
Prominent commencement speakers get uninvited, “the debate is over” is a regular argument in, well, the debate over global warming, and firings over having the “wrong” opinion have become commonplace.
We’ve become a culture that policies each other’s language to an alarming degree. Offending someone is the worst possible crime, and the punishment for it can be severe.
The pro-Milbank side ignores the fact that Gabriel listed countries besides Nazi Germany on the “peaceful majority” point to make it sound as if Gabriel equated Ahmed with a Nazi. Is it really so crazy to say history is full of examples where peaceful majorities didn’t matter?
Beutler somehow still condemns Gabriel’s comment: “The point is that the diatribe itself was ugly and its reception unflattering to Heritage.
And if you’ve attended similar events there, the atmospherics Milbank describes won’t surprise you at all, even if the video doesn’t convey them as well as he does.”
No, that’s not the point at all.