Neocons Get CNN Editor Canned For Nuanced View of Islamic Scholar

When conservatives whine about liberal “political correctness,” it’s a simple matter of projection. It’s the Right that finds Wrongthink to be both pervasive and perversive.

The latest victim, according to the NY Times:

CNN on Wednesday removed its senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs, Octavia Nasr, from her job after she published a Twitter message saying that she respected the Shiite cleric the Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on Sunday.

Ms. Nasr left her CNN office in Atlanta on Wednesday. Parisa Khosravi, the senior vice president for CNN International Newsgathering, said in an internal memorandum that she “had a conversation” with Ms. Nasr on Wednesday morning and that “we have decided that she will be leaving the company.”

Ms. Nasr, a 20-year veteran of CNN, wrote on Twitter after the cleric died on Sunday, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Who is Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah? Here’s Matt Duss over at Think Progress:

On Sunday, the influential Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah passed away in Lebanon. A source of religious guidance for thousands of Shiites, including many members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Da’wa Party (which he helped found), Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights, and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings.

Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam.

All in all, a fairly complex individual whose career, views and influence can’t really properly be conveyed by the single word “terrorist.” That is, of course, unless you’re a neocon.

You know the rest of the story — outrage, screeches of liberal media bias and sympathy for terrorists, and of course the perennially terrified powers-that-be at CNN caved.

But I want to highlight what a great double-standard we have in this country. Consider the Wall Street Journal’s reaction to another prominent death.

Praise for Pinochet is nothing new for the Journal. Like one of its idols, Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the mouthpiece of Wall Street has weighed in numerous times on the side of the murderous Chilean regime and its chief.

On the occasion of Pinochet’s (temporary) detention by British authorities in October 1998, the Journal gnashed its teeth and proclaimed that the general had “headed the coup that saved his country.” Under the military, the newspaper asserted, Chile was transformed “from a Communist beachhead to an example of successful free-market reform.”

At the time of the hated dictator’s death in December 2006, the Journaldeclared that Pinochet “took power in a coup in 1973, but ultimately he created an environment where democratic institutions would prevail.” He supported “free-market reforms that have made Chile prosperous and the envy of its neighbors.”

Glenn Greenwald noted that the Journal wasn’t alone in expressing admiration for the brutal former dictator:

The Editorial Page of The Washington Post today lavishly praised right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The Editorial begins with the cursory (really almost bored and resentful) acknowledgement that “for some [Pinochet] was the epitome of an evil dictator.” Why would the dreaded, unnamed “some” shriek that Pinochet was an “evil dictator”? No good reason; only this:

Mr. Pinochet was brutal: More than 3,000 people were killed by his government and tens of thousands tortured, mostly in his first three years. Thousands of others spent years in exile.

The Post even belittles the contempt expressed for Pinochet by claiming that it is due less to his murder and torture of political opponents – thatcan’t possibly be the real reason — and is driven instead by the fact that “he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left: socialist Salvador Allende, whose responsibility for creating the conditions for the 1973 coup is usually overlooked.”

So, with the Rush Limbaugh/National Review straw man in place (i.e., Pinochet is only hated in “some” circles because he was pro-U.S. and overthrew a darling of the socialist-anti-American-internationalist-left), the Post builds its case that Pinochet is, on balance, an admirable figure despite his bad points (murder, terrorism, torture): “It’s hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America.”