April 30, 2002

Cockburn Update Somehow I missed

Cockburn Update

Somehow I missed it when it first went up, but here's Franklin Foer's piece on Alexander Cockburn and his recent round of cagey anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorizing (discussed here and here.)

Foer gets to the heart of the matter here:

When I reached Cockburn to ask him about these conspiracies, he insisted he was just reporting what was already in circulation. "I don't think I said they are true. I don't know there's enough exterior evidence to determine whether they are true or not."

But, of course, that last sentence is the giveaway. There most certainly is enough exterior evidence to determine whether the stories are true or not. The answer is that they are not. They are wild rumors circulating, if at all, in some of the least credible corners of the Internet. No respectable media outlet has given these stories credence. Merely by stating that these ideas are in circulation, merely by saying it's impossible to judge their veracity, Cockburn confers these ideas with legitimacy.

Consider, for example, the story about the mad Jew scientists out to ruin the Muslims. I searched for it on the Lexis-Nexis news database but came up with nothing--not one single mention of the story in a mainstream news outlet. And I only found it on the Web at an obscure, far-far left site that refers to the United States as "gringoland" and accuses Daniel Pearl of working for Mossad. (Note the similarity of the Jewish anthrax rumor to the Nation of Islam creation myth about the wicked chemist Yacub.)


He tries to track down the source of each of Cockburn's "stories sloshing around the internet." Definitely worth reading.

(Incidentally, I suppose the Daniel Pearl/Mossad story clears up the mystery of what Andrew Stephen of the New Statesman had in mind when he adduced an alleged Jew-controlled media cover-up of Pearl's Jewishness as an example of a broad tendency to conceal or exonerate Jewish wrong-doing under all circumstances. These guys are twisted...)

Posted by Dr. Frank at April 30, 2002 09:08 AM | TrackBack