In their song “Heaven,” the Talking Heads sardonically describe a tedious heaven in which a band “plays my favorite song; they play it once again; they play it all night long.”
If that’s the case, Salon.com must be heaven for anti-Israel activists. Type “Israel” into the site’s search bar, and the monochrome results are enough to bore even the most excitable of Israel’s opponents and defenders. The abridged headlines include:
Putting aside the glaring issue — this undisguised campaign to demonize Israel, the world’s largest concentration of Jews, reeks of bigoted, age-old obsessions — Salon’s one-note samba inevitably leads to some hypocrisy. When your guiding principle is “Israel is Evil,” actual principles must fall by the wayside.
Note Salon’s incompatible positions on two of New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent executive orders, each of which was meant to show the state’s opposition to discrimination. When Cuomo banned non-essential state travel to North Carolina to punish the state for what he called “misguided legislation” that “replicates the discrimination of the past” by targeting the LGBT community, a Salon piece said that the governor’s order “has its merits,” even if the author would have preferred a different, more engaging reaction.
“How dare you blacklist people for enacting racist policies? You can only blacklist them for national origin.” https://t.co/G10DdJDrvF
— Eylon Aslan-Levy (@EylonALevy) June 6, 2016
It is reasonable, of course, to debate whether a state should use economic leverage to oppose what it sees as regressive policies. It is reasonable to support the principle, or to oppose it, or like constitutional law professor Eugene Kontorovich, to support its legality in general while also cautioning against constitutional overstep and at the same time criticizing overheated critics.
