Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Excuse me while I barf at Jennifer Siegel’s awful, stupid piece of journalism at the Forward which posits this dubious proposition:

Bloggers — as the feisty class of Internet pundits are known — love to paint themselves as free-speech warriors who bravely tackle the hard truths that mainstream media outlets either ignore or distort. But as the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raged on and conventional media outlets covered the news from the ground, major players in the liberal blogosphere were keeping, by their own admission, decidedly quiet.

The most prominent liberal blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, briefly addressed the topic Monday on his eponymous Web site DailyKos.com, in a post titled “Why I won’t write about the Israel/ Lebanon/ Palestine fighting.”

This is “a morass of a mess of a disaster of a quagmire of a sinkhole,” Kos wrote. “It doesn’t matter what the President of the United States says. Or the United Nations. Or the usual bloviating gasbag pundits.”

Of course her “get out of jail” card on this one is the phrase “major players.” She narrows her field of vision to the usual suspects and thereby spins a theory that holds no weight or water whatsoever.

Liberal bloggers are no more silent about Lebanon than they are about any major story in the world news. You just have to look a little harder to find us. Unfortunately, Siegel didn’t have the sufficient zitsfleisch to sit & do the requisite research and hence came up way short.

And I also find offensive the notion that if a blogger “major player” doesn’t write on a subject that this somehow has significance. Clearly, none of the bigshots she interviewed feel confident enough in their knowledge of the subject to tackle this big, complicated issue. They know there’s a world of emotion out there when it comes to the subject. They figure–why get into this hornet’s nest when I’m not sure enough of my point of view to argue it strongly or vigorously enough? That’s prudent. But what bugs me is that Kos, Marshall, Drum and all the others didn’t bother to enlighten Siegel about how mistaken her notion was. These are the big boys of blogging. They should know there are liberal bloggers blogging on practically any given subject. Why wouldn’t they know we’re out there? The fact that they don’t says reams about their limited grasp of the liberal blogosphere when it’s something outside their regular realm of interest or expertise.

Thanks to MaxSpeak for bringing this story to my attention and linking to me in a list of “Not Crazy Jewish Blogs.” For more of those posts which liberal bloggers are supposedly not writing about Lebanon, check out my new Israeli-Palestinian peace blog aggregator. And to make it even easier, here are some of my favorite “liberal” bloggers writing about Lebanon:

Mark A. LeVine
Helena Cobban
Head Heeb
Ray Hanania
Lawrence of Cyberia
Rootless Cosmopolitan
Ariga
Juan Cole

Take that, Jennifer Siegel!