Joshua Marshall responds to criticism of his description of Arafat’s figurehead prime minister Abu Mazen as “unquestionably one of the good guys.” He takes a gratuitous slap at FrontPage magazine, then admits their facts are accurate; admits he didn’t know about Abu Mazen’s history of Holocaust denial (while ignoring his support for the intifada and for killing Jews in the disputed territories) but says it doesn’t change his opinion; says he believes Arafat has genuinely worked for peace but “for a variety of reasons both personal and political was unwilling or unable to actually make the deal”; and then reiterates that it doesn’t matter to him if Mazen has ugly beliefs, he’s still one of the “good guys,” because he worked on the Oslo trojan horse … uh, I mean peace plan.

Then he condescendingly misrepresents my comments:

(The proprietor of this website [LGF] seems to say that I am a hypocrite for holding Trent Lott to one standard and Abbas to another. To this I would say, yes, I confess that I do hold the United States Senate Majority Leader to a rather higher standard than the capos of the Fatah faction of the PLO. But, you know, that’s just me.)

It’s pretty clear from my original post that I was asking whether Marshall was simply ignorant of the facts, or if he was applying a hypocritical double standard. Now I have my answer—both.

His last point deserves a reply, though:

Of course, many people in this country — seemingly a lot of people on the web — really don’t believe in a two-state peace settlement; they think the whole Oslo Accord was just a con on the part of the Palestinians; and they prefer the stability and moral clarity of the on-going cycle of mutual death and destruction that has gripped the region for three years now. I guess we just disagree.

So if we point out that Arafat’s puppet is a Holocaust denier, that means we prefer an “on-going cycle of mutual death and destruction?”

Holocaust denial is not just a character flaw that can be tastefully ignored, or a phase that one grows out of; how naïve do you have to be to think that if Mazen “recants” these views he should be believed? And by the way, he has not recanted anything; instead, all involved are furiously trying to sweep the issue under the rug.

When writers like Marshall rush to bestow blessings on people like Mazen—a rabid anti-Semite appointed by a terrorist leader who obviously has no intention of relinquishing power—they are the ones helping to perpetuate the violence in the Middle East.