Saturday, February 17, 2007

A tidal wave ....

There's another review of Nick, this time in The Australian by Rebecca Weisser. A moment's googling reveals Weisser to be one of those people who gets namechecked on Normblog, reproduced on FrontPageMag, etc etc. So it's the usual boilerplate stuff, basically. Items worth of mention:

"Cohen, like Christopher Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and David Aaronovitch, stands in the proud English tradition of writers such as George Orwell ...." (Nice to see his friends as well as his critics now bracket Nick with Mad Mel P.)

"In fact, it [the Euston Manifesto] launched a tidal wave of support and dissent." (Yeah, a veritable tsunami.)

"A headline on The Guardian website, 'David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-Semitic', was challenged by an enraged reader who protested against the inherent bigotry and demanded the headline be rewritten as, 'David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man, or woman, anti-Semitic.' " (A fairly feeble joke this, lifted from the book, I think ... is there any actual evidence for it?)

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"A headline on The Guardian website, 'David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-Semitic', was challenged by an enraged reader who protested against the inherent bigotry and demanded the headline be rewritten as, 'David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man, or woman, anti-Semitic.'"

IIRC it was a topic posted by an ordinary member of the Guardian talk board (or whatever it's called), and swiftly removed by moderators. In Cohen's hands it morphed into "the Guardian ran a web debate entitled...", implying some form of editorial decision (though he corrected the error in his book), and I see it has now become "a headline on the Guardian website".

In both instances the intention is clearly to imply that the eevul liberal Guardian readership doesn't care about anti-semitism but will happily make pedantic corrections for the sake of anti-sexism.

2/17/2007 02:08:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The attempt to minimise this would be more persuasive if it weren't for Roger's nice little post in the Amnesty thread below. You know, where Nick has metamorphosed into a "my beloved Israel, right or wrong" man. I challenged Roger, but BB and BB2 were notable for their absence. I hardly need to point out that Roger (of RoGERs RAnts) has not appeared to set the record straight.

2/17/2007 04:58:00 PM  
Blogger Chardonnay Chap said...

Anon - I am BB2.

2/17/2007 06:50:00 PM  
Blogger Captain Cabernet said...

"The attempt to minimise this ...."

What attempt to minimise this? Anyone who makes an issue out of Cohen having a Jewish name is a moron and a bigot. But it is possible to acknowledge that whilst suspecting that the "man or woman" story is largely invented.

2/17/2007 08:29:00 PM  

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