What Part of ‘Death to Israel’ Does Margot Patterson Not Understand?
Margot Patterson
Margot Patterson, a staff writer at the National Catholic Reporter, is standing by her “reporting” about Hezbollah. Despite its ongoing campaign to overthrow a democratically elected government, continued acquisition of weapons courtesy of Syria, and increasingly flagrant expressions of Jew-hatred, she still thinks the group should be portrayed as a nuanced and sophisticated political organization whose anti-Semitism isn’t worth mentioning.
In a letter to the Jewish Chronicle responding to a piece drawing attention to her indifference to Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism, Patterson asks “[M]ust every article about Hezbollah discuss its anti-Semitism?”
Patterson’s genius as a journalist is finding cooperative experts who allow her to write around the elephant in the room: Hezbollah hates Jews as Jews, because they are Jews.
As to her mind-boggling question: “[M]ust every article about Hezbollah discuss its anti-Semitism?” the answer is in a word, yes. If Patterson were interested in covering this “facet” of Hezbollah’s ideology, she might have interviewed Larry Johnson, a former counter-terrorism expert with the Clinton Administration who states that “Hezbollah is the direct ideological heir of the Nazis.”
With her question, Patterson seems to be angling for her very own entry in an ecumencial update of an old classic.
She has earned it.
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