More from an Angry Mackey

Even while announcing that there’s “no room for dialogue” with anyone “hysterical” enough to disagree with him, Robert Mackey seems intent on continuing his dialogue with Snapshots. And that dialogue has proved quite revealing.

To summarize the discussion thus far:

* Mackey doesn’t like that we’ve highlighted his penchant for posting predominantly anti-Israel material on his blog, The Lede, on the New York Times website. He insisted that he can’t be considered biased since, he admitted, his output was “almost all based” on the writings of anti-Israel bloggers and activists who are just trying to save the country from itself. For good measure, he added that our criticisms are “hysterical,” and represent an attempt to silence him.

* In response, we noted that seeking out harsh criticism and passing it off as if that’s where the conversation begins and ends is the very issue: “It pushes aside other facets of the debate. Mainstream Israeli voices are virtually silenced. Mackey leaves little room for commentary that’s more understanding of Israel’s challenges. He leaves little room for criticism of the Palestinian Authority.” We also drew attention to specific examples of his unfair treatment of Israel, and addressed his (rather un-self-aware) confusion about the distinction between criticizing someone and attempting to “silence” them.

Mackey’s latest rejoinder, which is republished below (and can be seen in its original context here) seems especially angry. It’s not just that he uses the word “hysterical” twice this time instead of just once. More striking is that he leveled charges that are so easily belied by a quick glance at his website.

He asserts:

There’s obviously no room for reason in a dialogue with someone who feels the need to devote a fresh hysterical post to preface my comment on his previous hysteria, but thanks for neatly illustrating my main point by claiming, falsely, that I compared the raid on the Gaza flotilla to the one on the Exodus – a comparison that was, in fact, made by an Israeli blogger and journalist.

Did he not compare the raid to the Exodus (and thus, by extension, compare the I.H.H. thugs to Holocaust survivors)? Let’s start with his title:

“Echoes of Raid on ‘Exodus’ Ship in 1947.” That’s certainly an analogy by Mackey.

And what about the first sentence of the post?

To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday’s killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel’s military in international waters, as commandos intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and a seminal event in the Jewish struggle for an independent homeland.

Mackey does not merely relay someone else’s comparison here. He says in his own voice that there are parallels, which are so obvious that they were impossible for other “observers” to miss. (That’s not to say the blogger’s integrity would have been intact if he stopped at approvingly citing someone else’s disgraceful analogy.)

And here’s more analogizing in the blogger’s own voice:

On Monday, activists wounded by the Israeli military during the raid on the ships were brought to Haifa for medical treatment. Sixty-three years ago, the world saw photographs and newsreel footage of dazed Jewish refugees, some wounded by the British military, disembarking the Exodus 1947, under armed guard, in Haifa.

Not obvious enough? Mackey continues, “Another parallel between the events of 1947 and those on Monday is ….” The rest of the sentence doesn’t matter. He is clearly comparing the Mavi Marmara to the Exodus, and its activists to Holocaust survivors. (Not a single voice was quoted taking issue with that offensive comparison.)

It’s as good a time as any to scroll back up to first block quote above, in which the blogger flatly denied making a comparison that he clearly made.

His complete comment follows.

There’s obviously no room for reason in a dialogue with someone who feels the need to devote a fresh hysterical post to preface my comment on his previous hysteria, but thanks for neatly illustrating my main point by claiming, falsely, that I compared the raid on the Gaza flotilla to the one on the Exodus – a comparison that was, in fact, made by an Israeli blogger and journalist. It was the voices of bloggers in various countries that my Times blog was devoted to covering – and the fact that you can only see that as some sort of attack on Israel exactly echoes the response of ultra-nationalist extremists in several other countries – including Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, Serbia and Northern Ireland – who also leaped to the same, erroneous conclusion when forced to read the criticism of dissidents from their own nations.

You other objections – that describing an anti-Palestinian group as ‘anti-Palestinian’ is a slur; that I reported that a video “showed police preventing a Palestinian mother from boarding a police van hen I simply wrote or suggested no such thing – are similarly based on either intentional distortion on your part or a shocking lack of reading comprehension, so there’s clearly no need to bother disturbing further you with the facts.