As Pamela Geller said yesterday, “Clearly the media is no longer taking a passive role, or even objective reporting. The media has become an activist voice for supremacists and the far left.”
The pioneering historian Bat Ye’or is the latest victim of this irresponsible advocacy. She was misrepresented yesterday as expressing regret for inspiring the mad murderer in Norway, as if she were accepting the media’s relentless claim that she had some responsibility for his murders. In fact, that was not the case. Here is her statement:
This sudden smear campaign and accusations against authors who live in different countries miles away from Norway, authors that governments want to silence, is very suspicious. Now more things are known: the text of the man could be a fabrication put together at the last minute; the police knew the criminal, yet he could buy all this ammunition and do this massive massacre by himself. And now, authors, writers and politicians disliked by the Norwegian Leftist government are accused of having inspired, by their democratic criticism, this massive crime that the police should have prevented, because this is their duty to do so. Something smells in all that. Is this a new tactic to suppress free thinking and free culture? Universities? Books that displease the regime? Are we going back to dictatorial Nazi or communist regimes, burning books and fabricating proofs to label people?
I do not think that this international campaign against intellectuals will in any way benefit the Leftist Norwegian government, which itself sponsors hatred and violence against another people. It is this government that has to make some self-examination before spreading another media campaign of hate.
Bat Ye’or
Gisele Littman, who writes under the name Bat Ye’or, said that since her books are in the public domain she had no control over who quoted her.
“Of course I regret if this man took inspiration from what I wrote or from what other writers wrote,” she told The Associated Press by telephone from her home in Switzerland. “As an insane person he should have been treated before, and I am greatly saddened for all the young innocents who tragically lost their lives, and for their families.”...
