POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY IRSHAD MANJI IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
"The paranoid can't handle the truth"
The arrogance and just plain ignorance of this article are appalling.
First, Ms Manji lumps together a great variety of people under one heading, the "paranoid."
While there certainly are paranoid people out there, there are also critical thinkers and skeptics galore. Calling them paranoid is willfully ignorant.
Indeed, since paranoia is a genuine mental-health problem, Ms Manji's use of the word flies in the face of all our society's good intentions about removing the stigma from mental health issues.
Would Ms Manji say "Brain cancer patients can't handle the truth"? If she did, she would be castigated for her ignorance and crudeness.
Well, just so the statement about "paranoid."
The childishness of her writing is demonstrated too in an over-used, trite expression from a movie, "You can't handle the truth!" That's high-school writing.
The fact is, in politics and international affairs, we do live in a shadow world where very little of what's in newspapers is complete or accurate.
Why is that? Because very great matters are at stake involving the projects of very powerful organizations.
When, in the early 1960s, a New York Times reporter discovered the impending invasion of Cuba by an American proxy army, the paper suppressed the story. To have done otherwise would have been to invite the wrath of the CIA and Pentagon and White House and an end of the kind of cooperation and leaks so vital to any newspaper.
Does Ms Manji not understand that most of the “great” news stories of the past depend upon such cooperation on a selective basis?
The CIA a few years ago violated its own rules about the release of files of a certain age. It did this concerning the matter of Guatamala in the 1950s. The CIA engineered the coup that brought down an elected government (only one of a number so treated in that era), but judged it was still too early to release the facts on its dirty work.
Even now, almost three-quarters of a century after World War II, new secrets from that time are sometimes released.
We only learned the other day that Israel from 1967 into the 1990s engineered the statelessness of 140,000 Palestinians who happened to travel abroad. Our press never told us that ugly story.
What about apartheid South Africa’s small nuclear arsenal, created with the cooperation of Israel? Our press never covered it. What about Israel’s own still secret nuclear arsenal? What about the fact that President Kennedy made efforts to stop Israel’s getting the bomb? Did our press cover those?
There are countless examples.
Somehow I doubt Ms Manji would show the same deference towards the powers that be and stupid use of language were she writing about women’s issues, but then I may be wrong. She may well be as inept on any issue as she is here and has been in other columns.
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"Manji is one of those new breed of wannabe narcissistic writers, who thinks everything they write is important."
Absolutely.
I think it's possible this silly person went to one of those primary schools where kids in grade four have their "works" published (put into covers resembling a real book) and put on display shelf.
The immense ego of this woman - an ego supported by absolutely no demonstration of real learning or intellectual talent - would have been force-fed by such educational silliness into the throbbing monster she unleashes with every "column" she writes.
At least a throwback propagandist like Margaret Wente can be funny at times, but Ms Manji has no discernible talent of any kind.
She displays only earnest arrogance with a remarkable lack of genuine education.
