The term "Twitter" has always struck me as an apt way for those who for whom email has now become too intimate a means of communication to convey their every thought, impulse and emotion. Now comes news that someone named Nir Rosen, a left-wing journalist affiliated with New York University, used the social network to unburden himself of the opinion that a woman journalist's sexual assault in Egypt is quite a gas. The victim in question is CBS correspondent Lara Logan who was hospitalised after being violently set upon by a group of men for thirty minutes whilst covering the revolution in Cairo's Tahrir Square. She had previously reported from the frontlines of Iraq and Afghanistan and said some non-condemnatory things about the recently dismissed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, all of which makes her an unlamented 'war-monger' and fair game for the following titter-fest on Twitter. I quote from the website FishbowlDC, which carries a contrite interview with Rosen, now formerly affiliated with New York University:
 

[Nir Rosen's] tweets from Feb. 15: “Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.” But there was more: "Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.” He was referring to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who suffered beatings during his Egypt coverage. He also called Logan a war monger, saying, “Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.”

Rosen apologises, of course, lacerating himself as "rash," "careless," "idiotic" and "childish." It was all a big misunderstanding, you see. He was just worried "how celebrities, especially white ones, get so much attention, and before I realized it was a sexual assault I was sort of anticipating a return to the old theme about unleashed brown natives attacking a white woman." That clears it up.

It will hardly surprise that Rosen's views on jihadism and Islamism are as masochistic as his desperate, media-shopped beg-your-pardons. He believes that the anti-Semitic terrorist group Hezbollah is
 

not a terrorist organization. It is a widely popular and legitimate political and resistance movement. It has protected Lebanon’s sovereignty and resisted American and Israeli plans for a New Middle East. It’s also among the most democratic of Lebanon’s political movements and one of the few groups with a message of social justice and anti-imperialism.

Rosen's assessment of Hamas and suicide bombings is equally persuasive.

Though amidst his belated career-rescuing attempts in that FishBowl interview, Rosen did manage to tell the unmitigated truth on one occasion. He boasts that he has "spent eight years risking [his] life as a journalist" reporting from warzones. That's true. He was "embedded" with the Taliban in Afghanistan for a spell, and so his life was always in danger of being extinguished by an American drone or Nato fusillade at any time. 

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