I just finished reading Andrew Sullivan's post, What Often Happens To Israel's Critics I.
Sullivan was coming to the defense of Johann Hari, a columnist at The Independent. Sullivan's entitled to his views, so instead of asking Why?, I'm asking Why now?
You see, the fight Sullivan weighs in on was back in 2008.
That's ancient in blog years, so here's a quick recap:
It began in advance of Israel's 60th anniversary: Hari compared Israel to sh*t (literally) in a column based on an invented quote, which HonestReporting pointed out. Rather than address the issues we raised, Hari's follow-up column smeared HonestReporting, claiming we (along with Melanie Phillips and CAMERA) were trying to intimidate him and other critics of Israel. It was a charge HonestReporting responded to before the blog storm petered out.
I didn't see anything in Sullivan's post indicating a new development, and I even looked at Hari's archives to see if I had missed something. Secret prisons in Afghanistan are beyond our scope.
And then I saw where I believe Sullivan picked up on Hari. On the side of the page was this box. Check out item 3 on the list.
Amazing. The half-life of Hari's tripe is longer than Iran's uranium production, and The Independent's readers were already giving this radioactive commentary a life of its own. Sullivan just enriched it even more.
UPDATE Feb. 16: Sullivan posted a part 2 item, but for whatever reason, removed it. All that remains is Sullivan's tweet. When I posted this last night, it should have occured to me that Hari's column was boosted to its popular status because of the traffic from Sullivan's blog. That's the more likely case.
But my original question remains. Why is Sullivan writing this now?
If this has anything to do with his dust-up with Leon Wieseltier, leave HonestReporting out of it.
