Israel Matzav

NYU: What took you so long?

In an earlier post, I reported that Nir Rosen had been forced to resign from New York University over his despicable Twitters regarding the sexual assault perpetrated against CBS News reporter Lara Logan. What's amazing is that Rosen wasn't forced out earlier.

Rosen made his name shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a journalist willing to take big risks to get a story. If his editors never wondered how he was able to endear himself to, say, the Sunni insurgency in Fallujah, or the Taliban, or Hezbollah, that’s because they had more important concerns—like waging a media campaign against the Bush administration. Therefore, it didn’t matter to any of the prestigious press outlets that published Rosen (like the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, or the Atlantic, which also publishes Goldberg) that he was openly rooting for the other side.

“Hizballah is not a terrorist organization,” Rosen said of the Lebanese outfit that is responsible for killing American soldiers, diplomats, and civilians, as well as Israelis, Arabs, and other Lebanese. “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 never hid his convictions or sympathies, and no one ever called him to account for it. Instead he was rewarded, made a fellow at the New America Foundation and then NYU, and invited to share his expertise in broadcast media, like the PBS’s “Newshour” and CNN’s “GPS with Fareed Zakaria.” Most remarkably, he was invited to testify on Iraq before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2008, which includes this telling exchange with then Senator Joseph Biden. “As a journalist,” said Rosen, “I'm uncomfortable advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power.”

So why did Rosen get away with it for so long?

As Jeffrey Goldberg reports at the Atlantic, Rosen has been making disturbing and violent comments on Twitter for quite awhile. Of course, the difference was that these remarks took aim at politically correct targets — America and Israel — while his Tweet mocking Logan’s sexual assault was decidedly un-PC.

Indeed. Read the whole thing. You'll find out that NYU probably would have rather kept him despite the tweets. Think about that the next time NYU asks you for money (I went to law and business school there).

In case you're wondering, yes, he's Jewish (with that name it would be surprising if he were not), and yes, he's Israeli. And the morons at Mondoweiss are in mourning for him.

Labels: moonbats, New York University, Nir Rosen

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:14 AM