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Sunday, August 07, 2011

Ron Kampeas invades Jennifer Rubin's privacy

Poor Jennifer Rubin is being picked apart by the media for writing a post two weeks ago that made what seemed like a reasonable assumption at the time - namely that the Norwegian terror attacks had been carried out by Islamists - and then leaving that post untouched until after the Sabbath ended. Ron Kampeas was particularly nasty.
In any case, the Post's ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, clears her in part because she does not work on the Sabbath:
...What compounded Rubin’s error is that she let her 5 p.m. Friday post remain uncorrected for more than 24 hours. She wrote four other unrelated blog posts that night, through about 9 p.m. Police officials in Norway at 8:33 p.m. Washington time had made their first statement that the suspect had no connection to international terrorism or Muslims. Rubin should have rechecked the facts before signing off, and Post editors should have thought about editing her post more that night.Rubin has a good defense. She is Jewish. She generally observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday; she doesn’t blog, doesn’t tweet, doesn’t respond to reader e-mails.

When she went online at 8 p.m. Saturday, her mea culpa post on Norway was the first thing she posted, although its tone also hurt her, particularly this sentence, which struck many readers as borderline racist: “There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.”

Rubin has a good defense. She is Jewish. She generally observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday; she doesn’t blog, doesn’t tweet, doesn’t respond to reader e-mails.
The problem with this “good defense” is that it’s anything but. This has nothing to do with Shabbat. Pexton says as much -- Rubin filed four additional posts over the next four hours, so she had time to check the facts and update her Norway post before signing off; and The Washington Post always had the ability to update the post even after she called it a night.

The issue isn’t when Shabbat started, but what Rubin did before sundown that Friday night and what the Post did afterward.

Hey Ron - did you ever hear of scheduling posts? I do it all the time.

It is entirely plausible - indeed likely - that Rubin posted those other three items within half an hour or an hour of her original post on Utoya, and then shut off her computer well before the Sabbath started, having queued the other three posts to go live on Friday night.

While I personally do not queue posts to go live after the Sabbath starts where I am located, or before the Sabbath ends where I am located, there is no prohibition of which I am aware under Jewish law from doing so.

I know that this post has nothing to do with Israel, but Jennifer Rubin is one of Israel's strongest advocates and deserves to be defended by the pro-Israel community, especially when it comes to matters of Sabbath observance.

Dan l'kaf zchut (judge another person favorably), Ron. Elul is just around the corner.

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2 Comments:

At 4:16 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

JTA and Ron Kampeas in particular are leftist shills who try to destroy anyone who doesn't support their left-leaning politics and who supports Netanyahu. So they think they have found the right avenue to go after Rubin, attacking her own credibility as an observant Jew. Truth be told I don't know any pundit or editorialists that did not right off the bat think Norway was an Islamists attack.The irony is that once the world found out that it was a deranged man, the left punditry tried to tie it into the Conservative movement and Christianity with a vengeance. Something they call racist if you do to Islamists and their terror. Kampeas is boring as is his compatriots who attacked any conservative voice after Norway. Who truly listens to him anyway except some self-appointed aelf-righteous individuals who reaffirm their own importance by telling each other how brilliant they are during their sojourn through the cocktail party circuit.

 
At 4:22 PM, Blogger The Caped Crusader said...

Hear hear Carl, well done!

What would've been unpardonable was if Jennifer continued to claim it was a Muslim attack, after the evidence showed otherwise.

Yet this is exactly the way NGOs in Israel, and 'critics' of Israel, operate when accusing the Jewish State of war crimes, human rights abuses etc.

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-4102602,00.html

An apology to any Islamist is hardly necessary and would be quite perverse!

 

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