Even the liberal New Republic

The Moor Next Door, who should be daily required reading, rips Jonathan Chait and Marty Peretz a new one. The whole post is worth reading. He ends with a question.

The question remains: why can Marty Peretz, in all his bigotry and foolishness, sit at the helm of the so-called flagship publication of the American left? How can he spend his days writing bitterly ignorant blog posts while American liberals look on without raising any fuss? That sounds like it turns on Peretz his own demand that Muslims, regardless of profession, place, age or whether they live in a free state or a dictatorship, protest every bombing or beheading in Pakistan or some other warzone (because they protested cartoons); but it does not. Liberal bloggers do take him on; liberal writers do too. And they do it quite well. They accuse him of racism or of being a neoconservative in the guise of a liberal. The latter charge is of no particular concern here, but one must draw the conclusion that Peretz gets away with his racism because he can.

He can write five times a day on why the President must call terrorist acts acts of “Muslim terrorism” and why Americans should not think that the sliver of Muslims engaged in violent radicalism represent the essential Islamic tradition because he is the editor-in-chief and as such has underlings to look the other way and to defend him if need be. He can make warnings about minor matters in the vein of Sir Anthony Eden crying out about Nasser because a good many are willing to let him rant so long as they can sit in another room, that quirky old man. He has the ear of Al Gore and other powerful liberals. “But how can that be?” the little American Ait-Brownskin asks. “Because the possibilities of conversation are always broader than the inconvinent truth of Martin Peretz’s bigotry,” replies Baba Ait-Brownskin.