LA Weekly: WTF?

If a press photographer is doctoring photos, then they should be exposed and fired.

That's exactly what happened to Adnan Hajj, who was working in Lebanon for Reuters.

And the LA blog Little Green Footballs is to be commended for largely uncovering the deceptions.

Okay, but there's something really nasty going on in Brendan Bernhard's "news" article (it's not marked as opinion or commentary) on the matter for the LA Weekly.

First off, Bernhard characterizes LGF as a blog "widely reviled by some because it takes global Islamist terrorism more seriously than, say, a Dick Cheney hunting accident."

Oh, is THAT why LGF is reviled? And not because blogger Charles Johnson never met a Muslim he didn't want to incarcerate, or that the site is, as even Andrew Sullivan has acknowledged, "enthusiastically pro-torture"?

But there's little hope of a measured opinion from Bernhard in this slobbering valentine to Johnson and LGF, since Bernhard himself offers helpfully that "you’d be hard-pressed to find Muslims in the U.S., let alone Europe, who aren’t strongly anti-Israel."

What. The. Fuck.

Uh, dude, in fact it took me exactly two seconds of Googling to find a whole page of them.

But wait, here's the end of the above sentence: "why on earth would you expect to find neutral Arab reporters in Baghdad or Beirut?"

Oh, um, well, I expect it, actually, because it is their job. I expect it just like I expect a reporter from Israel to be neutral, just as I expect a reporter from the U.S. to be neutral.

Yes, we all know that neutrality is a constantly moving target. Unless you're Switzerland. But I get the sense that Bernhard, just like his beloved Johnson, believes that the Israelis are a lot more capable of fairness than Muslims of any nationality. I get the sense that he believes, like Johnson, that Muslims are something just a tiny bit less than human.

And just in case you are still harboring any lingering delusions about the depth of thinking going on in Bernhard's article, he offers us this tired old chestnut: "Johnson’s chances of being invited to a party at Arianna Huffington’s mansion are about as good as Osama bin Laden’s. (Okay, worse.)"

Ho ho ho! Because, see, she's a liberal! And they would rather invite a mass murderer and sworn enemy of the U.S. to her house than someone who disagrees with her! Ho ho ho!

What a tool.