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CNN fires terrorist supporter.

lupus_in_fabula said:
Here’s Baer’s take on Fadlallah: The Death of Fadlallah: The Misunderstood Shi'a Cleric

He concludes (in shades of grey rather than black & white):
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Damn, that's like saying: Franco, fascist tyrant of Spain, but at the end of the day he was also one of the few European fascist dictators to not collaborate with Hitler.

Look, that means that the guy just wasn't as horribly nasty as he might have been… not that he wasn't already plenty nasty.
 
my grandmother always used to tell me if you cant say anything nice about someone dont say anything at all...
 
Giz said:
Damn, that's like saying: Franco, fascist tyrant of Spain, but at the end of the day he was also one of the few European fascist dictators to not collaborate with Hitler.

Look, that means that the guy just wasn't as horribly nasty as he might have been… not that he wasn't already plenty nasty.
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I hear he is also dead.
 
Giz said:
That's fine for a mainstream person who you just disagree with, but what if the bad parts of a person vastly outweigh their good parts.

To take another Jew-obbsessed militaristic death cultist as an example... would anyone say "Sure I disagreed with Hitler on a host of issues... but he was vegetarian and kind to animals so I respected him a lot and am sad to hear he's dead".

Answer: no one would say that because any good points they might have had are way, way overshadowed by the horrorible side of them.

To a lot of people Hitler is a much better comparison to a senior Hezbollah official than Bob Barr.
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Uh, white supremacist groups are not "mainstream" and are actually, you know, exactly like Hitler.

But way to Godwin up the thread. I guess I win the internets?
 
But...this isn't about Joe Stalin, Hitler, or even the Shia cleric. It is about a CNN reporter losing her job for an opinion, ill-considered, taken out of context, expressing exactly what she meant to express, whatever. The point is should she lose her job over her opinion? And, considering bad as this Claric appears to have been, he isn't Hitler or Stalin. Indeed, King Abdullah of Jordan (A US Ally) also voiced sorrow at this man's passage, as did Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq, so whether you agree with it or not, the perception, at least in the Arab world, is that there was something redeemable about this guy.

My concern with where this thread is going is that, IMO, this reporter shouldn't have lost her job...especially when her opinon is viewed in its complete context. This isn't holocaust denile, it isn't her arguing that the 9/11 bombers were justified, it isn't her saying: I'll miss the guy because he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. It was her saying that she was sad because this particular claric had progressive, non-doctrinaire views of women and their place/role within Islam. At least that is how I understand it.
 
headscratcher4 said:
But...this isn't about Joe Stalin, Hitler, or even the Shia cleric. It is about a CNN reporter losing her job for an opinion, ill-considered, taken out of context, expressing exactly what she meant to express, whatever. The point is should she lose her job over her opinion? And, considering bad as this Claric appears to have been, he isn't Hitler or Stalin. Indeed, King Abdullah of Jordan (A US Ally) also voiced sorrow at this man's passage, as did Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq, so whether you agree with it or not, the perception, at least in the Arab world, is that there was something redeemable about this guy.

My concern with where this thread is going is that, IMO, this reporter shouldn't have lost her job...especially when her opinon is viewed in its complete context. This isn't holocaust denile, it isn't her arguing that the 9/11 bombers were justified, it isn't her saying: I'll miss the guy because he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. It was her saying that she was sad because this particular claric had progressive, non-doctrinaire views of women and their place/role within Islam. At least that is how I understand it.
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Well, to move away from the; "Why is it so hard for some people to accept that a senior Hezbollah official is a bad guy? What's more, why is it the "progessives" that are desperate to find some good in him and mourn his passing?" and move onto the; "should the CNN employee lose her job?" - she expressed an opinion about a controversial figure on her work twitter. Most corporations would fire you for that (unless your role is to be a controversial blowhard a la Glenn Beck).
 
WildCat said:
I disagree. The guy was despicable and evil, even if not 100% so.

Hey, I hear John Gacy did a great job remodeling kitchens and bathrooms, and Ted Bundy was a good tipper...

No one is 100% evil, that doesn't mean you get off the hook for "respecting" the non-evil things they do.

Hitler loved his dogs, but I don't think the SPCA will use his image on any advertisements anytime soon.
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I am in a state of despair; we seem to be coming to a choice between a bunch of crazy Teabaggers who want to turn the clock back a 100 years, and a bunch of "progressives" who want, basically, to make nice with the Al Qaeda and their othen Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorist brothers.
 
Giz said:
Well, to move away from the; "Why is it so hard for some people to accept that a senior Hezbollah official is a bad guy? What's more, why is it the "progessives" that are desperate to find some good in him and mourn his passing?" and move onto the; "should the CNN employee lose her job?" - she expressed an opinion about a controversial figure on her work twitter. Most corporations would fire you for that (unless your role is to be a controversial blowhard a la Glenn Beck).
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So, after 20 years of comendable and honorable work most workplaces -- espeically a business in the news/opinion/reporting field like CNN -- would fire a "twitter" opinion without resorting to other diciplinary measures or actually checking on the context of the statement?

Look, I'm not defending this claric or his opinions. I'm willing to say that this reporter's praise and her open expression of it, such as it was, was at best misguided. But was this a firing offense? It seems to me to be a complete over-reaction and, to accept Cicero's explaination of why it can't be "political correctness", than it is reverse political-correctness.
 
dudalb said:
I am in a state of despair; we seem to be coming to a choice between a bunch of crazy Teabaggers who want to turn the clock back a 100 years, and a bunch of "progressives" who want, basically, to make nice with the Al Qaeda and their othen Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorist brothers.
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BUT it simply isn't an either or situation in this particular case. She wasn't praising AlQeda, she was praising this claric's nuanced and progressive view of the role of women in Islam and Arab societies. Indeed, our "allies" -- Maliki and King Abdullah -- were apparently saddened at his passing for his quailties as a leader of Hamas. She loses her job, they'll get White House face time (and would have under Bush).
 
Ziggurat said:
I oppose honor killings, obviously. Him taking the right side on that issue doesn't make him right on any other issue. And it doesn't stop him from being a terrorist.
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The reporter in question was saying she respected him for his stance on womens rights and honor killings, yet when it suites you the nuance doesn’t matter and she shouldn’t respect any of his positions because he takes one you disagree with.
Ziggurat said:
Indeed, you can play the game. But you can't understand it.
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You are far more transparent then you seem to believe. The fact that you don’t even recognize your own cognitive errors is actually quite telling.
 
dudalb said:
I am in a state of despair; we seem to be coming to a choice between a bunch of crazy Teabaggers who want to turn the clock back a 100 years, and a bunch of "progressives" who want, basically, to make nice with the Al Qaeda and their othen Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorist brothers.
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I know what you mean. But I wouldn't despair too much, too soon; the republic has withstood a couple of centuries of human folly without the sky falling!
 
Giz said:
That's fine for a mainstream person who you just disagree with, but what if the bad parts of a person vastly outweigh their good parts.
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I actually agree that the bad vastly outweighs the good but that judgment is entirely subjective. At best all you can really do is say what you agree with him on and what you disagree with him on.
 
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