The New York Post Just Called Us “Cowards,” and We Couldn’t Be Happier
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On Wednesday, Paste’s Donovan Farley wrote a piece titled “Why Jesse Hughes’ Statements on the Bataclan Theatre Shootings Aren’t Just Wrong, but Dangerous.” It was a typically thoughtful piece from Donovan on why Hughes, the Eagles of Death Metal frontman, was off point when he blamed the “liberal mentality” (whatever that is) and PC culture for the tragic shootings on Nov. 13 in Paris, and went on to claim that security was complicit in the attacks, and that Muslims were celebrating in the street immediately afterward. The comments may have been understandable, when you consider that Hughes had just survived an incredibly traumatic event, but that doesn’t make them any less incendiary, inaccurate, or—Farley had it right—dangerous.
Enter the New York Post, in the form of neo-red-baiter Joe Simonson. If you couldn’t make an educated guess at the level of nuance Simonson would display from the name of his newspaper, the title of the op-ed should clue you in: “The PC police are backing Islamic terrorists over Eagles of Death Metal.”
Immediately after reading that headline, I rushed back to Farley’s piece in a cold panic, looking for the part of his essay where he cheered on ISIS. I sure wouldn’t want that running under the banner of Paste politics! In fact, we’re avowedly anti-ISIS, and I apologize to no one for that stance.
But you’ll never believe what I found: It didn’t happen. Not once did Donovan praise, justify, or excuse the Bataclan shootings. Not even close. Take a moment to gasp, and get a cup of water, or whatever.
Of course, that didn’t matter to Simonson, whose job is to stoke anger against a fictional hyper-reactionary left who just loves ISIS to death. He writes:
All things considered, pretty mild stuff…Not to the left, of course. To them, it’s more important to hysterically rush to the defense of the “marginalized” group, regardless of how preposterous it looks.
It’s true that writers on the left are seeking to defend marginalized groups, but to conflate the people who are actually hurt by Hughes’ words with ISIS is essentially to say that all Muslims are terrorists. Simonson doesn’t make that point directly, but then again, he doesn’t really have to—it’s coded in every word he writes. We would recommend he re-reads Donovan’s piece, and, when he’s done, he should check out Ismael El Iraki’s facebook response to Hughes, in which he details how one Muslim man at the show saved several lives in the thick of the violence. Simonson should read that near a fainting couch, though, just in case the utter shock of learning that a Muslim man may have been against the terrorists knocks him out on his feet.
Oh, and here’s Simonson’s direct attack on our writer: