Bruce Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson: Fantasy and Worse from the Los Angeles Times

victorhanson.com ^ | February 14, 2006 | Bruce Thornton and Victor Davis Hanson

[Tolik]

[Editor’s Note: In the Sunday February 5, 2006 edition of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fresno-based Times reporter Mark Arax published an essay purportedly about how acrimony over 9/11 issues, Iraq, and the war on terror has divided his community "The Valley's Not So Civil War". In fact, the piece was slanted, replete with factual errors, and almost laughable in its caricatures, especially of Fresno-area "Jews." Here is our response to the essay by Victor Davis Hanson and Bruce Thornton, Private Papers contributors who were both mentioned in the article, and like Arax are both natives and life-long residents of the valley.]

Mark Arax's recent Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine essay ("The Valley's Not So Civil War") offers up a fanciful tale of a small group of rabid Jews and wild-eyed Christians, in service to the vast, right-wing conspiracy, threatening free speech in our Central Valley. It is striking to hear at this late date someone still parroting the tired canard that a cabal of neoconservatives, associated with the nefarious Project for the New American Century, somehow convinced the naïve and non-Jewish Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice — not to mention the U.S. Congress — to go to war in Iraq for Israel, as their local minions ("The Jewish community was doing its part as well.") threaten Peace Fresno dissenters on the streets of the city.

How amusing to see those old bogeymen Richard Perle and Douglas Feith mixed in with local Christian fundamentalist zealots ("Up and down the valley, the church is a kind of state"), all cast as dire threats to the old Fresno liberal order of sophisticates like Mark Arax ("The Jews were willing to take their chances on Armageddon as long as the Christians supported Israel in the here and now.")

<SNIP>

[Tolik]

victorhanson.com is a MUST EXCERPT website

[Tolik]

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

       Let me know if you want in or out.

Links: FR Index of his articles:  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson 
His website: http://victorhanson.com/     NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

[Tenacious 1]

Read later.

[Publius6961]

I thought it was me.
I tried to read that verbal diarrhea three times when it first appeared on FR a week or two ago, and could not finish it.

[maica]

A tiny excerpt:

So instead Mr. Arax quotes Hanson at some unspecified date declaring that "Great nations needed to wage war to remain great," and advocating "A call for war against Islam". Arax cannot produce a citation for either sentence since Hanson never wrote or said either.

Why do these "progressive" writers give themselves permission to publish lies?

[metesky]

Do Hanson and Thornton think for one minute that Mark Arax gives a damn? All he cares about is getting his version published in a widely circulated paper.

[Billthedrill]

It's significant to note that this wasn't just some wild-eyed paranoic regurgitating a Stormfront screed, this was a "legitimate" reporter from the LA Times magazine who evidently really does believe in a cabal of Jewish movers and shakers running the U.S. government. It's the kind of crap people used to laugh at on both sides of the political spectrum, but these days if it's anti-Bush you know someone's willing to print it and a lot of idiots are willing to believe.

[dervish]

“His wife, Peggy, though, thought it was important that they share Jared's story, so he welcomed me into his home, but on one condition: "Ask anything you want about Jared, but please don't turn him into a political pawn. I know this war is controversial, and we just came through a nasty election. But I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't. We supported his decision to join the fight."

Arax: “I pointed to the Army recruiter's press release. "Now they're using your sons for propaganda."

Who is using this dead soldier (RIP), this man’s son, for propaganda?

Everything one needs to know about the author Mark Arax, and the authenticity of his article, is here in the violation of his promise to this grieving father.