(I'm reposting this after it vanished from our site for a moment)
On September 11th of last year, Nir Rosen, who yesterday found great humor in the sexual assault of Lara Logan, tweeted that it was "hard to disagree with much of the Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan Statement Regarding The Anniversary Of The 9/11 Event." He attached a link to this statement from the Taliban. You can read the statement for yourselves, but it is typical Taliban dreck. It's somewhat amazing, in retrospect, that NYU's Center for Law and Security, which took away Rosen's fellowship this morning, didn't separate itself from Rosen then. Or that his repeated calls for the destruction of Israel merited no condemnation from NYU.
I've just spent an hour reading Rosen's Twitter feed, and it's alternately amusing and appalling. Much of it is taken up with petty griping -- he writes repeatedly about his desire to sit in business class ("I fucking hate people in first and business class when I'm not one of them," he wrote.) His hatred of Lara Logan (as well as Wolf Blitzer, James Rubin, Tom Friedman and many other people) is on full display. On September 29th of last year, he wrote, "Washington Post and International Crisis Group turned down my job applications so I can be as vulgar as I want again. Yay! Fuck Tom Friedman.") There is a good deal of violent longing, as well. He wrote on December 15th of last year, "just saw footage of Greek rioters beating a former minister. Now there's accountability. I wish we had some of that." And he wrote, "'Lets not forget the pain and suffering this war has caused,' says Wolf Blitzer, not Iraqi pain of course. I wish pain and suffering on Wolf."
Many of his tweets are given over to expressions of hatred of Israel, and wishes for its destruction. He openly advocates for violence against Israel: "Yes to a 3rd Intifada. This time hopefully with the support of the Palestinians citizens of 'Israel,'" and he states that "Israel's existence is a blight unto the nations." He also appears to believe that Iran should be a nuclear power: "I wish all these Sunni Arab dictators on Wikileaks would explain what the hell is so bad about Iran having nuclear weapons." On October 10th of last year, he tweeted, "new racist Israeli citizenship law should be celebrated. It exposes what Zionism really is, will further ostracize Israel, speed its demise."
The creepiest tweet of Rosen's is this one, I think, from December 3rd, 2010: "On Hannuka, Just think, if only the Greeks had been better at counterinsurgency we wouldn't have these problems today. Where was Petraeus?" The meaning of this is fairly obvious: Hannukah marks the defeat of a Syrian-Greek empire by a Jewish insurgency. If the Greeks had won, the Jews would have been slaughtered. He also wrote that same day, "genocide is modern concep (except when jews are doing it on god's orders in the old testament) greeks were just hellenizing."
I don't know much about Rosen (he has a Hebrew name, and I'm trying to figure out if his parents are Israeli), and I'm not equipped to conduct armchair psychoanalysis, but this is a damaged person. His identification with America's enemies is fairly complete. On October 3rd of last year, he wrote, "Amanpour asks if Americans should fear Islam. Wrong Question. Correct Question is Should Muslims Fear America. Answer: Yes." On September 11th of last year, he wrote: "for an empire like the US 9/11 was but a pinprick, but we went to war with two countries, bombed a few others, killed thousands in revenge," and this
: "its been nine
years already, does this really have to be such a big national (and
nationalist) spectacle at this point? time to get over it."
I really do find people like Nir Rosen very hard to understand.
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