Waiting for Politkovskaya

Via Chris Bertram, Mark Ames at the exile publication eXile.ru does a brilliant job smacking down American journalists in general, Washington Post editorial page figures in particular, and Anne Applebaum in super-particular for their opportunistic, shallow, and egocentric deployments of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya's murder:

What exactly was Anna Politkovskaya's bullet-riddled corpse worth to the West? No surprise here: A juicy opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia. . . .

The West has used poor Anna Politkovskaya's corpse to do exactly what she fought against: whipping up national hatred, lying, and focusing on evils committed safely far away, rather than on the evils committed by your own country. The West has exploited her death with all of the crudity and cynicism of an Arab mob funeral...only at least the Arabs use their own people's corpses to demonize an enemy that actually kills them. Whereas in this case, the West stole another country's corpse, then paraded it at home in order to whip up hatred against the corpse's birthplace. It would be like the Palestinians slipping into Tel Aviv, grave-robbing Rabin's corpse after his murder, then parading it around Gaza City, ululating hate towards Israel for allowing the great peacemaker to get killed.

Read the whole thing. Where, he asks, are America's Politkovskayas -- the brave journalists who stand up to the depredations and illiberalism of our local political goons? It would go too far to say there are none, but Fred Hiatt and friends certainly don't qualify.