{"id":286893,"date":"2016-12-23T04:59:56","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T03:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/columnist-thought-syria-conflict-worth-murdering-over-but-not-worth-writing-about\/"},"modified":"2016-12-23T04:59:56","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T03:59:56","slug":"columnist-thought-syria-conflict-worth-murdering-over-but-not-worth-writing-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/columnist-thought-syria-conflict-worth-murdering-over-but-not-worth-writing-about\/","title":{"rendered":"Columnist Thought Syria Conflict Worth Murdering Over\u2013but Not Worth Writing About"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Daily<\/a><\/p>\n

Daily News<\/strong> columnist Gersh Kuntman later claimed that this piece, also headlined “Don’t Cry for Russia’s Slain Envoy, Who Was Putin’s Lackey,” was not an endorsement of assassination.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Daily News <\/b>columnist Gersh Kuntzman is doubling-down on his celebratory-but-not-celebratory-but-obviously-celebratory take (12\/20\/16<\/a>) on the December 19 murder of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov by an off-duty Turkish police officer. His follow-up column, \u201cVladimir Putin Is Demanding an Apology From Me!\u201d (12\/21\/16<\/a>), came a day after Kutzman openly justified the killing of Karlov in the United States\u2019 sixth-largest newspaper.<\/p>\n

Predictably, calling for the assassination of Russian diplomats in such a large forum upset the Russian government, and President Vladimir Putin has since asked for an apology<\/a> from the paper\u2019s editor. But Kuntzman, polishing his Bold Truth-Teller bona fides, used the opportunity to posture and further troll the world\u2019s largest nuclear power. This exercise in pseudo-courage came complete with front-page tabloid-taunting (“Yeah Right, Vlad”) Thursday morning, and a hastily made \u201cwanted poster\u201d by some poor Daily News<\/b> graphics intern:<\/p>\n

\"Russia's<\/a>
\nKuntzman\u2014who last gained slight internet fame<\/a> after he insisted<\/a> that firing off a few rounds from an AR-15 gave him \u201ca temporary form of PTSD\u201d\u2014appears to be enjoying his 15 minutes. \u201cApologize, Russia?\u201d Kuntzman mugged. \u201cOnly if you go first and apologize for Putin’s thuggery.\u201d Such bravery. Or at least we could pretend it was, if he didn\u2019t go on immediately afterwards to backpedal:<\/p>\n

\n

Make no mistake: I condemn violence in all forms. My article only sought to explain the assassination and put it in the current context.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But wait\u2014aside from support for the assassin being the logical implication of comparing Putin to Hitler and the Russian bombing campaign to the Holocaust, <\/i>he expressly defended <\/i>the killing on Twitter<\/b>. <\/i>On Monday, he tweeted out<\/a> his initial hot take with the words, \u201cWherein I make a case for political assassinations … when the victim works for Putin or Hitler, that is.\u201d The case for <\/i>political assassinations: Kuntzman is unequivocally arguing in favor of what the assassin did.<\/p>\n

In defending himself on social media, Kuntzman time and again shows he\u2019s far more concerned with grandstanding than engaging, even clumsily referring<\/a> to the gunman as Syrian (he is, of course, Turkish<\/a>) in one of his responses.<\/p>\n

The reality is, Kuntzman has a superficial understanding of the conflict in Syria, has a separate bone to pick with Russia, and cheaply used the former to demagogue the latter. In scores of pieces written over his four years at the Daily News<\/b>, Kuntzman has, until Monday, never once written<\/a> about the Syrian conflict. (The one mention of the word \u201cSyria\u201d in his writings came when he quoted his Trump-supporting father blaming Democrats for \u201callowing the Russians into Syria\u201d\u20148\/2\/16<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s correct\u2014what he now insists is a genocide unfolding before our eyes, so morally urgent it justifies gunning down diplomats, isn\u2019t something he once felt the need to highlight to his paper\u2019s hundreds of thousands of readers. Like the New York Times<\/b>\u2019 Nicholas Kristof, who spent weeks advocating the bombing of Libya in 2011 only to never write about Libya<\/a> again, Kuntzman\u2019s bleeding heart stops and starts at the whims of the US national security state.<\/p>\n

This speaks to what I sometimes refer to as \u201cThe North Korea Law of Journalism<\/a>,\u201d which states that editorial standards are inversely proportional to a country’s standing with the US State Department. Because relations with Russia are so frayed right now, US journalists and pundits can basically report or say anything they want. Despite the abhorrent human rights records of US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia\u2014to say nothing of the United States itself<\/a>\u2014one would never read a columnist advocating the murder of their diplomats in the pages of a major American paper.<\/p>\n

Kuntzman, without ever explaining himself, goes full Godwin<\/a>, asserting Putin as the moral equivalent of Hitler without ever laying out how this moral calculus was arrived at. After equating Karlov\u2019s Turkish killer with Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish student who assassinated Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath in France in 1938, Kuntzman insisted Russia\u2019s undefined Nazi status made all Russia public servants fair game:<\/p>\n

\n

Karlov’s job in Turkey was to ease tensions over Russia’s atrocities in Syria and its incursions inside Turkey itself \u2014 meaning his job was to enable and normalize Vladimir Putin. Given that role, he wasn\u2019t a diplomat, but a soldier, and his death is the same whether it came on a battlefield outside Aleppo or in an art gallery in Ankara.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The logical follow up to this is: Does this apply to all countries who commit war crimes? To US diplomats? If so, doesn\u2019t it also render virtually all modern diplomacy impossible? Such glaring holes in his argument are never addressed.<\/p>\n

They’re not addressed because, like many Western pundits, he is not serious about having a discussion on Syria\u2014or how to mitigate its horrors\u2014he\u2019s only interested it in using it as a proxy for other geopolitical grievances. He has never written about it before Monday, and will likely never write about after this spat is over. Syria, and its countless victims, are simply a moral bludgeon to be wielded when scoring points against US enemies and, as with others before, he will likely drop the subject once these aims are achieved.<\/p>\n

\n

Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org<\/strong>.<\/em> You can find him on Twitter<\/strong> at @AdamJohnsonNYC<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

You can send messages to the Daily News<\/strong> at voicers@nydailynews.com<\/a> (or via Twitter<\/strong>: @NYDailyNews<\/a>). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.<\/em><\/p>\n

This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daily News columnist Gersh Kuntman later claimed that this piece, also headlined “Don’t Cry for Russia’s Slain Envoy, Who Was Putin’s Lackey,” was not an endorsement of assassination. Daily News columnist Gersh Kuntzman is doubling-down on his celebratory-but-not-celebratory-but-obviously-celebratory take (12\/20\/16) on the December 19 murder of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov by an off-duty Turkish police […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-286893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}