Radical Chic: The Geritol Years

Someone set up us the bomb.

For a salon full of self-described “Progressives,” time sure does stand still at the New York Review of Books:

The New York Review never lost its taste for upper-class English dons, but in the mid Sixties the dons were joined by a more demotic element. Suddenly, political firebrands like Jerry Rubin, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Kopkind, and Tom Hayden began appearing (Rubin, Carmichael, and Hayden once each, Kopkind with ten pieces). The nadir came with the notorious issue of August 24, 1967. Headlined “Violence and the Negro,” the cover announced in outsize type Kopkind’s piece on Martin Luther King and Black Power and Hayden’s report on the riots—what he called “The Occupation”—of Newark. Underneath was a large diagram instructing readers on the exact composition of a Molotov cocktail.

—  “A nostalgia for Molotovs: ‘The New York Review,'” Roger Kimball, the New Criterion, April, 1998.

The latest edition of the New York Review of Books includes a 4,076-word piece sympathetic to the Boston jihadists who built bombs designed to rip through flesh and bone. In “The Bombers’ World,” Christian Caryl sets out to normalize the unthinkable and justify the savagery that claimed three lives and left many with missing limbs.

The article is an example of the pathology of the left’s obsession with justifying violence directed toward America or any other country that shares our values and the lengths to which they will go to exonerate Islam and deflect attention from the real root cause.

— “New York Review of Books Sympathizes with Jihadists,” Pamela Geller, Big Journalism, today.

Bill Ayers swears up and down that his Vietnam War-era terrorism was totally different from Islamic terrorism today — and yet it’s remarkable those who looked the other way (or were actively fundraising) when the Weathermen and Black Panthers were at their peak are more than willing to be sympathetic towards today’s terrorists. It’s almost as if the sclerotic reactionary left isn’t anti-war, just on the other side, to coin a phrase.