Columnist Thought Syria Conflict Worth Murdering Over–but Not Worth Writing About

Make no mistake: I condemn violence in all forms. My article only sought to explain the assassination and put it in the current context.

But wait—aside from support for the assassin being the logical implication of comparing Putin to Hitler and the Russian bombing campaign to the Holocaust, he expressly defended the killing on Twitter. On Monday, he tweeted out his initial hot take with the words, “Wherein I make a case for political assassinations … when the victim works for Putin or Hitler, that is.” The case for political assassinations: Kuntzman is unequivocally arguing in favor of what the assassin did.

In defending himself on social media, Kuntzman time and again shows he’s far more concerned with grandstanding than engaging, even clumsily referring to the gunman as Syrian (he is, of course, Turkish) in one of his responses.

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, Kuntzman has, until Monday, never once written about the Syrian conflict. (The one mention of the word “Syria” in his writings came when he quoted his Trump-supporting father blaming Democrats for “allowing the Russians into Syria”—8/2/16.)

Kuntzman: a sleazy hatchet man for the empire, and shockingly ignorant about the whole incident, erroneously calling the murderer “a Syrian”.

That’s correct—what he now insists is a genocide unfolding before our eyes, so morally urgent it justifies gunning down diplomats, isn’t something he once felt the need to highlight to his paper’s hundreds of thousands of readers. Like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who spent weeks advocating the bombing of Libya in 2011 only to never write about Libya again, Kuntzman’s bleeding heart stops and starts at the whims of the US national security state.

This speaks to what I sometimes refer to as “The North Korea Law of Journalism,” 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—to say nothing of the United States itself—one would never read a columnist advocating the murder of their diplomats in the pages of a major American paper.

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

Karlov’s job in Turkey was to ease tensions over Russia’s atrocities in Syria and its incursions inside Turkey itself — meaning his job was to enable and normalize Vladimir Putin. Given that role, he wasn’t 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.

The logical follow up to this is: Does this apply to all countries who commit war crimes? To US diplomats? If so, doesn’t it also render virtually all modern diplomacy impossible? Such glaring holes in his argument are never addressed.

They’re not addressed because, like many Western pundits, he is not serious about having a discussion on Syria—or how to mitigate its horrors—he’s 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.

EDITOR’S NOTE:
Mortimer Zuckerman: The elitist tycoon that enables Kuntzmann and his disgusting posturing.

Mort  Zuckerman has the smarts and elite credentials (as evidenced by his Harvard pedigree, etc.), but lacks the elementary morality to do something decent in this world with all that accumulated power, like opposing barbaric wars instead of fostering them. 

Mortimer Benjamin “Mort” Zuckerman (born June 4, 1937)^[2] is a Canadian-born American media proprietor, magazine editor, and investor. He is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO of Boston Properties, one of the largest real estate investment trustsin the United States. Zuckerman is also the owner and publisher of the New York Daily News and of U.S. News & World Report, where he serves as editor-in-chief. He formerly owned The Atlantic and Fast Company. His personal net worth is estimated at $2.7 billion.^[3]

Zuckerman was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the son of Esther and Abraham Zuckerman, who owned a tobacco and candy store.^[4][5] His family was Jewish, and his grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi.^[6] Zuckerman entered McGill University at the age of 16.^[7]He graduated from McGill with a BA in 1957 and a BCL in 1961, although he never took the bar exam.^[8] That same year, Zuckerman entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an MBA degree with a distinction of honor. In 1962, he received an LLM degree from Harvard Law School. After graduating, Zuckerman remained at Harvard Business School as an associate professor for nine years. He also taught at Yale University. Zuckerman spent seven years at the real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, where he rose to the position of senior vice president and chief financial officer.^[9]
(Wikipedia)