Eye on Winer

Dave Winer on Twitter today:

davewiner: One of the reasons I am so angered by Jorn Barger’s annointing as the leader of the blogging movement is that he’s an anti-semite. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: Being against a race is anti-blogging, imho, which is about inclusion not spreading hate. I wonder if the people who promote him know this. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: To take something so good and apply it to such a bad purpose is tragic. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: Jorn blames jews for lots of stuff we’re not to blame for. Pretty classic race hate, the stuff we’ve been dealing with for hundreds of years about 1 hour ago

davewiner: @eastgate, ask NPR or the BBC, or other MSM outlets. They’re careful to say he coined the name, but I doubt if many catch the subtlety. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: Look, I don’t care if Barger uses his blog to spread hate. I object to the idea that I am following him somehow. It’s the other way around. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: The jew-hater is using the medium pioneered by a jew. How about that for irony. Missed totally by the MSM people because they’re lazy, imho. about 1 hour ago

davewiner: @krisguy, i didn’t say anthing about this for ten years. the msm ought to know who they’re promoting. obviously they haven’t read his blog. about 1 hour ago

Winer’s going deep into the wayback machine for this attack, referring to a scandal that arose in 2000 when Barger used the following two headlines on news stories about events in Israel and Palestine: “Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?” followed by “Are Jews incapable of polite discourse? (Was: Response to my critics).” As the second headline demonstrates, a lot of people were mad as hell at Barger over the first headline.

None of this changes the fact that Barger coined the term weblog.

For someone who plays the anti-Semite card as hard as Winer, it’s interesting how he’s blogged about the same subject:

• Jan. 21, 2007: “I don’t know what it is about Jews, but when it comes to Israel they lose all sense of perspective. Do they think the Palestinians are entitled to a point of view? Imagine for a moment if you were a Palestinian. Might the treatment you’ve received by Israel feel just a bit like apartheid? … I was raised to think Jews are smarter than everyone else, but when it comes to Israel, we’re pretty damned thoughtless.”
• April 21, 2000: “When I was a kid, being Jewish was something dirty, to be ashamed of. I can’t say exactly how I came to this opinion, perhaps there is no reason why. I always hated how smelly and personal Jews were.”
• Aug. 1, 2006: “I know I’m going to catch hell for this, but it’s time to say something. Israel is wrong. There aren’t two sides to this anymore. … There are hundreds of millions of lives at stake in the Middle East, and this time not only has an Arab country, and that’s what Hezbollah is, withstood Israel’s attack, but they’re also clearly justified in their response to the Israeli attack.”

So Winer’s been an outspoken critic of Jews and Israel in the past, even to the point of speaking up for Hezbollah. As a Jew his criticism comes from a different place, but if you put his words in the mouth of a gentile, that person would be called a Jew hater.

Here’s where it gets weird. After Barger posed the questions that will forever tar him as an anti-Semite, Winer defended him: “I’m glad that Jorn Barger, who’s not Jewish (apparently) asked these questions. It’s reasonable to want to know if there’s a difference between being Jewish and being from Israel.”

Oy vey.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Dave, Politics, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.