It's all in how you select the material:

Eric Alterman writes:

Speaking of blinkered editors, Michael Kelly, who managed to outdo Andy as TNR’s worst editor ever, is now competing for the hard-to-win title of worst Washington Post columnist ever. In this column, he takes Paul Berman’s brilliant 25,000-word-essay-that-should-be-a-book about German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and shamelessly manipulates it into implying exactly the opposite of Berman’s nuanced and complex article. Robert Novak, call your office. (By the way, the Berman piece is one of the single greatest works of journalism to appear anywhere in the past decade. Offhand, I can’t think of a better one. Set aside some time to read it if the topic even remotely interests you.)

We agree with Alterman that the TNR article was fascinating. It covered the variety of positions and changes that have taken place within Europe's New Left over the last 35 years. The overall message of the article was that Fischer had witnessed the extreme left's violence, turned away from it, developed a deeper respect for human rights, and as a result was inclined (as a Green!) to use military force in places where necessary (e.g. Kosovo). But you wouldn't get that from Kelly's essay. Kelly cherry-picks entries and ignores other facts in order to present Fischer as a (nearly) unrepentant radical leftist. Kelly's entire essay is in the left column below, and excerpts from the New Republic article are in the right column.

From the Washington Post Op-Ed by Michael Kelly	From the New Republic article by Paul Berman
Mr. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal. This seems to me the right way to look at it. The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of whom we have failed to convince. Sometimes "who" explains "why."
Mr. Fischer, who are you? You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.
But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing on that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."
In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him . . ."	German newspapers began to fill with dispatches from middle-aged worthies from the business world and the learned professions who confessed that they, too, had waged the revolution back in the years around 1968, and then had grown up and had sanded down the sharp edge of their views, just as Fischer had done, and Germany's foreign minister ought not to be persecuted for what happened long ago. ... The most amazing vote of support came from Fischer's own victim, the white-helmeted policeman in the photographs from 1973, whose name turned out to be Rainer Marx. Fischer telephoned Marx to apologize for the gruesome beating in the Frankfurt parking lot, and Marx found admiring words to say about Fischer's conduct of foreign policy.
As Berman reported, Mr. Fischer, you rose in public life as an important figure in the anti-American, anti-liberal, neo-Marxist, revolution-minded German radical left of the generation of 1968. This was the left that produced and supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), which, as Berman wrote, "refrained from nothing," including "kidnappings, bank holdups, murders." You were not a terrorist yourself, but you were a good and active friend to terrorists, weren't you, Mr. Fischer?	... the New Left was never especially powerful in the Federal Republic of Germany as a whole ... But in the universities and the counter-cultural districts in Frankfurt and Berlin and a few other places, [the Baader-Meinhof Gang] drew on the active and even enthusiastic support of a not-so-small number of people, plus the passive support of far larger numbers, the leftists who would never have endorsed a program of violence and who wanted nothing to do with murders, but who would have said that, even so, the Red Army Fraction did have reason to despise German bourgeois society, and Marxist revolution was an excellent idea, and state repression posed a greater threat to society than any guerrilla resistance from the left. And shouldn't we progressives and reasonable leftists worry chiefly about civil liberties? And so forth: the many arguments and apologetics that people offer in circumstances when, out of confusion and moral timidity, they are too frightened to applaud the murders and the kidnappings, and too frightened to condemn them.
In 1976, to protest the death in prison of Baader-Meinhof founder Ulrike Meinhof, you planned and participated in a Frankfurt demonstration in which, Berman wrote, "somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail at a policeman and burned him nearly to death." You were arrested but not charged. In 2001, Meinhof's daughter, Bettina Rohl (who gave those damning photos to Stern) told the press that you were responsible for the throwing of that firebomb. Other contemporary witnesses, Berman reported, said that you "had never ruled out the use of Molotovs and may even have favored it." You denied it, for the record.	No one came up with any sort of indisputable confirmation. But Fischer was obliged to rise from his seat once again and, in his dignity as foreign minister, deny all connection to a very ugly event from long ago ("Definitiv nein!" he told Stern) ... [I went to the website for] fans of the Baader-Meinhof Gang ... and was interested to read about the curious case of Horst Mahler ... one of the founders of the group back in 1970. [H]is view, as reported on the website, right-wing and left-wing counted for nothing as far as the behavior of Meinhof's daughter. The real animus against Fischer bubbled up instead from a daughter's anger at her inadequate mother, the prison martyr. Or else, as was more widely said, Röhl's anger at Fischer derived from a still vaguer resentment against the entire era of 1968 ... For what was 1968 to Bettina Röhl? It was the era that had deprived her of a childhood.
In 2001 the German government put on trial your old friend Hans-Joachim Klein, who had been an underground "soldier" in the Revolutionary Cells, an ally of the Red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Revolutionary Cells helped in the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, and Klein himself took part in a 1975 joint assassination operation with Carlos the Jackal in which three were killed.	Fischer was called to testify, not in his capacity as foreign minister but as a private citizen. He was asked about his relationship to Klein back in New Left times. Fischer explained that in those days he tried to talk Klein out of joining the terrorists.
During your testimony at Klein's trial, you were accused of having harbored Red Army Faction members in your Revolutionary Struggle house, the Frankfurt center for the group Revolutionary Struggle, which you co-founded with housemate Daniel "Danny the Red" Cohn-Bendit. You were forced to admit there was some truth in the accusation after it was revealed, as Berman reported, that Margrit Schiller, "who had served jail time for her connections to the Red Army Faction," had in her memoirs "plainly stated that she had spent a 'few days' in the early 1970s living in the Revolutionary Struggle house."	The [revelation of visitors to the house] did not seem especially damning. All kinds of visitors were always traipsing through the house in Frankfurt. Abbie Hoffman was there; Jerry Rubin came to visit. Who could remember every last person who had ever stopped by? [Cohn-Bendit's] hair was flaming red in those days, and he was witty and impish, and he became known as Danny the Red.
(After your testimony, you shook hands with your old terrorist friend Klein. Sweet.)	And when Fischer had finished making his statement, he walked over to Klein in his defendant's chair and shook the man's hand. The handshake seemed innocent enough, given that, as Fischer had just testified, Klein was an old friend, and the old friend had long ago denounced his own crimes and was now about to expiate them.
In 1969, you attended the meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization in which the PLO resolved that its ultimate aim was the extinction of Israel -- that is to say, the extinction or expulsion of the Jews of Israel. Seven years later, Revolutionary Cells terrorists led by your Frankfurt colleague, Wilfried Boese, hijacked an Air France plane to Entebbe, Uganda. The hijackers intended to murder all the Jewish passengers on that flight but were killed by Israeli commandos. "Suddenly," Berman wrote, "the implication of anti-Zionism struck home to [Fischer]. What did it mean that, back in Algiers in 1969, the PLO, with the young Fischer in attendance, had voted the Zionist entity into extinction? Now he knew what it meant."	Now he knew what it meant. Fischer seems never to have gotten over the shock of Entebbe. Even in the early weeks of 2001, at the height of the scandal provoked by the photographs in Stern, the memory of the Air France hijacking came back to haunt him. He spoke to a reporter from that same magazine and cited the hijacking and especially the "selection" of Jews as part of his Desillusionierung with the violent left. A few months later, in his capacity as foreign minister of Germany, he happened to be in Israel at the very moment when a terrorist blew up a Tel Aviv disco; he was close enough to hear the blast. It was Fischer, more than any other foreign minister or religious leader or world figure of any sort, who took it upon himself to confront Arafat in person, who (so it has been reported) berated Arafat ferociously and even forced him into declaring some sort of a cease-fire. The erstwhile militant for the PLO, now militant against Palestinian terror.
So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused.

NOTE: We think that some issues, such as the Molotov coctail incident, are subject to debate. Fischer was in close proximity with the radicals back then. But the fact remains that Kelly didn't present a complete picture of the man. He ignores the 2nd half of the TNR article, which covers Fischer's struggles within the Green party and the "liberal case for intervention". And as we show in the table above, Kelly paints a portrait quite different from that by Paul Berman.

posted by Quiddity at 2/12/2003 07:49:00 PM