If this isn’t extreme, what is?

The Dearborn protests have received almost no attention nationally, and when they have it has usually been to denounce the participants as extremists and apologists for terrorism – either because they have voiced support for Hizbollah or because they have carried banners in which the Star of David at the centre of the Israeli flag ...

The Dearborn protests have received almost no attention nationally, and when they have it has usually been to denounce the participants as extremists and apologists for terrorism - either because they have voiced support for Hizbollah or because they have carried banners in which the Star of David at the centre of the Israeli flag has been replaced by a swastika."

The Dearborn protests have received almost no attention nationally, and when they have it has usually been to denounce the participants as extremists and apologists for terrorism – either because they have voiced support for Hizbollah or because they have carried banners in which the Star of David at the centre of the Israeli flag has been replaced by a swastika."

So reads a passage in Andrew Gumbel's story in the Independent lamenting American media coverage of the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. (You can get a pretty good flavor of the piece from the headline: America's one-eyed view of the war: Stars, Stripes and the Star of David.)  But people who express support for a genocidal terrorist organization are extreme, by pretty much any definition. Replacing the Star of David with a swastika is, as my good friend Mark Strauss argues, "the basest form of Holocaust revisionism." Gumbel is indulging in classic false objectivity: The belief there must be two equal sides to every story.

James Forsyth is assistant editor at Foreign Policy.

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