Soccer Dad

His royal heinous

Below is an e-mail I sent to Deborah Howell the ombudsman of the Washington Post.

Dear Ms. Howell,
Yesterday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Ismail Haniyah. As you can tell by the number of blogs commenting on it, this decision is one that could be described as controversial.
There are a number of reasons why the decision was wrong and it raises some questions.
First of all, while I can appreciate the need for a newspaper to keep its readers informed about all sides of controversies, Mr. Haniyeh is a terrorist, or, at least the member of a terrorist organization. The latter assertion is not an opinion, but a matter of a legal definition.
Blogger Pillage Idiot pointed this out not too long ago.
For the record, the United States also considers Hamas a terrorist organization. The Secretary of State has repeatedly designated Hamas as a "foreign terrorist organization," with all the legal consequences that such a designation has. Here is the most recent list of designated "foreign terrorist organizations," with a discussion of the legal criteria and legal ramifications.
Is it the policy of the Washington Post to give members of a terrorist organization the opportunity to air their views. Or only certain ones?
Blogger Kinshasa on the Potomac brings up another problem with the decision to publish Haniyeh:
All the WPost has done is show that they find his arguments - that America should abandon Israel, that Israelis are war criminals, that, eventually, Israel should cease to exist - a legitimate part of the debate.
The Post can't separate the man from the message. He is a representative of an organization that, in its charter, denies Israel's right to exist. In his column he referred to Israel as "'legitimate'" in quotes, indicating that this is still his belief. So is Israel's legitimacy, its right to exist, a debatable proposition? By including the op-ed the Washington Post signals that it believes so.
Finally, blogger Meryl Yourish asks if Haniyeh wrote the article himself. After astutely observing that the language of the op-ed contained many catch phrases she noted:
I have several questions for the WaPo that I do not expect to get answers to:
Did Haniyeh’s original draft include “Zionist Entity” every time Israel was mentioned?
Who really wrote the column?
Did the Carter Center have anything to do with it?
Did Jimmy Carter write Haniyeh’s column, by any chance?
I find it difficult to believe that he didn’t have some kind of Western help, what with the language in the column being completely, well, Westernized. Yes, yes, yes, newspapers have styles that you are expected to follow, but I would lay odds that Haniyeh didn’t write a quarter of what we see in the op-ed pages. I would love to see the drafts that went back and forth on this one.
So then even if one is a member of a terrorist organization and holds beliefs that are beyond the pale can that person still be published if he has the correct connections? Is it possible for someone heinous to be packaged as benign with the correct intercession?
In short what I'd like you to address (hopefully on Sunday) is: when is someone too heinous to be included in the op-ed page. I searched your archives and never found an op-ed from Joerg Haider, for example. Is that because he was beyond the pale? Or because he never sought the platform? Would you publish op-eds from Eric Rudolph or Abdullah Ocalan?
Why was Ismail Haniyeh allowed to publish his propaganda without challenge?
I am a blogger too. If you respond directly to me would I be allowed to post your response without comment on my blog? (I know that it's unlikely that you would be able to respond individually.)
Thank you for your time.
David Gerstman
aka Soccer Dad

UPDATE: Ms. Howell has neither responded nor addressed this in her Sunday column.