Lord Ahmed or Glenn Greenwald?

Lord Nazir Ahmed, the disgraced member of the House of Lords who resigned from the Labour Party after reports surfaced that he blamed a Jewish conspiracy for his 2009 prison sentence for dangerous driving, offered another penetrating insight into world affairs last week.  Ahmed commented thusly – at PressTV, the crusading Islamist news site known for boldly speaking truth to Jewish power – on international satellite providers’ decision not to include Iranian channels as part of their packages:

“Freedom of speech, and freedom of expression and freedom of media should be universal and it’s very unfortunate that the Zionist lobby does not like Press TV and many of the other outlets of Iran and that’s why, the pressure is so much that they need to be switched off.”

Now, here’s ‘Comment is Free’ correspondent Glenn Greenwald (in 2009 at his former Salon.com blog) on the decision by the U.S. Treasury to designate Hezbollah’s satellite television operation (Al-Manar) as a global terrorist entity, thus making it illegal for American cable providers to offer the channel:

So absolute has the Israel-centric stranglehold on American policy been that the U.S. Government has made it illegal to broadcast Hezbollah television stations and has even devoted its resources to criminally prosecuting and imprisoning satellite providers merely for including Hezbollah’s Al Manar channel in their cable package.  Not even our Constitution’s First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel’s enemies

Do you see any substantive difference between the two quotes?

Further, as you can see here, this quote by Greenwald was by no means a ‘one-off’.  Greenwald – who fancies himself a “liberal” and, evidently, a “journalist” – seems to share Lord Ahmed’s belief in the inexorable power wielded by Zionism.  Whilst Ahmed has rightly become an object of mockery over his fixation on Jews, it seems fair that Greenwald’s decidedly illiberal fixation on the power of organized Jewry should elicit a similar degree of opprobrium and impute to him the moral illegitimacy typically bestowed upon such bigots and conspiracists.  

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