Glenn Reynolds (whose archives seem to be hosed at the moment) and Matt Welch both ripped the LA Times (the worst major newspaper in the US) today for this silly fog-minded exercise in alarmism: Civil Liberties Take Back Seat to Safety. As Glenn and Matt say, there are some real things to worry about in the Patriot Act, but you won’t learn about them from this article.

Matt also points out what he calls a “vile column with a Saudi Arabian dateline,” (and sics me on it—“Kill, Charles! Good boy!”) titled Ideology Hiding Behind a Word, that argues:

The greatest threat to world peace today is clearly “terrorism”—not the behavior to which the word is applied but the word itself.

Read it again. The full stench of its post-modernist pseudo-intellectual rot may not be apparent at first sniff.

To paraphrase: kill-crazy freaks who plot and carry out the murder of innocent people are less of a threat than the word their intended victims use to describe them.

Matt’s right, this is indeed an exceptionally vile piece of work. Perhaps that’s because it originally appeared in none other than the Arab News, under a different title, on December 17, 2001: Terrorism: The word itself is dangerous.

And isn’t it curious how, in the same issue with a piece about trumped up charges of censorship, the LA Times chooses to publish a column from one of the most heavily censored, anti-Semitic, anti-American media outlets in the world?

I smell a camel.