Justin Raimondo: Sees All, Knows All
I’ve just read through some quite amusing rants, er…remarks, by Justin Raimondo, one of the louder mouths of the if-it-seems-pro-American-libel-it crackpot brigade, claiming to know the real story about the assassination of Lebanese political leader Rafik Hariri. Raimondo, as practiced in Arabic as he is in Ukrainian, and as committed to the truth as he is knowledgeable about toxicology, knows better than anyone else the real story about what’s going down in Lebanon, just as he knew about Chinese nuclear terrorists sneaking into the U.S. from Mexico (oops! the hysteria that caused him to call for “sealing” the border with Mexico was later “updated” with an acknowledgement that it was all a hoax) and the real story behind Israeli involvement in 9/11! Super-Sleuth Raimondo takes on a mere nobody, someone with no knowledge of the language, no knowledge of the situation on the ground, and no awareness of middle eastern politics: Michael Young, an editor of the Daily Star of Beirut and writer for Reason. Here’s exchange 1 and here’s exchange 2. If Raimondo’s inside knowledge is as reliable in this case as it is in all-the-other-scandals-Raimondo-has-uncovered-but-everyone-else-has-been-paid-off-to-ignore, Young — far from the scene as he is — must be wrong.
Raimondo assumes (keep in mind I can’t tell for sure because all that spouting has fogged up my glasses) that just because there hasn’t been any evidence found that Syrian military intelligence planted the car bomb, they couldn’t *possibly* be involved. Forget the fact that Syria has been known to support Islamists before these past weeks (Hizbollah anyone?).
The reason, the article Raimondo sites says, that Abu Adas killed Hariri was because of his support for the House of Saud. That is nearly every Islamist’s reason for doing anything in the region. Anything. Ever. Oh that and because a target supported the US at one time or another. Yet if he, or anyone else you might be tempted to agree, has looked at the Alawite strategy since al-Assad took office, he’d see it was one of divide and conquer.
He justifies the simultaneous oppression of his people at home and the Lebanese abroad by pointing to the Syria’s need to protect itself and Lebanon from an Israeli attack or a potential US invasion. To justify that claim, Bashar stirs up his subjects into a fury, rallies factions and directs those at an indiscernable and vaguely hostile enemy. Hariri was opposed to the Syrian occupation, we’re told, and therefore Syria had him killed. That doesn’t mean a Syrian agent physically killed him. It means Syria was complicit in the act.
Furthermore the “previously unknown” Islamist group’s admittance of guilt reeks of Syrian transference and misdirection. It is able to reproject soft power after it loses it in the region by having front groups take credit for the actions it takes. Hence, Abu Adas’s group, Hezbollah (which denies receiving Syrian support, monetary and otherwise), and the funding of groups that wreak havoc in Israel.
But Raimondo, the savant he is, knew that.
I found this interesting review of Dennis Raimondo, aka Justin Raimondo:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17310
I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s an effective response to Raimondo’s style of attack and his connections to weird anti-libertarian extremists.
That’s quite a photo. And it indeed looks to be Justin Raimondo. Where is it from?
I suspect that the resemblance is just a coincidence. I found it on a web site full of images about fortune telling; it seems that it was made from an old post card. But maybe it was from one of Raimondo’s earlier jobs. Who knows?
Uh, oh. Justin Raimondo is upset that people are teasing him for his decision to change his name: http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P1932_0_1_0 . I guess that’s fair but he sure is happy to go after others for their names, their careers, and everything else. I read the Schwartz essay ,more carefully and it makes lot of good points, but seems sometimes almost as hysterical as Raimondo himself.
Thanks for exposing Justin Raimondo. Words can barely do justice to this maddened, boorish, creepy narcissist, incapable of handling a differing view without sneering with personalized hatred and contempt. Any criticism of him, of course, invariably is a “smear,” all the better to induce self-censorship on the part of critics now chastened as “smear artists. I, for one, am not intimidated. So go call me anything you want, Justin.