Too clever by half

A recurring feature of the Wall Street Journal online editorial page is the carefully constructed insinuation; they're clever enough to know that you can't outright say "John Kerry = Osama Bin Laden," for example, yet stupid enough to betray that that is what they really think -- or at least that it's what they think Karl Rove wants them to write. Here they are today discussing the supposed equivalence between the Abu Ghraib prison photos, some shown by the media, and the sickening videoed beheading of Nick Berg, which can only be found in the more edgy parts of the web. This becomes an opportunity to criticise Howard Kurtz for essentially saying that the Abu Ghraib photos do have public value, whereas the Berg video does not, and they conclude:

But Kurtz really seems to be tying himself in knots with his varied opinions about networks' responsibilities vis-à-vis disseminating enemy propaganda.

Got that? The beheading AND the prison photos are "enemy propaganda." Now, they propound this slime by way of supporting the Jonah Goldberg position on this. Which is relevant because in a seemingly separate item further down the column, they run a clarification of one of yesterday's insinuations which was not quite fine enough, and conclude:

[opinionjournal] rejects the idea that Arabs and Muslims should be held to lower standards than everyone else.

Which is an odd thing to say for worshippers at the Goldberg Altar because right up above, they had approvingly cited him:

Huge percentages of Arabs are illiterate, which means these pictures will tell the whole story, particularly in the hands of the vilely anti-American Arab media.

So the equation here is Arabs = illiterate = people easily manipulated by propaganda, which sure sounds like a group of people being held to a lower standard than everyone else. Let's leave aside Goldberg's command of literacy statistics; given his track record, he doubtless got them wrong. Illiterate people easily manipulated? It was Europe's most literate society that gave us the catastrophe of fascism, and India has managed to run the world's most complicated elections and develop a stable democracy even with huge levels of illiteracy. Finally, we suppose that Goldberg's policy prescription would be...an illiterate audience should be protected from these photos. We wonder if that's why Fox News hasn't been running them?