Last week the New York Post ran a scurrilous and racist cartoon. In the face of overwhelming public revulsion-it apologized. It was a classic blame the victim apology, implying as it did that anyone who said they were offended was not truly offended, and that in any event, the problem was with millions who saw the cartoon as racist, not with the isolated individuals who did not:
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
I.e, this apology is only operative for those who did not complain.
This sort of apology has risen to a high art form recently. I wrote a while back about a Catholic Bishop whose excommunication the pope recently lifted. The man has denied the holocaust, although he’s admitted that several hundred thousand Jews were killed, but not six million. The pope, who unconvincingly claimed he didn’t know about the man’s views, demanded that he “unequivocally and publicly renounce his claims that there were no gas chambers and that fewer than 300,000 Jews died in the Nazi death camps”.
It will be interesting to see if the Pope is satisfied with his apology. The man is not a Jesuit, but his apology is definitely Jesuitical:
In a statement published by the Zenit news agency on Thursday, Bishop Williamson said, “I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them.”
He added, “To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize.”
He’s sorry if you were honestly offended by his remarks. He’s sorry people felt hurt. He’s sorry for the harm it caused the church and Holocaust survivors and relatives. If he had only known the harm he’d cause, he never would have said it. But he’s not backing down one inch from the substance of what he said. And as an extra little twist to the victims of the Holocaust, he’s more sorry for any harm he did to the pope than to them. So much for an unequivocal and public renunciation of his views. So much for an acknowledgment that he did anything wrong.
This is becoming a high art form. One can imagine Hitler’s apology: I’m sorry if you were offended by the fact that I killed six million Jews, along with causing a war that caused untold misery for countless others. If I had known how it would all turn out, I probably would have done things differently.
UPDATE: As a commenter notes, the Church has so far refused to accepted Williamson’s statement as adequate. Maybe some good will come out of all of this.
On a more bizarre note, guess who Williamson consulted to check the historical record:
Bishop Williamson has said in recent weeks that he needs more time to study Holocaust documentation. David Irving, a historian who served 13 months in prison in Austria for Holocaust denial, said in a telephone interview on Friday that Bishop Williamson had contacted him asking for assistance in assessing the Holocaust. Mr. Irving said the bishop had written him through an intermediary, saying: “At the heart of this whole uproar is the objective truth about what happened in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. I must conform my mind to the truth.”
…
Mr. Irving said he believed the outrage with the Vatican for trying to rehabilitate Bishop Williamson was orchestrated by Israel to distract the international community from the recent war in Gaza.
Mr. Irving said he responded to Bishop Williamson’s request for assistance by sending him a two-page memorandum advising the bishop “to accept that there were organized mass killings from the spring of 1942 to October 1943” in three sites run by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler: Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.
Going to David Irving, a notorious Holocaust denier, for advice about the Holocaust is a little like going to Pat Robertson for an unbiased critique of evolution. Anyone interested might want to read the judgment handed down against Irving by a British court, which you can read here.
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