The Odd Case of the One-Sided  Conversation

Here is a bizarre phenomenon I have not encountered before on the blogosphere.

Earlier today I posted a comment on this post by "Tikkun Olam" (the misleading title of a blog whose main business is the disrepairing of what the world had got right).

My comment was in response to the blog author who claimed with his usual aplomb that "Nusseibeh said nothing of the sort!" That is, Nusseibeh did not at all call the demonstration antisemitic, as one commenter claimed.


Here is what I wrote:

 I once defended Nusseibeh from the charge of antisemitism and I would still do so, in the same circumstances.

Your statement that “Nusseibeh said nothing of the sort!” is not quite accurate. In his original statement he averred that:

“These extreme elements spare no effort to exploit some rare but nonetheless damaging
events or scenes which occur on the campus of Al Quds University, such as fist fighting
between students, or some students making a mock military display. These occurrences
allow some people to capitalize on events in ways that misrepresent the university as
promoting inhumane, anti-Semitic, fascist, and Nazi ideologies. Without these ideologies, there would not have been the massacre of the Jewish people in Europe; without the massacre, there would not have been the enduring Palestinian catastrophe.”

As the statement was in response to a particular event within those “events or scenes” he alludes to in this paragraph, and as he ends the paragraph on the note that such an occurrence might imply that its message is shared by the university, and that since the university opposes “inhumane, anti-Semitic, fascist, and Nazi ideologies.” it is reasonable to conclude that he regards this occurrence as “inhumane, anti-Semitic, fascist, and Nazi”.

He is of course not coming outright and saying it , I suspect, for the same reason that he all but conceals the reference to the Holocaust under the much greater moral outrage of Palestinian displacement.

Checking out the thread later, I find my comment has not made it past Richard's byzantine moderation policy, but, strangely and inexplicably,  there was an answer to it.  

As you said, everything you said is “alluded to,” meaning he inferred it in very general, oblique terms. That’s certainly not sufficient to label it as Nusseibeh’s acknowledgement of the rally being anti Semitic.

(Please note that: 1. The correct English should have been: "he implied".  But Richard is somewhat illiterate, both in English and Hebrew, so allowances must be made. and 2. Richard is admitting here that Nusseibeh implicitly accepted that the rally was antisemitic, though he did not do so explicitly. That is a very different claim from Richard's earlier assertion that Nusseibeh "did nothing of the sort". It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Mr. Tikkun Olam is not fully cognizant of the fact that "nothing of the sort" means: absolutely not,  nothing like that, that is, a complete denial.)

How do I know it is in response to my comment? Because Richard uses my own vocabulary ("allude") in his otherwise enigmatic and needless to say, worthless and as usual illiterate, comment.

Now what to make of a blogger who posts replies to comments that he himself has banned from public view, thus creating a bizarre kind of one-sided conversation? Is this conventional conduct in some dark and impenetrable corners of the blogosphere? Or is it some sort of a new mental disorder, a kind of psychological quirk brought about by the excited delusion of omniscient power that some bloggers have developed within the confines of their own insignificant domain?