The execrable Susan Sontag died today at the age of 71 of an undisclosed illness. Perhaps I should be more charitable in my assessment of her now that she has passed away, but she and her ilk represent the worst of the hypocritical Left, especially in the wake of 9/11:

Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday. She was 71. ...

Sontag called herself a "besotted aesthete," an "obsessed moralist" and a "zealot of seriousness."

Here's what the obsessed moralist had to say about the 9/11 attacks:

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a `cowardly' attack on `civilization' or `liberty' or `humanity' or `the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" she wrote in The New Yorker.

"In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

No, of course not; targeting women and children for death is so courageous, at least in Sontag's worldview. Bill Maher said much the same thing, and I hear it still from time to time, the Sontag meme that will not die. It does not take courage to drive an airplane full of frightened noncombatants into a business structure when you think Allah will grant you 72 virgins on the other side. These lunatics committed these acts because they lacked the courage to engage in armed combat with people who could shoot back. They were and are moral and physical cowards, people who kill women and children because they cannot stand up as men. Those who defend their actions, like Sontag, are at least as despicable for granting them credit for their murders.

Sontag's entire political ouevre reeked of cowardice. She gave literary and intellectual cover to America-bashing after 9/11, a continuation of her life's work. (The AP also notes that Sontag once wrote that "the white race is the cancer of human history.") All she did was bolster our enemies and try to weaken our own resolve. In any other time, she would have been shunned by American society. Sontag deserves nothing but scorn, regardless of her death. She improved the world only by leaving it.

Addendum: As I wrote to Glenn Reynolds, I will probably have to mention this post at my next confession. For now, I don't feel like being charitable to the near-treasonous just because they died in their sleep, rather than screaming like the terror victims she so callously discounted.

UPDATE: In a deeper look at Sontag's life, the Los Angeles Times' Steve Wasserman includes this corker from Sontag:

Sontag had never been so public as she became over the next three years, publishing steadily, speaking constantly and receiving numerous international awards, including Israel’s Jerusalem Prize, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and Germany’s Friedenspreis (Peace Prize). Upon accepting the prize from Jerusalem’s mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sontag said of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians: "I believe the doctrine of collective responsibility as a rationale for collective punishments [is] never justified, militarily or ethically. And I mean of course the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians."

Sontag lectured the Israelis on the disproportionate use of firepower against civilians in the middle of a decade of exploding Israeli buses and pizzerias. Always siding with the terrorists and against the democracies. That's Sontag for you.

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» Susan Sontag from Bitsblog
I can only hope she has a firmer grip on reality from her newly acquired side of the veil than what she revealed to us as having on this side of it. Perhaps those already on the other side, as of the 9/11 attacks, will be good enough give her a few p... [Read More]

Tracked on December 28, 2004 3:01 PM

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Tracked on December 28, 2004 11:31 PM

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