Elitist ethics

The allegedly-hateful Eric Alterman makes a good point:

I did a profile once of Alan Dershowitz. ... I do remember that the guy refused to talk about where he lived for security reasons. ... This didn’t bother me. And it doesn’t bother me that William Bennett has the millions not only to gamble on blackjack but also to pay for his own private extensive security arrangements. And so I think it would be the better part of valor for both of these multimillionaires to shut up about the working stiffs in the media being cowards for not risking life and limb to print a bunch of cartoons.

The Bennett-Dershowitz column is here. They're not so much hypocrites, as Alterman calls them, as ethical elitists, looking down disapprovingly while safely perched atop large piles of money.

I've nothing in particular to say about the cartoon riots (or about much of anything here lately, of course). Obviously violence as a response to offending speech is insane. (As a student newspaper editor I was once threatened with violence by a Muslim radical for refusing to print an opinion piece -- not, I should say, because of its point of view but because at 20,000 words it was 19,000 words too long for the space allocated.) And clearly some Middle Eastern governments have played a big part in whipping up the violence. But I have a hard time mustering up sympathy for the publishers of the Danish paper, if what I've read is true -- namely that they actively solicited cartoons which would mock Mohammed in the context of an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims in Danish society.