cowards

Were Dante alive today, the Inferno would undoubtedly have included a lower circle of Hell for Stalin's apologists. And Walter Duranty would be chief amongst the damned.

But instead of Dante, we have the Pulitzer review board:

The 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to a New York Times reporter accused of deliberately ignoring the Ukrainian forced famine will not be revoked, an administrator for the journalism awards said Friday.

“The board determined that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case,” said a statement from Sig Gissler, Pulitzer administrator.

One word, Mr Gissler: horseshit.

[I]n March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been “serious food shortages” in the Ukraine, [Duranty] was quick to reassure them that “there [was] no actual starvation.” There had been no “deaths from starvation,” he soothed, merely “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” So that was all right then.

[But Duranty] was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. “The Ukraine,” he said, “had been bled white,” remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as “a sheer absurdity,” remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes.

Enablers like Duranty share in the guilt of such crimes. If you've ever heard the cute little aphorism “you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs”—that was Duranty, and his “eggs” were the multitudes murdered by Bolshevism.

Duranty was an odious human being. And the Pulitzer review board is staffed by liars and cowards.

(Initial link via Drudge.)

UPDATE. Hmmm…it appears that there's pusillanimity all over:

The European Union's racism watchdog has shelved a report on anti-semitism because the study concluded Muslims and pro-Palestinian groups were behind many of the incidents it examined.

The Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) decided in February not to publish the 112-page study, a copy of which was obtained by the Financial Times, after clashing with its authors over their conclusions. …

When the researchers submitted their work in October last year, however, the centre's senior staff and management board objected to their definition of anti-semitism, which included some anti-Israel acts. The focus on Muslim and pro-Palestinian perpetrators, meanwhile, was judged inflammatory.

If at first appeasement does not succeed, try, try again… (via Instapundit.)