"Censorship" Loses Its Meaning

From CAMERA Snapshots:

Some anti-Israel commentators, hoping to ward off criticism, charge those who scrutinize their claims as being guilty of censorship, intimidation, or otherwise stifling debate.

The thinly-veiled subtext is that criticizing someone is the same as censoring them. (See, e.g., CAMERA's Op-Ed "Asserting Mideast facts isn't the same as censorship.")

But why bother to thinly veil or to imply? One journalist recently did away with those formalities.

About the BBC Trust's ruling that Mideast editor Jeremy Bowen violated the BBC's ethical guidelines, a Guardian journalist wrote, simply:

"Criticising Bowen could affect his reporting of the region, which surely amounts to a form of censorship itself."

And that is how inane the "censorship" argument looks when stripped down to its essence and expressed in straightforward language.