‘Why so many hacks fell for the gay girl in Syria’

Brendan O’Neill on the latest, but certainly not the last, “cheap holiday on other people’s misery“:

From those Western pro-Palestinian activists who don the keffiyeh in a PC version of blacking-up, to the journalists and celebs who carved out new, super-moral public personas through their campaigning against the evils in Darfur, to the multitude of hacks and human rights activists who turned the war in Bosnia into their war, describing it with undiluted narcissism as a political ‘acid test for our generation’, time and again influential people in the West have reduced conflicts and clashes ‘over there’ to personality playpens, in which they might discover a new edge and spark to their own lives and existences.

…many journalists imagine that their brave reporting in Bosnia (I say brave. I say reporting) made them modern-day Schindlers facing down modern-day Nazis.