A print ad created by DDB Brazil for the World Wildlife Fund (which denies approving it and condemns it) portrays the pre-9/11 New York skyline with a multitude of planes descending toward the World Trade Center towers.
Message: "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. Conserve the planet. It's brutally powerful."
It's disgusting. It's shamelessly exploitative of the murder of thousands of human beings, and on top of that it's ineffectually so. I'd call it opportunistic if it conveyed anything resembling a coherent message. Since it doesn't, it's merely crass and meritless.
If you want to see it, knock yourself out. I'd run a Flash embed of the final scene of Pink Flamingoes before I'd plaster that garbage onto this page. It's that bad.
BUT!
Those who've danced on the graves of the dead of 9/11 for lo on eight years now don't get to say that, at least not without me pointing at them and calling them out as the hypocrites they are.
Michelle Malkin, for example, who parlayed 9/11 into two best-selling volumes of Know-Nothing paranoia and a continuing career as the blogosphere darling of the "they changed the terror alert color -- everyone squat, pee and beg for more police state!" set.
Or the neo-Trots at the warfare-welfare state's journal of record, The Weekly Standard, who've been waving the shirt since long before the policies they always advocated got it good and bloodied for them.
Or, preemptively, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who tried to transmute 9/11 from a showcase of his failures as mayor into the basis of a presidential campaign with sound bytes consisting entirely of (as Joe Biden put it) "a noun, a verb, and 9/11." You just know he's casting about for a microphone right now.
Those folks don't rate to criticize this ad. Or at least they don't rate to have their criticisms taken seriously. They've spent the last eight years dining on the flesh and drinking the blood of the 9/11 dead. Anything they have to say versus WWF carries precisely the same moral stature as the argument of one cannibal contesting possession of a particularly meaty human femur with another.
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