Shoot the Messenger!

In 1967 Paul McCartney was asked by a reporter of Queen magazine whether he had ever taken LSD and truthfully replied that he had. Of course, the magazine printed his answer. In the aftermath McCartney was attacked not so much for taking LSD but rather for being a bad role model for young people. He quite sensibly argued that it hadn't been he who had spread the word about his drug consumption, it had been the journalists. All McCartney had done was being a good boy and answering a question honestly.

Now the News of the World has breached the privacy of Max Mosley, president of Formula One's governing body FIA, by printing screenshots from, and writing about, a video that shows Mosley and prostitutes in S&M role play which is littered with references to Nazi death camps.

Jewish leaders are not amused:

"This is an insult to millions of victims, survivors and their families," Stephen Smith, director of the Holocaust Centre, [...] told [the Times]. "He should apologize. He should resign from the sport.”

No, he shouldn't and no, he shouldn't. What Mosley did was done in private - I'm pretty sure it wasn't he who leaked the video to the paper - and the interactions to be seen on the video were between consenting adults. (The "consenting adults" bit may not hold if any of the women were forced into prostitution, but note that Mosley is not being criticized for hiring prostitutes per se.) If anyone hurt Jews' feelings, it wasn't Mosley, it was the News of the World, possibly the most despicable mass publication on earth.