Vilifying Quotes
Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect.
Koenraad Elst
While we can see Snowden's experience as an instructional primer on both the value of whistleblowers and the costs of vilifying them, there are elements of his story-fed by the character assassination reprisal tactics of the government-that perpetuate many of the misperceptions about whistleblowers and contribute to the view that whistleblowers are problems to be addressed, rather than potential solutions. Snowden's case also typifies the most egregious manifestations of the institutional belief that whistleblowers are problems to be addressed rather than sources of risk management and mechanisms for promoting compliance-the focus on the "messenger” rather than the "message.”.
Edward Snowden
